Tarnished

by Erica Chilson

  “That’s on you, mister.” Willa points at Kade, and I freak the fuck out that her hands are no longer at ten and two. “You should have kept it in your pants, but you knew that already. I bet you did it on purpose so you could bitch about losing the job you were too yellow to quit.”

  Kade flips around to glare at me. “Can I push her out of the car? Ballsy Willa is like a combination of Warren and Wynn with tits, and I can’t handle seeing my best buddy and my boyfriend like that.”

  Laughing, I direct Willa where to park. “Front of the building, behind Warren’s old beater.”

  “Oh, hell no!” Willa snarls. “No. I ain’t parallel parking for nothing.”

  “Well, if you hit anything it will be Warren’s car, so you’re fine. You can’t scratch something that is covered in rust with its tailpipe and fender hanging to the ground.” I stare at Warren’s deathtrap, deciding that it’s going to the junkyard sooner rather than later. We can’t have Penny and Copper riding around in it.

  “I bet I can park better than you,” Kade goads Willa. “If I can do it on the first try, you have to stop bossing me around.”

  Gillette pride activated. Willa parallel parks. On the fourth try.

  I crawl out of the backseat, practically folding myself in half. I decide it’s high-time Willa learned how to drive stick shift just so we can take my truck from now on.

  Willa did a piss-poor job, but it’s her first time, so I’m giving an A for effort and leaving the car crooked to the curb. Let’s just hope no one clips the front bumper sticking out into the lane of traffic.

  Kade and Willa are bickering back and forth about how to parallel park while I take in our newest venture. Rusty Knob is a failing town, just like every other town in the United States. Government influence and conservationists murdered the coal and logging industry in our area. Then all major industry fled overseas. Our people have nowhere to work, but they still need to eat. They either left the small towns and moved to larger areas to find office and service work, or they starved while begging for government aid.

  If you drive down any main street, you’ll see buildings that have stood the test of time lie empty. Empty. Empty. Bank repossession. Going out of business. Liquidation sale. Empty. Empty. Dilapidated and boarded up. Struggling to survive while the owner uses their second and third mortgages to try to keep their fourth-generation legacies alive.

  With my money, I could have filled Rusty Knob’s buildings with businesses that would have sucked my wallet dry while giving a handful of townsfolk jobs. But in order to keep them afloat, the rest of the townsfolk wouldn’t be able to afford to shop there. It was an impossible situation.

  Driving down our streets and looking at our failing town is demoralizing, removing whatever sense of community spirit we have left. The business owners are committing suicide or falling into alcoholism to cope, splitting families and ruining lives. So instead of bleeding me dry to pay a few employees, I found a way to employ many while giving back to the community. A way to heal the infection that runs so deep in Rusty Knob.

  I bought an entire block on the left-hand side of Main Street between our two stoplights. I relocated all the remaining businesses to the right-hand side so the street now looks bustling and prosperous.

  My idea is a business plan to tie communities together from tax-deductible contributions using the empty buildings in our small towns. Our people need to know how to take care of themselves. They need an education that doesn’t involve debt they can’t pay back because they can’t get a job after leaving college. Ninety percent of the population can’t squeeze into ten percent of the highest paying jobs.

  There are jobs out there that will always be necessary: laborers, service jobs, and office work. There is no shame in honest work, and the wages you earn are enough to live on if they aren’t wasted on unnecessary expenses.

  They need to learn how to survive.

  “Looking awfully serious there, Royce.” Warren pats me on the shoulder to gain my attention. “You’ve been teaching us ignorant bastards for years. It’s about time you do it on a grander scale.”

  “Even if they won’t let us go non-profit, I’m still going to see this through.” I turn around to face Warren and the source of the constant babbling. My expression softens as I gaze down at the pink-cheeked baby boy gnawing on his own thumb. Spit bubbles pop and form as he makes noises like he’s talking to us in his own language.

