Chocolate for Lena

“Aren’t you going to smell that?” Lena asked as Orlando dropped a bottle of lotion into the basket.

“What?” he asked, confused.

“The lotion. You didn’t smell it.”

Orlando starred down at the plastic white bottle.

“How do you know you’ll like it?”

“Its on sale.” He pointed at the clearance tag on the shelf.

“But how do you know you’ll like it? It’s a big bottle.”

“Yeah, and its on sale. It’s a good deal.”

“But what if you put it on for the first time and you don’t like it?”

Orlando picked up the bottle, “its lotion?” he asked turning the bottle over in his hands.

“Yeah, Lando, its lotion,” Lena stated taking the bottle from him and opening the top, “but they don’t all smell the same.”

“I know that. But its lotion. Its on sale.”

Lena put the top back on the lotion and placed the bottle back into the basket. “Okay.”

Lena was not dating Orlando. She had been ‘not dating’ Orlando for around four years. He had recently floated the idea of her moving in. They were both paying too much in rent and he wanted to see her more.

“Can you grab me a box of tampons?” Lena asked as they passed the OBs. Thank God they’re back on the shelf, thought Lena. She was tired of rooting around in purses and the bottom of drawers for strays. Orlando flicked the nearest box into the basket using only the tip of his index finger.

“Did you grab a Super?” Lena stopped walking.

“What?”

“The tampons. Did you grab Supers?”

“I don’t know,” Orlando shrugged, looking away. Menstruation made him nervous.

“Did you look?”

“They’re blue, right? I grabbed the blue ones.”

“They’re all blue.” Lena puller the Variety pack out of the basket and replaced it with a box of Regulars. “I just need the regulars,” she stated to Orlando’s back. He was looking at his feet. I swear to God will you never grow up? Lena asked Orlando, in her head.

“Do we need anything else?” Orlando asked, looking down at the list Lena had written up in his apartment.

“I don’t think so, but we can look around some more.” It was hot outside, blistering, fry an egg on the pavement, melt lip balm in your car, kind of hot. Neither Orlando nor Lena had air conditioning at their apartments and so they were delaying leaving the cold glory of the store.

“Oh, I know,” cried Orlando in excitement and ran off.

Lena was flipping through a copy of Sunset when he returned. “They’re on sale,” he said proudly dropping two Cadbury Milk bars into the basket. “Chocolate. Its your favorite.” He grinned at her.

Lena leaned over and kissed him. They were smiling at each other when the clerk screamed.

“Oh my god a gun!”

Clide had never lived in Nashville, but he’d always dreamed of buying a little house there. His mom loved that home and garden station where they were always redoing people’s houses. Sometimes they did a house in Nashville and he’d watch with his mom and think how he’d do it differently. He wanted tile in the kitchen. Real blue tile. He didn’t care that his mom said it’d be dangerious, too slick when wet, people’d fall. He liked the idea of tile instead of linoleum, thought it sounded like something you’d hold on to.

There wasn’t much chance though, of getting that house. Clide had worked some odd jobs off and on. He was pretty good with plumbing. He’d fix things for neighbors. They’d pay him if they could, but he’d fix the problem anyway if they bought the supplies. His mom had tried to talk him into applying at a plumbing repair service. But he’d been afraid. He didn’t think they’d take him without a high school degree. He didn’t want to get laughed at for trying. He’d worked for a while at a plumbing supply warehouse. He’d liked it there, but some stuff got stolen and a coworker accused him. He’d denied it, but they’d fired him anyway. He had stolen the supplies, but not the money that was missing. Someone else had taken that.

Lena leapt behind Orlando, feminism be damned. A guy in a gray hoodie was pointing a gun at the blonde teenager at the cash register. His hand was shaking.

“The cash,” he yelled, pointing at the drawer with his other hand.

The cashier just stood there starring at him.

“The cash,” he repeated. This seemed to work better in the movies. Everyone was just standing around starring at him with their mouths open. No one was even crying. That was good though, Clide didn’t like it when women cried.

“The money,” he tried again, this time pointing with the gun. The movement of the gun seemed to wake the girl out of her paralysis.

She exhaled loudly and started to press keys on the cash register until she got frustrated and started hitting it.

“What are you doing?” Clide asked. “That’s not going to work. That’s not how it works? Are you new or something?”

“What?” asked the blonde teenager, now starting to cry.

“No. Crap, just move okay.” Clide slid behind the counter and opened the drawer. He shoved a bunch of twenties into his pockets and lifted the tray to see if there was anything larger. There wasn’t. His buddy had told him a grocery store was a great bust cause they’d be low on security and would be sure to have lots of large bills. Nick had been wrong before.

