by Lisa Wingate
I stripped off the boys’ shirts, put water wings on Landon’s arms, grabbed a swim diaper for the baby, and the pool party commenced. Aunt Lute showed the boys a few maneuvers she’d learned in some imaginary life as a synchronized swimmer in Vegas. The twins could swim like fish, so they weren’t too bad at the aquabatics. It kept them entertained, anyway, and by the time we dragged everyone out of the pool well after dark, the sibs were so tired they barely made it through peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches before passing out in front of a Disney movie. I carried the boys to their beds, and then put the baby in her crib. At the bottom of the stairs, Aunt Lute and I gave each other a high five.
“Glorious evening,” she pronounced. “Princess Stephanie loved to swim, as well. She had beautiful golden hair, and the softest brown eyes, just like yours.” Making a motion to illustrate flowing locks, Aunt Lute smiled, then turned away and headed for the bonus room over the garage, her wet slippers leaving twin slug trails on the tile.
No telling who Princess Stephanie was.
“Good night, Aunt Lute,” I called after her.
“Good night, Princess.” She finger-waved over her shoulder as she disappeared around the corner, adding, “I’ve some dry underwear in the laundry room.”
Still contemplating the weirdness that was Aunt Lute, I cleaned up the sandwich crusts on the bar, then went to the living room, turned off the Disney movie, and flipped through the cable channels.
My father was on channel forty-three in one of his “We take shabby homes” commercials. He was wearing a cheesy Superman suit, and his favorite advertising partner and former second-string fullback, Randy Boone, was dressed as Superboy with dreadlocks. They were rescuing some lady from back taxes she couldn’t afford on a house that needed costly repairs. My father gave her a market estimate and made her a purchase offer in twenty-four hours or less. And solved all her problems. Behind them, the house changed in an instant, going from shabby blue with a weed-filled yard to a bright, clean Householders yellow. Another derelict property rehabilitated by Householders, television magic, and my dad’s superpowers, as easy as one, two, three.
From outside, the glow of headlights panned into the front room, traveling from one end to the other as a car rounded the circle drive on the way to the garage. I changed the TV channel in case it was my father pulling in.
Lately, he hated those commercials.
Chapter 2
Sesay
They are interesting to watch—the people. They move in the same patterns each day, but some things are always different. Their clothes change. The clothes whisper as they pass, telling the stories of the people. I can hear them, because I remain very still and listen the right way. My grandfather taught me long ago, as we walked far across the burned country the soldiers had left behind, all the way to the shore. He told me of the story children, and how they became scattered over the world. Then he put me on a boat with my auntie, and let me go.
The boat was old, and it was packed body-to-body, and the waves pushed over it, but there wasn’t water enough to drink. Auntie died on the boat, but I did not. I came here, to a new place. I think I am from Haiti. I think I am the boat people, but I cannot say for certain. I can tell many stories much better than I can tell my own. I think most people are this way.
Sometimes I share the stories with the storyteller. I go into her shop, where the sign says Book Basket. I know this, although I cannot read it. The storyteller will trade a book for a good story, and sometimes she will trade a doughnut, as well. I come early, while there may yet be a doughnut in the bag on her shop counter. Sometimes I share an old story, and sometimes I tell the stories the clothes have told me about the people. Today, there is another yellow house on Red Bird Lane. It was pink, but they’ve painted it yellow. There are four others like it on the same street.
I tell this to MJ at the Book Basket, and she is not pleased. “Householders!” She snorts, her nostrils going wide. “They’ll have control of the whole neighborhood before long. Tear it down and put up more stinking condos.” Her eyes get hard as hearth coals then, and her lips pull back, showing her teeth white against coffee-bean skin. Her skin is dark like mine, but much prettier. She has beautiful teeth, as well. White like linen. I think it must be wonderful to have lovely teeth. But mine are not, so I hold my smile on the inside.
“It was pink—the house,” I say, and MJ nods.