  My arms itch to hold Copper, but his daddy isn’t one to pass him around. “This little feller hasn’t let me get a lick of sleep this past week.” Warren rubs a palm over his son’s shock of red hair. “I think he misses his momma. Don’t fret, Momma will be with us night and day come Saturday after graduation.”

  “I bet you’re proud.” My heart does a backflip for my sons and their friends, but it squeezes a bit when I realize how much I’m going to miss them come August.

  “Honestly…” Warren gazes down at his son while he speaks softly. “I didn’t think this day would come. If it hadn’t, I would have blamed myself and Penny would have resented me for life.” Getting emotional, he takes a deep breath. “Proud doesn’t cover it.”

  “You gonna miss being a stay-at-home dad?” I bite back a laugh at how Warren refuses to part with Copper. Penny has to fight him off to spend time with the little guy after school.

  “Oh, hell no!” Warren repeats Willa’s earlier words, and they sound identical. “My boy is coming with me no matter where you send me. Penny can just follow her ass behind us.”

  Willa and Kade’s bickering cuts off the second they realize they have an audience. Copper is like a homing beacon. Their eyes get droopy when they catch sight of him, then they’re walking toward us with goofy grins on their faces.

  “How’s my nephew?” Willa tries to lift Copper from Warren’s arms but is unsuccessful. “War…” she whines. “He needs to socialize.”

  “Socialize?” Warren arches his eyebrow. “Have you met our families? The Franklins are shoved up my ass day and night. Copper and I have to evacuate to Kade’s house to get some peace and quiet.”

  “How’s my godson?” Kade reaches right in and pries the feller from his daddy’s arms, and Warren has no choice but to let him go. Cradled to Kade’s broad chest, Copper nestles down like he belongs there. “Uncle Kade is your favorite. C’mon, admit it. Jeb is too small and Wynn looks too much like your daddy. You love me best.”

  “How come you let Kade and Wynn hold him but not me?” Willa’s whining again. “I have to fight Penny for two minutes when you’re in the shower, and all those dang little sisters of hers steal him from me.”

  “I don’t let them do anything,” Warren complains. “They take him.” He retrieves his son, only to pass the baby to his sister. “I’m just happy they give him back.”

  Willa looks up at me through the lace of her lashes while rubbing her cheek on the top of Copper’s red curls. “I’m not giving him back.” She flashes me a mischievous grin, and then walks to the entrance of the Community Growth: Life Skills Center.

  Brain dead, I follow after Willa. “I want a turn.”

  Non-Profit

  “I think this project should be connected to the school system so it can receive additional funding,” Miriam Ross interrupts the banker, Clyde Lomax, and the lawyer, Arnold Hinsdale, who are arguing over the benefits of non-profit.

  “No!” Kade’s voice overpowers mine. “No way, Miriam!” My son turns to me with fury etched across his features and issues me a warning. “If you give them any power, I’m out. Let’s get real, those bastards only fired me because I’m gay.” He glares me down. “Your sons are gay.”

  Sighing, I gaze around the long table and occupied folding chairs acting as our meeting room while we get this project up and running. We’re housed in the central most building, which used to be an insurance office a few years back.

  “I invited you all here today because I need community backing, not financial backing.” My words soothe Kade some,
but not enough to get his back from being ramrod straight. Even sitting, he’s towering over everyone. “The Life Skills Center will not be beholden to anyone. We will not play politics, knowing any money we receive will have an agenda attached. We won’t be connected to any religious affiliation because I don’t want God’s Word interpreted to fit a specific standard.”

  “Listen.” Warren adjusts Copper in his baby sling, and then leans forward to address everyone, much to my surprise. “This is for folks like me and Willa. Sure, we went to school, but what we learned at home overrode whatever you teachers taught us. Our loyalties were with our momma and daddy, not with some snooty know-it-all looking down their nose at us. So if you have any say in this, it’ll be high school all over again but with adults.”

