“You’re worried about money,” Sun states after the silence. “You were thinking Irv’s estate might have helped, and now you’re dealing with the disappointment of that. And that has you angry. The fear, it has you angry.”
“And I’m angry that I’m angry. And I’m broke.”
“You’re not broke. You’re cash poor. But you’re land rich.”
“I really don’t feel like a member of the landed gentry at the moment. I’m thinking, maybe I should burn down the house, make it look like it was an accident or crackheads or something, and whatever’s left from the insurance payout after I cover Tal’s education we, you and me, and her eventually, should take it somewhere it can last. Like Belize,” I say out loud. I actually say it out loud. It’s made sense in my head for months, but when it hits the air there’s an oxidizing reaction and it sounds a like a joke. Sun just looks at me. Because she knows I’m not kidding.
“You know that’s crazy talk, right? If you did that, you’d go to jail. And where would we go?” she asks and I know she means an entirely different we than us. “Roslyn’s got lots of leads for permanent settlements, but one of them is here. You need to go to her.”
“I’m not going to her. She’s been sniffing around this place for months, even before I moved y’all in. Why was she here that day she Tased me?”
“You Tased her first.”
“Yeah, but still? Or when I caught her checking out my rooms? I know she wants it, but that old lady is sneaky. She’ll try and rob me, watch. I know you hate me saying it, but I don’t trust her. She’s got her own agenda.”
“If she wants to buy the place, her agenda is the same as yours. Talk to Roslyn,” Sun says, as always ignoring my bias on the subject.
—
It’s later that afternoon when I wake from a nap to hear Tal’s voice talking to someone downstairs. I don’t give it further thought till I hear voices coming up the stairs. I hear Tal say, “It was up here,” and then multiple footfalls banging down my hallway.
“What the hell are you doing?” There’s a guy with her. When he turns around, I see he’s one of the kids from the funeral, the one that was texting at the cemetery. Tal’s crouching at the bathroom door, like we were that night. She stands to yell at me.
“Pops, put some pants on!”
“He doesn’t need pants. We can just film him from the chest up.” And then there is a video camera in my face. It’s reaching up, and suddenly a light is shining in my eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing,” is the appropriate response.
“Pops, this is Nate? Did you guys meet? Nate Karp? My cousin?”
I look down at my groin. I’m wearing boxer shorts. My reproductive organs are not showing. So I reach out to shake his hand. Tal says something about pants again, but to punish her for her tone I make no motion to go put mine on. These underwear could have passed as basketball shorts in the seventies. Doctor J went out on the court like this all the time.
“So, some quick questions. Did you see the ghosts?”
I can just make out Tal next to him through the glow. She wants me to say “Yes.” She’s nodding “Yes” in slow deliberate motions, like that will influence me, and it does. I don’t want to hurt her.
“I saw something. Definitely,” I tell him. The last word I say with added gravitas to make up for the vagueness of the answer.
“Okay, so you say you saw something, too. Do you think it was ghosts?”
I look at Tal. She’s not moving her head anymore. She’s just staring at me, intently.
“No,” and in response to her eye-rolling I add, “look, I’m not going to sit here and lie. Come on. You can’t expect me to do that.” Her cousin peers at me, lifting his gaze from the viewfinder, then turns to Tal for cues.
“But you said you saw something. What do you think it was?”
“Crackheads. I’m pretty sure I saw crackheads. But I don’t know.” I throw in the last bit to be generous, but Tal gives up on me anyway and walks down the hall.
“Well, could they have been ghosts, do you think?” he asks. Tal stops walking. Turns. Looks at me. I look at her. Then I turn to her cousin.
“Sure, they were ghosts. Ghosts of who they once were. You could say that about half of the city of Philadelphia.”
19
I TRY FORMALITY, send an email. The header is Loudin Mansion Is for Sale. This is as straightforward with Roslyn as I can possibly be. The body of the message has bullet points and text in bold. The most important of these says the house has been appraised at $1.8 million if fully restored; another bullet offers the house for the generously discounted rate of $1.3 million, which is a steal based on the $310,000 in estimated repairs the property would need. My father bought the place for $800,000, but that was at auction, at risk, and he paid much more personally for the purchase later. I don’t reveal to her that the mortgage payments will drain the money from his cash accounts in months, a fact no one but Sirleaf and I know. Another sub-bullet point, under a category I term “Advantages of Buying Loudin,” it says, “$0 Moving Costs.” At the end of the email, back in sentence form, I state that I would like to discuss this further at her earliest convenience. I even provide a link to my calendar. I sign it with Sincerely, for I am nothing if I am not sincere in my urge to be rid of this place.
The writing, the proofreading, the balancing of directness over noncommittal pleasantry, it all takes an unexpectedly long time. I send it and head to the kitchen to find food scraps to sustain me for the next few hours, when my phone pings and Roslyn’s text comes through.
Come see me, honey.
There’s no way she could have read a word. I check the time stamp on the phone with the one on the laptop still in my hand. Two minutes. So maybe she could have read the whole thing, but there is no way in my understanding of reality that this happened.
Are you free in one hour? I text back to her.
Come to me now, my warrior child, she texts back to me so fast I think at first it’s an automated reply.
I put on a blazer before I go over there, because I am not a child, I am a man, a grown-ass one. A crisp shirt with a tag inside that says, DRY CLEAN ONLY. I take an extra ten minutes to iron my jeans as well, until their starched legs become my armor, for I am a warrior. I look at myself in the mirror. Then I take the whole thing off and put on a suit. And a tie.
—
“Look at you, all cleaned up and some such.”
“You look lovely as well.” She does. Roslyn looks more formal than I do, a full suit with pants, a silk shirt, hair pulled back in an aerodynamic slick perfect for lunging.
“You look like you mean business, Warren. So let’s do business. Come in.”
Her cottage-looking trailer is set off at the farthest end of the Halfie Heights, the Victorian country house of RVs. The roof has wooden octagon shingles, stained so you can still see the grain. The cedar siding of the little box is vertical, in the New England fashion. Past the intricate white latticework of the porch railings, I see she’s painted its ceiling haint blue. I move through her open door. The whole living room is a card table with two seats.
One, a Shaker chair, sits by a ladder leading up to a cubby loft of a bed. The other seat doubles as a windowsill, and when I crawl into it I have to be careful not to lean back and burst through the glass.
“Let us have coffee. Something about the aroma, it reminds me of professional efficiency. Don’t you agree?”
I don’t, but do. I can already smell it, and I don’t feel particularly efficient at the moment. I feel a bit confused. I’ve been largely avoiding this woman since she moved her people here. I’ve seen her, but rarely alone, and now we’re crowded into a room so tightly we’re like twins in a wooden womb.