The Turner House by Angela Flournoy Page B

while. “The banks
are
being extra predatory right now. I saw it on the news. They know people can’t pay their mortgages, they knew it when they gave them the loans or let them refinance, but they refuse to renegotiate.”
    Troy nodded. He hadn’t intended to tell her about Cha-Cha and the basketball gear. It was a stupid, old, humiliating story, but it had done the job.

Outta the Fields
    Had his childhood been a happy one? The question felt irrelevant. Cha-Cha had made it through. He couldn’t recall being extraordinarily unhappy—he was clothed, fed, never molested, and never
beaten
beaten. Alice had posed the question to him earlier that morning, and now he posed it to his sister Francey in her Oak Park kitchen. He lay on his stomach underneath the kitchen sink, breathing in mildew and straining to snake the plug for her new alkaline water-filtration system to a power outlet in the adjacent cabinet. Francey’s husband, Richard, had electrocuted himself as a boy by jamming a fork into a socket, and now he avoided even minor electrical work. Every once in a while Francey would call Cha-Cha over to hook up a sound system, install a new light fixture, or fix the sprinklers, and during these visits Richard was nowhere to be found.
    â€œWhat a weird thing to ask,” Francey said. “You say this woman’s black, huh?”
    â€œDarker than you and me.”
    Plug finally secured, Cha-Cha rolled onto his back on the tile. Francey hovered over him. The track lighting on the ceiling made her close-cropped silver afro glow. With her cat-eye glasses and sparkly green earrings, she looked extraterrestrial.
    â€œThat’s really what goes on in therapy? They ask you to drag up a whole bunch of stuff from childhood? I thought that was just on TV. We’re so old! At some point that stuff doesn’t matter no more.”
    â€œI said . . . the same thing,” Cha-Cha said. He tried to catch his breath. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. “Unless something crazy had happened.”
    â€œAnd nothing crazy did,” Francey said.
    Cha-Cha sat up, reached his hand out, and Francey yanked him to his feet. At sixty-two years old she was surprisingly strong. Stronger than he was, Cha-Cha suspected.
    â€œUh-huh. But Alice kept going on about deep-seeded trauma, and how something old like that could be a reason I see this haint.”
    â€œWeird,” Francey said again. “We weren’t traumatized. Just poor.”
    â€œRight. Which means you’ve got holey socks, maybe, hand-me-downs.”
    â€œAnd you eat starchier food,” Francey said. “Lord, we ate so much greasy, nasty food growing up! I can’t hardly stand to think about it now. Just pork, pork, pork,
pork.
Mama cooked damn near
every
thing with pork.”
    â€œOh hell,” Cha-Cha said under his breath. Unhealthy food was Francey’s favorite hobbyhorse. There was nothing to do now but wait her out.
    â€œThat’s why when folks say they can’t understand how I’m a vegetarian I always say I got enough meat in my system to last me the rest of my life.”
    â€œMmm-hmm,” Cha-Cha mumbled. He opened Francey’s refrigerator and scanned the jugs of prune juice, carrot juice, and some sort of green juice that had separated into three distinct and disconcerting layers. If this is what it took to be as strong as she was at her age, Cha-Cha could live with being a little feeble. He settled on water.
    It had been warmer out this morning than the previous week’s visit. Alice took off her purple cardigan halfway through the session. Her arms looked soft but not flabby. She had some of the smoothest-looking skin Cha-Cha had seen on an adult—supple, with a sheen he attributed to some sort of body oil. She had a light splotch of skin about the size of a dime on the inside of her right biceps. Cha-Cha couldn’t stop staring at it as they talked. Either a