The next day, no one was calling, and Arleen got back to making her apartment a home. She enrolled the boys in new schools. She got her stuff out of storage and hung pictures on the wall. A neighbor gave her a couch. Arleen’s old apartment on Thirteenth Street was usually messy because cleaning didn’t do it much good, what with its cracked windows, ravaged carpet, and broken bathroom. But Pana’s father kept a nice place. It could look respectable if Arleen kept it nice. She did. Over the sink, she wrote a little note to Jori: “If you don’t clean up after yourself, we are going to have problems.” On the counter she set out a candle for St. Jude, patron saint of difficult cases. When people saw Arleen’s apartment, they would say, “Your house so pretty.” Some even asked if they could move in. Arleen would feel proud and say no.
Jori tried to adjust to his new school. He was technically in eighth grade but so far behind that he might as well have been in seventh. It was frustrating. And on top of that, T’s death had unsettled him. It had come out that when P.A. called T’s mother, he had called from Larry’s phone. The police questioned Larry but released him. It still twisted Jori up inside. Why was his daddy with P.A. that night? Exactly two weeks after the funeral, a teacher snapped at Jori and he snapped back. He kicked the teacher in the shin and ran home. The police followed him there, the teacher having called them.
When Pana heard about it, he made Arleen a deal. If she left by Sunday, he’d return her rent and security deposit; if she didn’t, he would keep her money and evict her. Children didn’t shield families from eviction; they exposed them to it.2
Arleen took the deal, and Pana was nice enough to help her move. She pulled her dishes out of the clean cupboards and took her decorations off the walls. When Arleen had finished stuffing everything into trash bags and recycled boxes, Pana loaded his truck and drove Arleen’s things right back to storage.
Arleen had lost the pretty house and felt miserable about it.3 “Why it’s like I got a curse on me?” she wondered. “I can’t win for losing. No matter how hard I try.”
—
Arleen called Trisha and told her how angry the landlord was when he found out she had been going door-to-door asking for a joint. It really was the police visit that did her in, but years of hardship had taught Arleen how to ask for help, and one particularly effective method involved addressing a person’s guilt, framing things so that someone looked like a real bastard if he or she turned you down.4 “The least you can do is to help me if you’re the one that got me put out.”
Trisha told Arleen to come on over.
There was a new street memorial on Thirteenth Street. Jafaris noticed it. “Someone got shot there,” he said in his six-year-old voice. When they arrived at the old address, the boys ran up to Trisha’s apartment to see Little. But Little was dead. A car had ground him into the pavement. When Trisha told Jori, he tried to keep himself from crying. He paced around Trisha’s apartment and sleeve-attacked the snot sliding from his nose. He found a foam mannequin’s head. There was always random stuff like that lying around Trisha’s place. Jori knelt over the head and turned it faceup. He hit the face with a closed fist. He kept hitting it. Soon he was grunting, and his punches flew faster and harder and louder until Arleen and Trisha screamed at him to stop.
Trisha didn’t hide the fact that she had begun turning tricks. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. Men would just show up, and Trisha would take them into her bedroom, telling Arleen, “Look, I’m about to get us some cigs.” Trisha would emerge later with eight or ten dollars. Once, Jori walked in to find a man in bed with Trisha, his pants on the floor next to them and her lipstick smeared. In crowded houses, there were no separate spaces, and children quickly learned the ways of adults.
Trisha kept at it even after her new boyfriend moved in. Arleen sensed that he encouraged her to. She also figured it was the boyfriend who told Trisha to raise Arleen’s monthly rent to $150, from $60. The man went by a string of nicknames; Trisha called him Sunny. He was a thirty-year-old man who had just served five years for selling drugs. Skinny, with a smooth walk, he bragged about having nine children by five different women and joked about taking a spatula to Trisha. When Trisha got money from johns or her payee, Sunny would take it. If Trisha called after Sunny on the street, he would ignore her and later hiss, “Don’t call me ‘babe’ in public.” Trisha would ball up under the covers with her clothes on or sit on a windowsill and light a cigarette, its smoke coming alive in the breeze like a raging spirit that had only seconds to live.
Sunny’s parents and one of his sisters moved in soon after Arleen did. Trisha’s small one-bedroom apartment, which was in bad shape to begin with, began to buckle under the weight of eight people. The toilet broke and the kitchen sink started leaking. The leak got so bad that the floor filled with water that would ripple when Jori stepped in it. He spread old clothes on the ground to sop it up.
“It looks like slums,” Arleen said. “Kitchen all nasty, floor all nasty. Bathroom.” She thought about what to do next. “What’s beyond this? What’s to come? It can’t get no worser.”
Then a Child Protective Services caseworker showed up asking for “Ms. Belle.” It was not Arleen’s usual caseworker but one she’d never met before. She knew Arleen was living there—Sherrena didn’t even know that—and she knew about the toilet and the sink. The caseworker opened the refrigerator and grimaced. Arleen pointed out that it was the end of the month. She had gone shopping, but there were eight mouths to feed.5
The CPS worker said she’d be back. Arleen became nauseous with anxiety and secretly suspected Trisha had reported her. She needed to escape, somehow. So she called J.P. Her dependable cousin picked her up and rolled her a blunt. It helped. So he rolled another. “J.P. always tries to make me forget about all my stress,” Arleen said the next day.
—
Finally, spring had come to the city. The snow had melted, leaving behind wet streets edged in soggy garbage. On the same day, the whole ghetto realized there was no longer a need to brace and tighten when stepping outside. People overreacted without regret. Boys went shirtless, and girls put lotion and sun on their legs long before it was actually hot. Chairs and laughter returned to porches. Children found their jump ropes.
Arleen and her boys had spent the past several days alone in Trisha’s apartment. She relished the peace and quiet. Trisha and Sunny and Sunny’s people had disappeared. Arleen didn’t give it any thought, figuring they were visiting kin or friends. But on May 1, movers stormed Trisha’s apartment. They came with gloved hands, ready to work, but ended up looking at each other bewildered, trying to figure out what they should pack and what they should trash. Belinda, Trisha’s payee, had contracted the men. She would later come check on their progress, pulling up in a new Ford Expedition XLT with temporary license plates from the dealership. Chris had been released and came by the apartment looking for Trisha. Belinda didn’t think her client was safe on Thirteenth Street anymore.
Arleen stared out the front window. “This is too much for me,” she mumbled. She had stayed with Trisha for a month and a half.
Jafaris came home from school with braids on one side of his head. He watched the movers lugging out mattresses and dressers and shoving handfuls of clothes into black trash bags. To this scene, he had no reaction. He did not cry or ask a question or run to check on a special possession. He simply turned around and went outside.