“I know that place,” she replies. “It belonged to the woman who started the Summer Kitchen in the church. Her uncle built that house a long time ago.” She points across the road to the old white church. I know the Summer Kitchen, of course. I go there for lunch some days. MJ tells stories to the children after the meal, and I think one day I may help her, if I have a mind to.
“A woman should not sell the house her family built,” I tell MJ, and I think of my father’s home. My mind must stretch very hard to go there. “Not to the yellow-house people.”
MJ frowns again and pushes long, thin braids over her shoulder. Three of them have fallen forward. Most often she keeps them wrapped in a turban, but not today. Today she wears her hair down, and I know why. I can hear the man working in the back portion of her building. She sells that space to him—the big area that was once for repairing automobiles—but as far as I can see, he never comes into the store to talk to her. He keeps to himself, as do I.
“SandraKaye didn’t want to let go of the house,” MJ tells me. “Her mother sold it out from under her, oh . . . a couple months ago. Just before you came to the neighborhood, I guess. SandraKaye wanted to run the Summer Kitchen there, but after the house sold, she had to move the free lunch café to the church building instead.”
“It’s bad to have a mother like that, a selfish mother,” I say. I cannot remember my own mother well, but I have a good feeling when I imagine her. I see her on the veranda of my father’s big house. She opens her arms, and calls to me, and smiles. I think it must have been very hard for her to send me away with my grandfather when the soldiers came to take my father’s house.
“Yes, it is,” MJ agrees, and her eyes tell me a bit more about her. She understands what I have said about mothers.
The man in back makes a noise. He drops something metal—most probably a can of paint—and it echoes through the vast, empty space there. MJ turns an ear to it.
“People moved into the new yellow house this morning,” I say. “A young woman, and a man, and two little boys. They look like him.” I point toward the door, so she will know I speak of the man in back. His hair is long and dark, and he ties it with a leather thong when he works on a painting. He looks like the Indian chiefs on the old television shows at the Broadberry Mission down the road. “He went to the house and helped to carry in the heavy furniture. I saw him there.”
“Hmmm . . .” MJ’s eyes dart toward another metal sound. “I’ll have to ask him about it.” But I know she won’t. She never disturbs the painting man. The artist. He is an artist, truly. Like the ones who painted the pictures that hung on my father’s walls.
“It’s bad that they have moved in there,” I tell MJ. “They are nice people. I can tell. And they are friends of his.” I indicate the man again, the painter. Through the small square of glass in the door, I can see the top of his head, his dark hair flowing long and loose today, like a horse’s forelock. “He should not allow his friends to move into a yellow house. A Householders house.” Perhaps he is not aware that those houses tell a bad story; as far as I can see, the man does not often go around the neighborhood. He paints here, and then goes to the place where he lives, a few blocks away on Blue Sky Hill, where the mansion homes are. His home is not a mansion. It is atop someone else’s garage.
“I’ll warn him about it,” MJ replies. Both MJ and I know what happens to people in those yellow houses. “I hope they haven’t signed anything.”
I back away from the counter, because the talk of signing papers weaves my stomach tight, like a basket drying in the sun. People make you sig
n a paper so they can take away your soul. I know this.
I go to the front of the store and quickly pick out a book from the many stacked on the shelves. “I will take this one today,” I say, and hold it up. I like the picture on the front.
MJ nods. “They’re starting another evening class at the church. Three nights a week.” She adjusts the pad of paper on her desk and pretends to be searching for a pencil, so as not to look at me. She knows I cannot read the book. The class at the church will be about reading, of course. She has told me before.
“I like this book,” I say, and give her a little smile. One that doesn’t show my teeth. When the book has pictures, you do not need to read the words to hear the story.
MJ holds up the white bag that has been waiting on her desk. “Don’t forget your doughnut, Sesay.”
