2806 Cloverleaf

by Anthony Otten

With you and your dad gone, I live in the quiet. Mostly I’m fine with it. When I want my conversation fix I sit in my wicker chair on the porch, like I am today, and wait for the mailman. He’s a young Black guy in a blue cap and shorts. Real polite. I don’t know, maybe I scare him. Old white lady in socks and sandals, feet too sore for shoes. Squinty little glasses I hardly need since Medicare did my cataracts. 

“Nothing but junk, Mrs. Scott.” He hands the mail to me instead of the box. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’d be out here anyway,” I say, heavy, like I’m visiting the cemetery. “My new landlady’s coming by.”

He laughs. “She needs you on the porch to flag her down?”

“Says she’s gonna sell my house. Unless I can talk to her.”

He tucks his lips in, that look when somebody’s sorry but they can’t help you.

“You could see a lawyer about that. She can’t just throw you out.”

“People can do anything if it’s bad enough,” I say. I fan myself with the junk mail. He’s backing down the porch steps already.

“Well, I hope it goes all right for you.”

“You better. Otherwise, I’m coming to live with you.”

He laughs, head down, as he goes to the next door. There are so many houses on my block, it’s a while before he turns the corner.

I got time to water my four o’clocks before her silver Audi slides to the curb. She gets out with her big red handbag and locks the doors twice—just to be safe, I guess. She’s wearing high heels and a black pantsuit. It must be somebody’s funeral today.

“You Laura?” I say. I want her to remember what the place looks like with me on the porch.

She comes up and shakes my hand. “Very nice,” she says, studying the house. “Very nice.”

I wait for her to go through the place, pick at the rust on the stove burner, turn her nose up at my strawberry wallpaper. I ain’t going to tell her about the chimney, I know that. But she don’t inspect anything. Just stares at your dad’s picture on the wall; then out the window to see if anybody’s in the alley. Nothing’s there but my English ivy, waving at us.

The silence makes me itch. “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” I start off.

She sits on the brown loveseat and tightens her mouth into a little smile. I don’t feel like I can sit with her around, so I stand.

“You knew him going way back, didn’t you?” she says.

“Yep. We moved here in ’83. Never gave him no trouble. Just money.” I laugh a little; set the box fan on low so she can spread her papers on the coffee table. Must be the lease.

“You like a soft drink?” I ask.

“No, I can only stay a minute. I have to pick my son up from soccer at five.” She scrunches her forehead looking down at a paper. Her eyebrows are drawn sharp and thick, dark blonde centipedes. “So. I booked a couple showings for this week, but you’re fine to stay until the 31st.”

“Right. I wanted to ask about that.”

“I can work with you on the date. Do you need a couple courtesy days?”

“More like a courtesy decade.”

She laughs without really laughing.

“I’ve been here over thirty-five years,” I say. I feel naked, standing up in front of her like I’m in court. “I want to talk to you about this.”

“We talked last week, dear. There are better neighborhoods for you than this. I could even take you around.”

“You think I got money for a better neighborhood? All I ever did was cook at Golden Corral. My husband passed way back in—”

I see her kind of stiffen up. I look over at your dad’s picture in its red frame.

“I reckon you already know,” I say. Her makeup can’t hide the blood leaving her face. “It don’t bother you, does it?”

“What, like there are ghosts here?” she asks.

“No. I didn’t mean it like that.” Not that I’d mind the company.

She still looks up at the ceiling like spiders are lowering down on her head. I can tell she’s had treatments. Another one of those people who think they’re never supposed to die.

“I just hope that ain’t the reason you’re putting me out,” I say. “Long time ago.”

She nods. “I’m sure this house means a lot to you.”

“My life means a lot to me. It’s all been here.”

“So, really, it’s not about the money?”

I keep looking at her. She puts her eyes down. After a while she gets up, slow, and sets a paper on the table. “I wrote the showing times on there.”

Your dad’s smiling eyes watch her leave. I go with her out on the porch. The transit bus chunks up the block, spitting exhaust on her Audi. She tells me, “The realtor has a key, but she’ll knock.”

“Your father would’ve worked with me.”

“Call me if you have any questions,” she says.

 *

Our house. It was ugly when we first moved in. Yellow siding with a red brick foundation, like Dorothy and the witch. Your dad, that summer, lived a whole week on a ladder with a paintbrush in his hand. “I ain’t raising that kid in a bumblebee house,” he told me. I was big with you at the time. My body still between you and the world.