  “You can’t…” Willa looks down at her hands, but she doesn’t stop speaking. “You can’t make us feel stupid, or we’ll stop coming ‘round. If we need help, you need to show us how to help ourselves, not do it for us because you think we’re too ignorant.”

  Sensing Kade’s rising anger and Willa and Warren’s erupting emotions, I take charge and hope everyone will hear what I’m saying. “The Life Skills Center is not an educational system for adults. It’s survival. It’s making the most of the life you were given. Kade, pass out the list of services you came up with.”

  “As a director, it will be my responsibility to find volunteers to teach specific classes. Most of this is common sense, pure and simple. Just because you’ve never learned something, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of learning.”

  Kade passes a stack of paper to Miriam, and so forth. With fifteen members of Rusty Knob’s community surrounding this table, it’s a mishmash. Several business owners are scowling, realizing they may lose money once this is up and running. The banker is shaking his head left and right, muttering ‘no’ underneath his breath.

  “I was briefly a teacher in Kentwood Area School District, and I despised the politics in the system. Most teachers put in requests for supplies and ended up buying their own, and that is the bullshit I want to prevent. What good is Home Economics and Shop class in the eighth grade? I didn’t need to know how to sew a stuffed animal when I was thirteen. But at eighteen, I needed to know how to balance my checkbook and how to shop at the grocery store.”

  “I know you’re thinking that’s our parents’ job, and I will teach my children this myself. But what if your parents didn’t know and were too prideful to admit it, so it went untaught?” Willa still won’t look up from her hands, but she’s found her voice at last. “Every generation is teaching their children less and less about this stuff, and we’re getting more and more ignorant. Being book smart is not the same as knowing how to take care of yourself. Our kids need to know calculus, but they need to know how to change a tire more. Every day I feel stupid over all the things I wasn’t taught.”

  “It was a rude awakening coming out of college and buying my own home, having to pay some dude two-hundred bucks to change the broken flush chain in my toilet tank. Wynn laughed at me when he found out, saying it would have taken five minutes and a two dollar part. But I didn’t know, so I lived on Top Ramen for the rest of the month to offset the cost.”

  I scan down the list Kade printed off. “It’s the small things that destroy families, and money is usually the root of it. If you lose your job, you feel like you let your family down. Everything out of your wife’s mouth sounds like a complaint. Your kids need this and that and you feel like a failure because you can’t afford it. So you look to the bottle for some relief, not realizing you’re wasting your money on something you didn’t need while destroying everything you’ve ever built. I want our community to know there is hope, even when they are down and out.”

  “No one should have to live like that,” Warren says with conviction. “I hated how hopeless I felt when our house was falling down around our ears and we couldn’t afford to hire it done and we didn’t know how to fix it ourselves. So you sit while your life crumbles down around you, looking for anything that is an escape. Except the escape traps you in an even worse fate.”

  “Our program will teach valuable lessons, like money management.” My fingertip scans down the list, but I decide to speak from experience instead. “The less money we had, the more Annie wanted. She’d go buy something to fill the void. It would be something cheap and worthless, only a few bucks here or there. Easily broken and forgotten. But it added up to where we could have had something of value. Most people are too blind to notice. It’s only a cup of coffee, or a cigarette, or a couple beers because I only have a twenty dollar bill and it’s not enough to pay the electric bill. So they spend it to feel better. But written down, they would see they just spent an entire mortgage payment on bullshit throughout the month. You can be poor and still have more. It’s all about value and worth.”

  “Penny was spending too much on cookies and pre-packaged snacks, and she didn’t realize she could make the same things at home for a quarter of the price.” Willa finally looks up, and stares right at Miriam. “So I taught her how to bake some things and make air-popped popcorn, and how to clip coupons and buy groceries that are on sale. She’d cry to me how she wanted cable but couldn’t afford it. Now, instead of throwing money away at the store, she has TV to watch at night and food that isn’t filled with preservatives.”