I come back to the counter and pinch the bag between my fingers, then tuck it into the pocket of my big brown coat. I haven’t taken it off this morning, but I will when I go outside. It is hot here, even in the mornings. “Remind me to tell you about the children of Story Mouse,” I say to her. “I was thinking of that today.”
“I will.” She looks at me with interest, which causes me to like her even more. Most people cannot see me. Outside, I am invisible for hours at a time.
The man drops something in the back room again, and MJ looks away.
“Warn him about the yellow house,” I tell her.
“I will,” she answers. “Have a good day, Sesay.” She waves as I go out the door. I allow myself the real kind of smile, once my back is turned. I am invisible now, anyway.
Because no one can see me, I sit under the tree by the fence to eat my doughnut and look at my book. From there, I can watch through the big garage door into the place where the Indian chief is working. He is painting something large—just beginning it with a thick brush, in bold shapes of brown and green. He leaves white space that looks like mountains as he lays the colors on the canvas. He does not know I am watching him, as I often do. I like to see the picture take life.
It tells a story, and stories are something I keep. I am a storyteller, like my grandfather.
Chapter 3
Shasta Reid-Williams
If you drove by it on the street, it wouldn’t stand out much. It was just a little house, like all the rest on the block. Maybe it was in better shape than a lot of places on Red Bird Lane. It had actual flowers in the flower beds—not just dandelions, Bermuda crawlers, and thistles, but plants somebody planted. The windows weren’t plastered with tinfoil and old sheets, and the place had a fresh coat of paint, even if it was road-stripe yellow. There were a couple more homes down the street painted the same ugly color, like a highway department truck had lost a fifty-gallon barrel of paint, and the neighbors found it and divvied it up. Nobody’d do their house in neon yellow unless the paint was free.
“It’s our signature color,” the salesman had said when Cody made some rude joke about the paint job, while we were looking at the house. “Sort of like a calling card. It lets people know we’re working in the neighborhood, cleaning up these old places, and helping young families like yours step off the rental roller coaster with no down payment. Why throw away your hard-earned money when you can be the master of your very own castle. Am I right?” He sounded like the commercial that came on, like, every half hour during the daytime soaps, and late at night on the stations that showed stuff like fishing shows and car chop jobs, stuff only Cody would watch.
It was the commercials that first gave me the idea. After catching them about a bazillion times while we were stuck in an apartment where I couldn’t let the kids go outside because there were lowlifes around and police sirens going off all the time, one of the Householders commercials mentioned the Blue Sky Hill area, and I knew it was a sign from God. Blue Sky Hill was close enough to where Cody needed to be for his training with the Dallas Police Academy, and Terence Clay lived there. He was a distant cousin of Cody’s, and the only person we knew in Dallas. Even if he was an artist, and, well, kind of weird, he was Choctaw, like a lot of folks from back home—like Cody and me. Whether they know each other real well or not, Choctaw folk stick together, especially once they get out into the real world, outside Pushmataha County, where members of the Tribe are thick as gnats on a bull’s back. Here in Dallas, as far as I could tell, there was us and Terence, which made us family.
The Householders commercial said no money down, and you didn’t even have to have great credit. I started to think, Maybe we really can get a house. A real house. The kind that doesn’t have wheels on it. Back home in Hugo, Oklahoma, we’d moved out of a rental house and bought a trailer, but it wasn’t really like owning our own place.
The trailer was set up out behind Cody’s parents’ barn, and even with no lot rent, we got so upside down on the payments, we made a deal to let the trailer go back to the bank when we moved to Dallas so Cody could get in with the DPD.
After I saw the Householders commercials, I started to think about our possibilities. We’d been planning to hold off the house hunting until after Cody got his big graduation bonus for finishing the police academy, but with a no-money-down loan, it seemed like we could do it now. We figured it all up, and even with payments on our new-used pickup, and what we still owed on old debts, and credit card payments, we could swing it. We drove out to Blue Sky Hill, surprised Cody’s cousin, and found our house. The Householders program made it all so easy, you’d have to be an idiot to keep wasting your money on rent.