The landlord wouldn’t hire a painter, and your dad wouldn’t have let another man do it, anyway. He’d wear the same socks for a week, forget to flush the toilet or pull out the bathtub plug, but he couldn’t sit still if somebody else was doing a job around him. He was like you’d remember, tall as a weed, had those slanted shoulders from all his bending and pulling furniture at the JCPenney warehouse. He just didn’t have that belly yet, that fake baby drooping over his belt.

When he was done with the house it was white with cherry-red trim on the shutters. We stood back in the street and wished we had a camera. Nobody else in this city had put as much pride into their skinny little shack.

“Some nice folks live there,” Darrell said.

“Hope we can hang onto it,” I told him. The landlord ran a vacuum cleaner shop over in Cincinnati. We could never get him to help with much, but we didn’t complain. He could’ve just thanked us for the paint job and thrown us out anytime he liked.

So we kept ourselves in the place. Or it kept us. If you live in a house a long time, I found out, it’ll tunnel its roots into you. Soon enough it’s like you couldn’t live without that creak on the stairs, that door you can never get shut, that clawfoot bathtub you swear goes walking around at night, because what else is dripping water on the steps? It’s as bad as being married, thinking how you couldn’t live without the other person’s stink on you. It’s like your own blood is running through the pipes.

 *

The first showing’s that Wednesday. I’m not at the house. I’m on the bus bench up the street, holding a toilet paper roll to my eye, playing pirate.

The agent’s there with a family. It’s a young couple holding hands with a little girl in blue jean overalls and big sneakers. She jumps up and swings between her parents, so light she can hold her feet off the ground without tipping either one. The sight of them presses a stone into my throat. I never guessed anybody with a child would even look at my house. The young people on Home & Garden are always asking for granite countertops and stainless steel.

They’re going around the house now. I get up and head down an alley. The backyards don’t have fences here, so I can move behind the houses easy. I look up once or twice so I don’t step under the pigeons on the power line—I know what they’ll do if they get the chance.

There’s a moldy mattress by my neighbors’ garbage cans, a nice place to stand unseen. I can hear the little girl around the corner. She asks a question but neither of the parents says anything. They’re listening to the agent.

The neighbors have Rottweilers. I reach around, pull their screen door back, and let it slam. The dogs startle up, barking like murder. I press my back against the garden hose rolled up on the wall, hidden, sweating the starch out of my shirt.

After the dogs quit there’s silence, mostly. The little girl’s still chattering like somebody pulled her string. The mother says, “Do they have a noise ordinance here?”

I wait back on the bench till the cars drive away.

 *

I’ve lived in our city, across the river from Cincinnati, ever since I was born. I might’ve left, eventually, if I hadn’t met your dad in the grocery line. We found our little house on Cloverleaf Avenue together, on a stroll from our apartment downtown. It was the kind of neighborhood you don’t see no more. People in and out of your house like it was theirs. All these folks, Black and white both, watching football on our rabbit-ear TV, smoking, dropping ashes and pork rinds on my rug. Kids setting Popsicles on the furniture. Now the only place I see those people is in the obits I save. They’re in a folder in the drawer with my address book. I’ve got yours with them.

I don’t have to look at the calendar to know it’s the day I lost you. I just have to look down at my hand. My right pointer finger has a little cut on the side that opens, like a mouth, every year on the same date. I’ve waited all this time for it to say something, to do more than bleed, but it never has.

After the funerals your Aunt Faye wanted to burn my album with your baby and school pictures. She didn’t say it like a suggestion. Just announced she was going to do it because she didn’t want her sister-in-law living with any reminders of Satan’s power. Of course I wouldn’t let her.

“My brother’s been taken from me, but you still want to look at those pictures,” she said.

“What else do I have to look at?” I said.

She squinted down her high-sitting nose at me.

“I never cared for folks having just one child. It’s not regular,” she said. In my own kitchen. We were still in our black dresses from your dad’s service. You could smell my oatmeal cookies that nobody’d touched, getting cool on the sheet.

I told her, “Clayton was worth more than all four that come out of you.” And made her give me her house key back. She stood out on the sidewalk and knocked the dust off her cheap hose as a witness against me, like any good disciple. She’d never cared for me being with Darrell, anyway. I was too much a heathen.

There are times even now I’ll dream about your pictures burning, and I’ll wake up damp and hot. I see flames blistering your face, you and your Tonka truck raveling up in smoke. That’s the only nightmare I ever have. I don’t dream about the day it happened.

 *

For the next showing I’m there in the house, drinking hot tea with honey, sitting on the loveseat like I’m just another thing—the sink tap, the fridge—except I’ve been broke a long time and nobody’s ever called the man about it. I figure I’m crazy to hope I can keep Miss Botox from landing a sale. Maybe it ain’t hope, though. Maybe it’s plain spite.