By this point the blonde was sobbing and leaning into Orlando’s shoulder.

“You,” Clide gestured at Orlando with the gun, “you got a phone on you?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. I’ve got a phone. It’s in my back pocket.”

“Okay, well give it to me.”

Orlando, pushed Lena aside just enough to grab his phone. She was clinging to him pretty hard, he thought he might have bruises in the morning.

“What’s this?” Clide looked down at Orlando’s five year old phone.

“It’s a phone.”

“This it?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong with it?”

“You don’t have like an Iphone or something?”

Orlando let out a brief burst of laughter. Lena pinched him and her mouth got very small.

“No,” he told Clide. “I don’t have an Iphone or something. I’ve got that.”

“You don’t get upgrades?” Clide asked, turning the phone over in his hand.

“Seriously?” Orlando looked at Clide in disbelief and then looked at Lena and the sobbing cashier.

“Yeah, yeah, right” Clide responded, getting the hint. “Anyway, um, don’t call the cops.” He clipped his shoulder on the automatic sliding glass door as he ran out. The door hadn’t opened as quickly as he anticipated.

“Oh my god.” Lena breathed slowly, still clinging to Orlando’s shoulder. “We’ve been robbed. Or… well… I guess, you’ve been robbed.”

“Don’t worry I already called the cops,” said a guy near the back of the dairy aisle. “They’re on their way.”

That night, Lena collapsed on Orlando’s futon. “I am too tired to move,” she stated into the cushion. They’d spent hours talking to cops and filing paperwork for Orlando’s crappy phone. The guy had been right, of course, Orlando’s phone really did need to be replaced.

“I don’t have anyone’s numbers,” Orlando had realized at the station. Lena couldn’t help really, they had some friends in common, but since they were not dating, they kept their social lives fairly separate.

“You’ll just post it on Facebook. People will send you their numbers.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Orlando broke open one of the chocolate bars in the kitchen while Lena lay face down in his living room. The store had given them their items for free, since they’d been so helpful with the police and Orlando had calmed down the teenaged cashier. Well, until her boyfriend arrived anyway, at which point she started crying so hysterically that the only thing anyone could understand was “I could have died” over and over again.

“You want anything?” he called to Lena.

“Have you thought about having a baby?” she called back.

Orlando chocked on his square of chocolate. The sweetness coated the roof of his mouth, “what?” he asked quietly, walking into the living room with the look of a man given a fatal diagnosis.

“A baby,” Lena repeated turning her face in his direction.

“That’s what I thought you said. A baby?”

“Yeah. A baby?”

“Like a human baby?”

Lena stared at him without answering.

“What? It’s a legitimate question.”

“No” Lena sighed, pushing herself into a sitting position, “its not.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know where this is coming from.”

“It coming from my uterus.”

“What?” Orlando started, starring at her lower abdomen. “Um, wait are you?” his voice trailed off.

Lena threw her hands over her stomach. “No, no, what? No. We bought tampons.”

“I don’t know. What is going on? What is wrong with today? I got robbed. We are not having this conversation. Not today.”

“You didn’t seem that upset earlier.”

“Earlier?”

“At the police station.”

“About the baby? I didn’t know anything about a baby at the police station.”

“What? No,” Lena shook her head slowly. “About the robbery. You didn’t seem that upset. Are you pretending.? To get out of this conversation?”

Orlando sat on the floor, “I would, I mean, I would pretend to get out of this conversation, but no. I’m not pretending now that I’m upset. I was pretending then that I wasn’t.”

“What?” Lena crawled off the futon and over toward Orlando on the floor.

“There was some guy, pointing a gun at you. I was upset. Of course I was. But what was I going to do?”

“You didn’t seem upset.”

“What was I going to do? Whitney was sobbing…”

“Whitney?”

“The girl. The cashier, her name is Whitney. Anyway she was scared shitless, and she was sobbing and you were there and the dumb fuck had a gun. What, I’m gonna start crying or something?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anyway, I’m not pretending. But, Lena, a baby? You want to have a baby?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“With me?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.”

“But you decided to think about it now. Today?”

“I don’t know. That guy, he had a gun pointed at you. I… I mean… I think we should have a baby. Maybe. Or at least talk about it.”

“Not today.”

“Okay, not today, but still.”

“Right.” Orlando pulled Lena to him and wrapped his arms around her. He rested his chin on top of her head. “We’ll talk about it later.”