All of a sudden, everything was perfect, and there we were, standing on the curb of our first honest-to-gosh house, with all the furniture moved in, and the papers tucked away in the footlocker Cody bought at an army buddy’s yard sale. Home at last.
“We did it,” I told Cody, and put my arm around him while Benjamin and Tyler ran across the yard and slipped under the porch behind an oleander bush on the corner. They’d found that spot while we were moving the furniture in, and they had big plans to make a fort there.
“I guess we did.” Cody didn’t sound as happy as I wanted him to be. Houses aren’t such a big deal to a guy, I guess.
“It’s ours. Our first real house.”
Underneath my arm, his ribs expanded and deflated in a big ol’ sigh. He was all muscle now. For months, he’d been jogging and doing extra push-ups with the kids sitting on his back so he’d be in shape for the DPD physical fitness requirements. “Guess so.”
I looked up at him, and I could see our house, tiny like the pictures in a locket, reflected in the dark centers of his eyes. “Try not to sound so excited about it.” It was just like him to be all macho about everything and spoil the fun. It was like he thought that’s how the man of the family oughta act—just like his daddy, who was the manager at the lumber mill back home, and about as much fun as having a cavity drilled.
“I’m excited.” Cody spat out the words with his lips in a tight, straight line.
“Yeah, sure. You sound real excited.”
He went stiff under my arm and shifted away a little so our sides weren’t touching anymore. “I said I’m excited.”
“Well, could you show it a little bit?” The complaint snapped out sharp as a rubber band popping, and then I was sorry. I didn’t want us to fight, especially not today. “You don’t have to be all police business here, you know. This is home. This is our place. You can just be my Cody-boy.”
Back in high school, Cody was the biggest goof-off there was. He was always doing something stupid to get a laugh, which drove me nuts. I wanted him to act more grown-up so Mama and my brother would like him better. Now that Cody was all about being the serious, frowny-faced Dallas police gonna-be, I missed the fun guy.
“Sorry.” He pasted on a big, stupid smile, and leaned so close to my face that his eyes were meeting in the middle. “This better?”
I giggled, of course. He knew I would. “You’re such a fart.” Grabbing his chin, I squeezed hard, then pushed his face away.
“
I know.” He grinned again, and we stood looking at the house some more.
“I wish Mama could see the place.” As soon as I said it, I knew I shoulda kept my mouth shut. Bringing up my mother would only throw a wet blanket on our big day.
Cody’s face went straight. “I don’t think you wanna know what your mother’d say about this. She’s still griping because we let the trailer go back to the bank, remember?”
I nodded, and I didn’t mention Mama again. She was mad at Cody and me for leaving Hugo and moving to Dallas in the first place, and if she knew we’d jumped into buying a house before Cody was even through the academy, that would just be one more thing for her to rise up on her hind legs about. She’d give me a great big financial speech, and tell me we didn’t have any business taking on a house loan until we’d paid off every single credit card, and saved up an emergency fund, and blah, blah, blah. Just thinking about it made me queasy, and I was queasy enough already.
“We’ve gotta do something about that oleander bush,” I said, when the boys squirmed out from under the porch and took off for the backyard. “Take it out, I guess.”
Cody pulled back and squinted at me. “Why? It looks good there. I bet it’s been there forever.”
I took in the plant, thinking that it most likely had been there a long time. Branches had grown through the porch railing and all in the lattice underneath, so that it seemed like part of the house. The first time we came to look at the place, I’d caught the sweet smell of it the minute we got out of the car. It was sad to think of killing it.
“They’re poisonous,” I said.
“What are?”
“Oleander bushes. They’re poisonous.”
Cody’s chin jerked, and he spit out that little “Khhh!” sound I couldn’t stand. Like I was making it up or something. “My mom had those all over the yard, and none of us got poisoned.”