This new buyer’s a guy in his forties, blue button-down shirt and a shiny, plastic kind of face. He drinks a cup of tea with me while he decides whether to take my house. The agent goes out on the porch to play on her phone.

“You got kids?” I ask him.

“One. She lives with her mom.”

“Good. This place ain’t fit for a child.”

He smiles. “I’m not looking for a place to live, ma’am. I flip houses.”

I let him explain it to me, patient, even though I get Home & Garden on the neighbor’s cable and I know what flippers do.

“What would you change about the place, if you could change anything?” he asks me, like it’s our project together.

I point at the fireplace. “Guess I’d get the dead thing out of that chimney flue.”

“Dead thing?” His eyes get big. “What in the world is it, a squirrel?”

“Couldn’t say. I don’t mind it too bad, anyhow. It sure ain’t the only death this house has seen.”

“No?”

I point at the floor where he’s standing, drinking the tea I made him. “Right there? Where my husband went down. And he never got up.”

“Gosh. I’m so sorry. He didn’t fall, did he? Was the floor slick?”

“With his own blood,” I say. “My son shot him.”

He backs away from the spot as if your dad’s still laying there. I sip my tea.

“That was a while back?” he says.

“Mm-hmm. Eighteen years. Never could scrub that stain out all the way. You see it?”

There’s nothing for him to see, but it’s like he sees it. He shuts his eyes for a second, then sits down real careful in the fake leather armchair across from me. His voice goes down to a whisper.

“At least you feel like you can move on. I’m glad for you.”

“Oh, I ain’t going of my own accord,” I say. “They’re selling it out from under me.”

“Where are you planning to go?”

“I don’t know yet. They got dog shelters left and right, but nothing with my name on it.”

He twists his hands in his lap. He don’t say he’s sorry again, but he goes out to talk with the agent. I know I’ve won when they don’t come back in.

 *

I never should’ve let you wear glasses, even though you were starting high school and the doctor said I’d already waited too long. Up till then, your dad hadn’t minded all the reading you did—the books piled under your bed, the afternoons at the library where the front desk lady had practically babysat you growing up. Now he looked at you in your specs and all of a sudden he felt bound to do something.

“It’s on me to harden that kid up,” he said. “Else he’ll crack one day.”

He put your books in a milk crate and locked them in the garage. He made you learn to ride a bike, an old rusty Schwinn some kid forgot in our yard, except you never really learned; just fell and scabbed yourself up and cried for the shame when you had to get on it again. He browbeat you into sliding under his Pinto with him and helping him change the transmission filter. He dragged you over the bridge to Indiana, out in the woods, and showed you how to clean and oil and load and shoot a gun, and he watched you run back to the car when he tried to put the gun in your hands. Watched you run from whatever he thought was a man.

I told Darrell I didn’t see the point of making you hard if he had to kill you to do it. He didn’t pay me any attention. I was tempted to pull the few plays I had on him—quit cooking, call a divorce lawyer, pack a getaway bag. But I heard my own dad, dead by then, tossing in his two rotten cents: A woman don’t help nobody trying to make a bad thing better. To him I said, Don’t tell me to let this alone. I brought that boy out of my own body, and I see a black river running behind his eyes. I’m doing something about it.

So I tried to help you. I mended those old pants you liked, left money on your dresser for the movies. I harped at you to ask a girl to the junior prom and take the dishwasher job at the restaurant, same shift as me. I was worried enough I thought about having Faye and her prayer posse lay hands on you. Whatever I did, I was on my own against that dark thing growing in you. I saw how your shoulders curved down under a hidden weight. How you quit reading even after your dad finally let up and carried the books back from the garage. You just sat in a corner, doodling shapes with your finger on the carpet, waiting for company to leave so you could go up to bed. You’d have slept twelve hours a night if I’d let you.

I knew what I was afraid of, even if I had nobody to tell. It was the time, back then, when folks thought a kid hurting himself was on account of a bad raising, or being selfish, just like they said every boy or girl who went missing from our neighborhood was a runaway. Maybe that’s still how it is.

One day I came up from doing laundry in the basement. It was a cool fall morning, a Saturday. I didn’t know you were up yet, but there you were in the living room, with your back turned to me, wrestling with your dad over something. Darrell’s eyes were white, his pupils squeezed small. You both had your hands on the pistol he kept in our closet. I said “Clayton, Clayton, Clayton,” but you didn’t hear me or didn’t want to.