A Short Sale

De looked down at her neatly gnarled hands. They hadn’t gone the way of her friends’ hands, haphazardly curled and swollen along long forgotten fault lines. De’s hands had collapsed around themselves with a graceful symmetry, like perfectly balanced tree roots. This symmetry made them none the less useless sometimes, however. Beauty had not saved her stemware nor opened her jam jars. It was best not to be vain over useless things, best not to be vain at all, De was quick to reprimand herself.

Flexing her fingers to judge their grip, De thought about the agent. He was coming again today. He would arrive, as always, scurrying nervously up the walk in his ill fitting suit. De would, as always, greet him with warm coffee and a burning loathing. Never mind that it wasn’t this man’s fault that she and Walter had mortgaged the house thrice over, nor that Walter had up and died on her before they even nearly paid back the bank. This man was a scavenger. He fed off the bones of old ladies and single mothers.

The house had never been much in comparison to the faux mansions middle class couples were buying up on the outskirts of the city. Or were they, De wondered, still buying those places? Still middle class couples? She and Agnes, her best friend, had gone out to tour one of the houses when the subdivisions first went up.

“Can you believe this?” Agnes had gasped when they’d entered the foyer.

De had given her friend the ‘be cool’ look. They were both pretending they could afford this place and the woman showing the house was pretending that she did not know any different. A lot of the older ladies from town had come through for a good gawk and a bit of make believe.

“Your rug would look lovely in this room,” De offered in her best Miss Georgia voice as she meandered into the first living room. The house had four, though of course the company building the places had a different word for each room.

“You put a couch in here?” asked Agnes.

“If you like,” answered the polite smiling young woman, clutching a leather folder and teetering in what De assumed must be very trendy heels.

“But, you put a couch in here,” Agnes countered almost accusingly in the middle of the fourth living room, which was termed the “entertainment room” on the little printed map of the house that the women had been given upon their arrival.

“Well, yes. This is a reclining seating unit. It is really comfortable and great for watching movies on this built in entertainment center.” The woman pressed a button on a remote she had in her folder and a screen rolled down from the ceiling. “The entertainment center is one of the optional upgrades listed in the informational packet.”

“Hm,” responded Agnes.

De’s house certainly did not have an “entertainment room” or optional upgrades. It had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and one, yes one, living room. Though this had never stopped her and Walter from entertaining.

“No granite counter tops?” the agent had questioned on his first visit.

“No” De had answered.

“Hardwood floors?” he continued without conviction.

“Under the carpeting.”

He looked up hopefully.

“In some rooms,” De rushed to add, “but its not in very good condition. That’s why we got the carpets.”

The agent wrote himself a note.

“How old’s the roof?”

“I don’t know,” De admitted. That had been Walter’s job, taking care of the maintenance of the house, managing the paperwork. They had discussed it of course. Did they need to replace the roofing? All of it of just patches? What would it cost? Could Walter do it himself on a dry day? But she honestly couldn’t remember if this was eight years ago or twelve. She knew they’d done something to the roof, but the extent of it escaped her.

She sensed the agent’s frustration and bafflement, but how could she explain the way the years leached together. Forty years of marriage. Thirty three years in this house. There were no unfrayed edges left.

De shivered as a whip of late November breeze hit her. She’d miss this porch, she thought. She and Agnes had sat here drinking tea and watching their collective children play on summer evenings. She and Walter had rocked nights on the two seater rocker that they had saved for and carefully picked out. Solid maple and carved with branches. “Solid like our marriage,” Walt had said, “nothing but the best for my baby.” Nothing you couldn’t brag about.

Forty years of marriage doesn’t go down easy. De hadn’t know that until she was smack in the middle of it. No one told her. No one said it would be so hard to be so happy. They were, happy. Happier than they were angry, sad, lonely, or anything else. This made their marriage a success by any yardstick, but that didn’t mean that De hadn’t been bone weary by the end. She had not realized how tired she was until she came home from the hospital that night Walter had died. She unlocked the door, dropped her purse, weighed down with his personal belongings that she ‘might want to hang onto,’ on the threshold. She couldn’t summon the energy to walk through the open, empty, doorway. She’d slept on the porch that first night. Rocked on the rocker. Agnes had come by next morning with her husband, still living and capable of coming by, and gotten De to bed. De had not know a body could be that tired.

She was only fifteen the first time she saw Walter. She and her girlfriends were hanging around the community pool willing the boys to admire them. Walter had walked by on the other side of the chain fence, decked out in blue jeans, collard shirt, and a bright red jacket with the collar up. Up, as though it weren’t over 90 degrees in the shade. Up, as though he couldn’t be touched. Touched by mere reality. De wanted to fall at his feet, so she did what any self respecting fifteen year old girl would do. She ignored him.

