But she’s not the hard sell I think she’ll be. She crashes with Ryan and Tatum, and after two weeks of general carousing with the boys, she is a convert. “This place is fucking fascinating,” she tells me. Ryan and Tatum fill her in on the city’s more destructive history and she follows up like a model student, spending hours at the university poring over photos of the 1977 tornado, rooting through the downtown cemeteries. At night, she and Ryan and Tatum drive around looking for abandoned buildings to explore, crossing the river into Indiana. She locates a regular weed dealer in Waterfront Park after three days and goes on long runs through downtown, platinum head bobbing and weaving through traffic. The city is a borderline zone—neither Union nor Confederacy, neither big nor small. Mel seems to master it quickly. She gets it, she tells me. She gets what it is.
“Let’s try this,” Mel says. She’s sketching in the back room of Weirdo Video, waiting for the store to close so she can go out with Ryan and Tatum. She’s sunk into what we’re making already. Knowing it would make her more agreeable to staying—the baby with her bottle—I’ve encouraged it. “Be part of the great flight from New York. All those people flinging off their Brooklyn bullshit and migrating out to Detroit and Asheville and Austin? Well, for a quarter of the rent, why not Louisville.”
When the first installment of the grant comes through, we have the check sent to Weirdo Video, cash it, and rent out a furnished carriage house at the rear of an enormous Victorian owned by a U of L professor. We convert the back into sleeping quarters for Mel and rig up the front as a workstation. Mel improvises, building a drawing board out of spare lumber and an old Formica tabletop, banding a handful of flashlights above the board for perspective.
After we finish setting up, Mel looks around appraisingly, hands on hips. “Okay,” she says. “We can work with this.”
—
Meanwhile, I’ve unofficially moved in with Teddy. We’re in the kitchen cutting vegetables for soup and I’m taking down a carrot, slowly, deliberately, when my cell rings.
I see the 606 area code for Faulkner.
I angle the knife fast and wrong, slicing my thumb open. “Crap,” Teddy says. “Hold on.”
I pick up the phone, consider letting it go to voicemail. Decide to answer. “Mom?” I say as Teddy bundles a wad of toilet paper and thrusts my thumb inside.
“Sharon, where are you all,” she bleats.
I wince, hold the phone away from my ear. Teddy laughs silently. It’s as loud as if she were in the room with us. I had described my mother’s voice to Teddy as resembling the shriek of a thousand bagpipes melting in Satan’s taint. She’s not proving me wrong. “You all have been gone for I don’t know how long, and here I was thinking the worst. Y’all could be raped and murdered by the side of the road.”
Teddy covers his mouth and doubles over.
“We’ve been gone two weeks,” I say. “This is just now occurring to you?”
“You shoulda called me and you know it.”
I squeeze my thumb, trying to stop the blood. “I’m sorry. We’re still in Louisville. Some things came up.”
“Oh,” she says. Tones of blame. “You’re in Louisville.”
“Yes.” I lean my head against the wall.
“Are you okay?” Teddy whispers. I nod.
“Who was that,” Mom demands.
I hold my finger up and duck out into the hallway. “Funny story,” I say. “That was Teddy Caudill. Remember? From next door?”
There’s a wary silence. Then she says, in a tight, small voice, “Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, that was him.”
Her voice goes up. “That was him just now?”
“Yup.”
“Well, what’s he doing in Louisville?”
“Living. He owns a business. Mel and I are actually kind of thinking about sticking around here for a month or two. The people subletting our place in New York want to extend the lease, and we’re really liking Louisville. We think it might be a good place to get a jump start on this thing we’re working on.”
There’s a silence, then she counters, “Are you all staying with him?”
“Off and on. He helped us to rent out a space to work in.”
“And that’s all right with him?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know,” she says dubiously. “This seems like it happened awful quick. You sure you’re not wearing out your welcome?”
“He invited us to stay, Mom. It’s fine.”
There’s another minute of silence. Then she says, “I thought you come out here to visit with us. Did you really come out to hunt some boy down?”
“Holy hell, Mom. Really?”
When speaking to or about me, my mother has a very short range of tones: suspicion, resignation, exhaustion, singsong condescension, and, occasionally but memorably, disgust. She is not a believer in the power of tone—the argument It wasn’t what you said, it was the way you said it earns the adjudication of “Bullshit”—but were one to judge from tone alone, my mother thinks I am the world’s biggest twat. It’s a weird sensation, knowing your family believes the worst of you. It makes you want to disappear a little.
Of course, the fact that she’s partially right in this case doesn’t make it any better.
“I know we’re not real exciting or anything,” she says, “but I would have expected you all to stick around a little longer. I didn’t even know y’all were going to Louisville until you left. Kent had to tell me.”
“We told you, Mom. The night before we left.”
“Well, I didn’t hear you.”
“I don’t have any control over what you see and hear.”
“What are you doing out there,” she repeats, and though I’ve already told her, I know she’s asking a different question entirely.