She quickens her pace when the sign for the Palm Manor Apartments comes into view, the painted letters flaking off into what might once have been a garden, but is now just a muddy puddle littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Only a few more steps and she’ll be inside, warm and dry, with a mug of something hot to drink. And her copy of The Outsiders.
It was supposed to be homework for Mrs. Kendrick’s English class, but it didn’t feel like homework at all. How could reading be work when you got to meet people and go places you’d never be able to go in real life? She smiles as she thinks of Cherry and Ponyboy, the movie-star-handsome Sodapop. They have become her friends, outsiders like her, from the wrong side of town. Except they have one another, and she has no one, a freak loner from an entirely different world than kids who wore name-brand jeans and went home to real houses. It might be nice to belong to a gang—not the drug-selling, gun-toting kind of gang—just a few kids who wouldn’t tease her for wearing thrift store clothes and bringing her lunch in a brown paper bag.
She’s still weighing the pros and cons of gang membership when the rain-drenched quiet is broken by a sharp string of oaths. “Goddamn rain! Every goddamn time I gotta boot somebody out, it goddamn rains!”
Christy-Lynn jerks her head up, knocking the hood back from her face as she searches for the source of the swearing, then freezes when she spots a mound of clothing and furniture on the soaking wet steps outside their apartment. And then she’s running with the rain in her eyes and a knot in her stomach, running toward a man carrying the mismatched lamps her mother had brought home from Goodwill a few months back.
“What are you doing? That’s our stuff!”
“And that’s my apartment,” the man says, jerking a thumb at the open apartment door. He’s tall and beefy, wearing a soggy wife-beater and dirty gray overalls. “’Less you got six hundred dollars on you. But I’m guessin’ you don’t—any more than your mama did.”
“But you can’t! She isn’t even here!”
“I can,” he barks back. As if to make his point, he drops both lamps onto the soggy heap of household belongings. The larger of the two rolls off the pile and onto the pavement with a sickening pop as the bulb implodes. “Says so right in the lease your old lady signed when she moved in. Two months late, you’re out.”
A boy carrying an armload of towels and pillows appears in the doorway. He’s not much older than she is—fourteen or fifteen—a younger version of his father, with the same yellow hair, hard jaw, and cold eyes. He fires the pillows out onto the pile from where he stands, then aims a hard little smile at her. It isn’t the first time he’s helped his father evict someone.
Eviction.
The word fills her with shame. She knows things have been tight, that her mother’s been struggling to make ends meet, stretching the groceries with hot dogs and boxed mac and cheese, but she never realized it was this bad. No wonder she’s been picking up extra shifts at the Piggly Wiggly. And why she always looks so worn-out, like little by little she’s coming apart at the seams.
Christy-Lynn is still staring at the sopping heap of their belongings, her gaze locked on a fuzzy purple foot—the stuffed dinosaur her mother had given her for her sixth birthday—when something, a bit of sound or movement, suddenly catches her eye. Her stomach lurches as the curtains part in the window overhead and a pair of faces appear. And they aren’t the only ones watching. All around the complex, people are peering through windows or hovering in doorways, looking on as the scene plays out. Their watching makes it worse somehow.
She shoves down the urge to cry. What good will crying do? She needs to call her mother, to tell her what’s happening, only her boss doesn’t like her getting calls at work, and the last thing they need right now is for Charlene Parker to get fired. Besides, there’s no way to call. Even if the landlord were to let her back into the apartment—which she was willing to bet he wouldn’t—the phone had been shut off weeks ago.
The landlord’s son appears again, this time with an armload of pots and pans, including the cast-iron skillet her mother uses to make corn bread. He drops them onto the stoop with a clatter, then turns back to take a box his father is holding out. It looks like cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink, window cleaner, cleanser, dish soap, a half-used roll of paper towels. She watches as the cardboard darkens in the rain, the roll of paper towels slowly wilting.
It’s the paper towels that finally push Christy-Lynn to the edge, the sight of them slumping in the sharp, icy rain is simply too much to bear. They don’t have much, a fact that’s hard to dispute when everything they own now sits in one ghastly pile on the stoop. Is it too much to ask that he spare their roll of paper towels? A wave of rage suddenly boils up in her, mingled with a throat full of tears she struggles to swallow. It isn’t the unfairness of it; if they’re really two months behind in their rent, he has the right to evict them. But did he really need to toss their stuff out into the rain while everyone watched?
The son reappears with a stack of plates and mugs. He sets them down on the sidewalk, then drops the dish towels he has wadded under his arm into a puddle. For a moment, she considers charging him, knocking him off his feet and pummeling him bloody, but he’s too big for that.
“Your father’s a bastard, you know that?” she chokes out instead, hating that she can’t keep the tears from bleeding into her words.
He stares at her a moment through the rain, his straw-colored hair plastered flat to his head, then shrugs. “If there’s stuff you want, you best get busy.” He bends down and reaches into the carton of cleaning supplies, coming up with a box of plastic trash bags. He tosses the box to her without aiming. “If this stuff ain’t off the sidewalk in the next hour, it’s going in the dumpster.”
Christy-Lynn watches mutely as the landlord’s son disappears back into the apartment. And then finally, because there’s nothing else to do, she stoops to pick up the box of trash bags, rips one from the roll, and begins stuffing handfuls of wet clothes into it.
FIVE
Sweetwater, Virginia
November 20, 2016
Wade Pierce stared at the blinking cursor with gritty eyes. It still wasn’t right. Three hours on one damn scene, and it still wasn’t right. Nor was bashing away at it for another three hours likely to fix the problem. It wasn’t the scene; it was him. He was edgy and unfocused, buzzy from way too much coffee. Frazzled, he shoved back from the table and padded to the fridge for a Mountain Dew, then opted for a bottle of water instead. The last thing he needed was more caffeine. He took a long pull as he opened the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the deck.
The air was heavy and gray, thick with the scent of damp ground and distant wood smoke. It was a good smell, an earthy smell. No bus fumes or car exhaust. No reek of trash or piss-soaked alleys. He filled his lungs, scanning the rolling hills that rimmed the town of Sweetwater. The foliage that had set the hilltops ablaze in recent weeks was gone now, leaving behind a landscape that seemed to mirror his mood of late, chilly and barren, devoid of color. Maybe a city boy trying to live off the grid wasn’t such a good idea after all. Or maybe he was just sick of his own company.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time—getting away. Okay, running away if he was being truthful. To finally get back to doing something that fed his soul instead of just his bank account. Only it wasn’t working. He liked to pretend running off to the wilds to live like a hermit had been about getting in touch with his muse, but it hadn’t. At least not entirely.