The eating house is still when I get home. It naps during the day while I am at school: a night house. I go straight to my room, because that’s what she likes me to do. It’s later in the afternoon that she emerges from her bedroom to begin her ritual for her night: the washing and applying of creams and makeup. In recent years, she hasn’t wanted me around, not even for her bath. And I don’t care. I hated watching her wrinkle in the chipped, rose-colored bath, pieces of paint peeling off and floating in the water around her. I pull out my box, choosing a candy bar and a warm can of Mountain Dew, and begin my homework as the eating house wakes up and creaks around me.
When the first of her visitors come, I pack up my notebooks and pencils and crawl to the wall that separates my bedroom from hers. This is the way I know her. She has not gone completely silent. I hear her speaking to them. I am so desperate for the sound of her voice; I spend nights pressing my ear between our walls. They tell her things—things about their lives, and their wives, and their jobs. They punch up their sentences with words like fiscal year, college tuition, and parole violations. She only speaks when they need her to. She’s perfected the art of the pause and response. A word here, a word there. Her voice never changes from an agreeable purr. They find it sexy, her willingness to listen and her reluctance to speak. A beautiful woman who does, and does not disagree. I am learning so much about men, the way they want and what they want. They pace her bedroom, their heavy steps a dull thud on the chipped and marred wood of the eating house. Once I hear her give advice: Sell the house, downgrade. You don’t need all of that space now that the kids are gone.
Where is my advice? I wonder. Where are my words? Whose kid am I?
WESSEX, a street cobbled with crack, crack whores, dealers, drunks, girls who had barely dried the milk from their own chins before giving suckle to their little undernourished babies. It is pitiful, this thing we call life. I know that, but I’m not sure they do. One grows accustomed to suffering, especially in a place like Bone Harbor. You take your first steps, everyone claps, and then you cease to be remarkable. Nearly surrounded by water, it used to be a harbor before they moved it farther south to be closer to Seattle. But that was before my grandmother was born. The people around here call the area the Bone. A kind of joke that developed after all the business dried up. I kind of like that they call it that. No use calling yellow, blue. And that’s what we are, rubbed down to the bone.
Six days a week I take the bus to work. To get to the bus, I have to walk up Wessex and down Carnation. Carnation is only slightly better than Wessex. The windows aren’t broken, and a couple people mow their grass. The people who live on Carnation Street call us trash. I suppose in a world such as this, unbroken windows and mowed grass make all the difference.
God is not in the houses that stand side-by-side down Wessex. I wonder if God lifted Himself from this place and put us behind a veil to suffer alone. It’s a nightmare street. The people in the outside world don’t know we exist. They don’t want to know. But our houses stand, almost collapsing under the weight of the sin they contain. Before the eating house comes the crack house. Before the crack house comes Mother Mary’s house. Mother Mary can see the future, but not any future. She can only tell you how you’ll die, and she’ll charge you forty dollars to do it. Which brings us to the bad people house. I only call it that because it’s where the ex-cons hole up after they’re released from prison. I don’t know what they get up to in there, but once a week there’s an ambulance outside and someone is hauled out on a stretcher.
There is only one house I like on Wessex Street. It’s the very first house on the block, and it belongs to Delaney Grant. Delaney grows pot in her garage. She doesn’t even sell it. She just smokes it all herself. Everyone calls her greedy. Sometimes, when there’s a pot shortage at the crack house, you can see people knocking on Delaney’s door. But she chases them away with a shotgun she calls Horace.
The reason I like Delaney’s house is because her son, Judah, lives there. Part of the time. The times he’s not with Delaney, he’s with his dad. We’ve never actually spoken, but he sits out in the yard a lot, and he always waves when I walk by. When you look at him you forget that he’s in a wheelchair. He’s handsome, and he’d be tall if he stood up. Six feet at least. He never went to school with the rest of us. A bus came to pick him up every morning. It could fit his wheelchair, and it drove all the way from the city. Delaney pissed her own life to shit, but when it came to Judah, she made sure the world saw him. You had to kind of like her for that. Especially when you had a mother like mine.
The bus is late. I tap my foot impatiently and crane my neck to peer down the street. If the 712 gets here in the next five minutes, I can still make it to the Rag O Rama in time for my shift.
“Good times,” I whisper as I see it bouncing around the corner. There are three of us who climb onto the 712: myself, Cuoco, one of the neighborhood heroin addicts, and little Nevaeh Anthony who catches the bus to her grandmother’s house every afternoon while her mother works.
“Hi Margo,” she says.
“Hi, little girl. You going to Granny’s house?”
She nods.