“He put rounds in it, Sandy,” your father said, and then you jerked that gun back from him, and the crack stilled us all. Darrell went down on the floor. He was looking at the ceiling, but he didn’t have a look on his face. You turned to me, panting, gnarled up with shame. Still in your blue-checked pajamas. You had dark creases under your eyes like you’d laid awake waiting for daylight, gathering nerve for this. Fighting with the devil, or yourself.

Some nights I’ll sit in that room, where we used to have your crib, and I’ll watch it happen again, in front of me, like I’m by myself at the show over on Liberty Street. It don’t scare me. I know what’s coming, and I’ve never had any ghosts come to bother me. I never was so lucky.

You turned that gun on your own chest and I went for it. I had good aim—stuck my finger by the hammer so it couldn’t strike. The metal opened my skin. I didn’t feel any of the hurt, the warming drip of blood. We looked at each other over the barrel like animals. I sensed it then, that I wouldn’t win. But I still fought you, going up the stairs, crying and hitting, till you shut your bedroom door on me and did what you were set on doing.

I don’t think you would’ve gone through with it if you hadn’t shot your dad on accident. You probably wanted us to take that gun from you, tell you you couldn’t do it. But people can do anything if it’s bad enough. Even if they don’t mean to.

 *

My landlady rings me up. I can hear a smile poking through her voice, and I wish I’d let the machine catch her. She says the house has been sold. Sight unseen, some poor folks with an FHA loan.

“This must be my courtesy call,” I say.

“Now, honey, I’m not putting you out in the street. You’ve got until the end of the month.”

Certain folks are polite even when they’re measuring you for the casket.

“You don’t need that money,” I tell her. “You’re just doing this cause you can’t stand to think of what happened here. And why? It wasn’t your family.”

“Look, Sandy. I know you played that game with one of the buyers. It won’t work on me.”

The quiet stretches. My ribs close up around my heart like a bird’s claws.

“You ever been the reason somebody died, Laura?”

Her breath pulls in sharp. “Hold on. Wait. Don’t say that.”

“I can’t live where I want. I might as well say what I want.”

“Do I have to call for help?”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” I tell her. “I got all the help I need.”

I hang up; look down at my hand, and notice my finger’s bleeding. A red drop grows, fattens, on the old cut. I watch it fall. The rug soaks it in before I can bend down and wipe it up.

Today ain’t even that day. But blood, I tell myself, always has a reason. It’s like the permission I’ve been waiting for.

I pull your dad’s picture off the wall and put it in the obituary drawer so he don’t see the rest. Then I lift the album down from the closet shelf. Tonight, before everything, I sit in the living room and count your faces. You’ll never have to get old, like me. I don’t know if I should be grateful for that.

When I’m ready, I set the album on the loveseat and toss rubbing alcohol over it like one of those priests on the Catholic channel, flicking water at folks. Then I scrape a match and drop it. They can blame your Aunt Faye for giving me the idea.

I won’t lie, this house deserves more than an old woman with a scar on her hand. But I can’t just leave. All the living I had to do after dying with you and your dad—it happened here. 2806 Cloverleaf. The last place I was able to call myself us. If they want to take it away from me, I’ll take it first. They’ll just have to figure out which ashes are mine.

I hear the fire start rushing as I climb to the top of the staircase. Smoke bitters the air. A red glow spills from the living room, waiting for the fire department to show up late and hose the embers.

They don’t come, though, and the flames never find me. I wait till my back aches from sitting on the steps, and then I head down to look. The fire’s burned itself out, a big charred spot where the album was, like the devil stopped in and sat on the cushion. Didn’t even set off the smoke alarm.

When I look at that burnt place long enough, I can see you. The shadow of two thin legs scorched into the seat. Your skinny chest. Everything but your bottomless eyes. And on the floorboards, where I scrubbed and scrubbed, a faded streak of red blushes out of the wood.

Once, I held you inside me, closer than anyone could have ever held you again. We were the same body, and this house was ours—yours and mine and your dad’s. It still is. Our blood’s in the wood, the walls. I know this now: even if they put me out, what’s left of us won’t be going anywhere.

I go out on the porch and sit in my wicker chair. The streetlights cone down on the asphalt; somebody’s having a cigarette at their window. A stereo plays, and people I can’t see talk in dark voices. My heart fills. It’s summer, warm all night.

 

 

Anthony Otten’s short stories have won contests in the journals Still and Able Muse, and his fiction has also appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, Jabberwock Review, Grasslimb, and Valparaiso Fiction Review. He lives in Kentucky and is an MFA candidate in fiction at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find him @anthonyotten_ on Instagram and at anthonyotten.com.