  “I know all of this sounds like it’s the 1950s, but maybe we need to remember a few things our grandparents used to know. No one has to sit around waiting for someone to help them when they have the tools to help themselves. Instead of wasting money on simple tasks because it sounds easier, do it yourself so you have the money when you really need it.”

  “I thought it best to group classes of a similar nature in the same space.” Kade scans his list. “Set up hands-on stations instead of barking instructions that will fall on deaf ears. Like simple home repairs happening at stations around the room. Or different recipes in a cooking class. Or showing how to balance your checkbook at one table, while at the next discussing how to clip coupons or create a monthly budget.”

  “I thought…” Willa stumbles over her words, so I reach over to grip her hand before she wrings them raw. “I thought it would be good to do things in real-time. For those with even a quarter acre of usable land, we could help till their garden. Later we could harvest, and then show them how to put the produce up for winter. We don’t need to buy it if we can grow it, and it would occupy us from doing destructive things.”

  Kade winks at Willa, and then takes the floor. “With the advent of the internet, things have been simplified, but we’ve lost touch with living. I could order groceries online and have them delivered to my front door. Convenient and awe-inspiring, sure. But since I can’t afford my mortgage because I’m unemployed, what good is that to me? I need to know how to stretch my dollar, not pay quadruple because it’s a novelty. Technology is sucking us dry, and we don’t even realize it. We’re buying what we don’t need at the expense of what we do need.”

  Reaching past Kade, I snag the folder I organized for this meeting. “We will be privately funded by tax-deductible charitable contributions. We will also be hosting Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, Al Anon, and various support groups. I’ve contacted counselors across four counties for their help. Kade is organizing an LGBTQ support group open to sixteen-year-olds and older, and Willa would like to start one for victims of domestic violence.”

  “I highly doubt you’ll get much community support when it comes to Kaden Marx and his queer crusade,” Conner Stevens blurts out without filtering his thoughts. While sounding bigoted, it was more of a statement of truth. We’re sitting in Conner’s former building. After the decline, he had to move his insurance practice to his home. His choice, given by Banker Lomax, keep the failing building and dwindling clientele and lose his house to the bank– he chose the roof over his head and to work from home.

  Every person in Rusty Knob has a similar story, and it’s made them bitter.

 
; “If any of our donors disagree with our policy of not having an affiliation to anything, they can keep their money. No agendas will be run during our program. All funding will go toward paying for upkeep on the buildings, wages for our directors, and supplies for our volunteers. We will provide an inventoried monthly statement down to the last cent.”

  “And who will be your directors?” Arnold Hinsdale asks with narrowed eyes and a scowl pulling at his lips.

  “You’re looking at ‘em.” I don’t back down as I point to Kade, Warren, Willa, and myself. “We’re here in Rusty Knob for life, and we would rather live in a thriving town than watch it cannibalize itself.”

  Clyde Lomax snorts. “Three hillbillies and their king?”

  “Who better to understand the people who will use this program than the very ones who would have utilized it in years’ past when they needed it most?” Miriam comes to our defense. “They get what we will never understand– what it means to be hungry.” She turns kind eyes on me. “Royce, I agree with your stance. I won’t push the issue on government funding, but I want to be able to refer both volunteers and people in need.”

  “And that is precisely why you’re here,” I say with a smile, glad someone is finally getting with the program. “We’re going to start small, helping Kentwood County. After the kinks are worked out, we’d like to branch out. Share our business plan with other counties so they can clone what we’re trying to achieve. Every town has empty buildings rotting because the banks won’t release them for purchase.”

  “I’m in,” Miriam and Conner say at the same time.

  Banker Lomax just gets up from the table and walks out the door, because what we’re proposing is to live within our means and not accrue the debt he’s peddling.

  “I assume I’m here because you’ll need a lawyer?” Arnold Hinsdale perks up. The eager, evil light in his eyes twists my guts.

  “No,” I utter bluntly. “I’ve had a team of attorneys since Annie and my father’s accident. They will be handling the legal side of things. I need you to refer us to your clients because they need our help more than they need yours.”