“Hey ladies,” Walter’s cousin called to De and her friends. “It sure is hot today.”

The girls eyed each other and giggled as they turned away.

“I’m John, this is my cousin Walter. We’re new in town,” he continued undeterred. “Walter, have you ever seen prettier girls in your life?” John asked dramatically, whistling and widening his eyes like an actor he’d seen in a movie. Walter was annoyed.

“Yeah, great. John, I’ve got to go. If I’m late my first day they’ll can me.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’re going. Hey ladies, you hear, my cousin here has a job. Do your boyfriends have jobs? I bet we could take you to see a movie on Friday, if you’re interested,” John said leaning closer to De’s half turned back.

“Johnny, come on,” Walter hissed.

“Being new and all, we seem to have gotten ourselves a little lost,” John continued trying out his smooth voice on De’s friend Peggie. “Do you know how we could get to Sylvia’s Market?”

“You work there?” De asked Walter, as though she could not care less, but was too well bred no to ask. Her heart had begun to race standing so close to him.

“Um, yeah, well, I will if this guy doesn’t get me fired.”

“You’re real close,” she said, nodding east with her chin. “You could walk from here,” De hesitated. “Want me to show you?”

“Oh, sure,” Walter replied, a little taken aback.

“K. Let me get my skirt and things. Just a sec.” De wanted to vomit. She’d never been so bold with a boy in her life. Her mother would be horrified. But it had worked, hadn’t it? Forty years of marriage all because she’d ignored nearly everything her mother had ever taught her about men.

“You were sassy,” Walter told her about a week before he died. “I liked it. You weren’t like the others, you played me, made me work to please you.”

De’d laughed. “Work? I loved you from the moment I saw you. You had no work to do.”

“Yeah,” Walter smiled slyly, “but I didn’t learn that till later.”

He was late. The agent. He was always a little late, but what did that matter if he did his job, right? And he did, do his job. You wouldn’t know from the suit, but the man could hustle. De supposed that was a genetic requirement in a hyena. He had shown up, taken one look at her house and said, “Yeah, we can sell it. The bank’ll have to take a bit of a hit, but they’ll take it. Better than another foreclosure.” He had added this last part as though they were sharing a sage secret. As though he weren’t laying bare her shame.

“Okay,” was all De could bring herself to say.

Her son in law had brought up selling the house, taught her about short sales, brought the agent around.

“De,” he’d never called her Mom the way other son in laws might, “you can’t handle this place. The monthly payments are insane. I mean, for what its worth, now, in this market, you just can’t be paying this much. And you’ll never pay it off... on your own? I mean if Walter had left you something, maybe you could hang on to it. But as it is, it just seems insane. And, I mean, we love you, but Pat and I just aren’t in a position to help you right now. And really,” he rambled on emotively “wouldn’t you be happier in a smaller place? A one bedroom? You could rent a place near us, so much more convenient. So much less to clean.”

He’d meant well. De kept telling herself that. They had gathered around her kitchen table, the one she had raised four children at. Sunday dinners, homework, birthday cakes, and decline.

“Should we vote?” asked Patti, De and Walter’s second daughter. Veronica, the eldest would never have suggested such a thing, but she wasn’t there that day.

“Vote?” baulked her husband, “Why? This isn’t an option. She has to do this.”

Patti had nodded at her mother the way she might at a young child. De wondered if she hadn’t given Patti enough attention as a child, enough encouragement. How had she raised a child who would so easily give up to a husband? But then in the end she’d given up to her son in law as well. It had seemed easier, and if she was honest, more practical. And maybe less to clean wasn’t such a bad idea, though the amount of cleaning hadn’t seem difficult since the children had moved out. Children, lovely creatures that they are, really did make a mess of things.

That had been three months ago. Smelling the coffee percolating and pulling out the slightly chipped mugs from the cupboard, De wondered if short sale was the right phrase. Should a short sale take three months? The agent had posted the house on Craig’s List, on Youtube, on real estate web sites, and such. They’d taken pictures and people had come by and commented on the color of the walls and the height of the grass. De hadn’t started looking for a one bedroom apartment yet.

“We’ve got an offer!” the agent said, rushing up the walk as De walked out with the coffee tray.

“What?”

“An offer. On the house. We’ve got one. It is what we asked for, so the bank will look it over. They’ve got thirty days, but it shouldn’t be a problem. There’ll be an inspection, but that should be fine too. Barring anything unexpected, De, your house is sold.” De didn’t like that her daughter’s husband and this man called her by the same name, even if it was her name. She felt it gave the agent a familiarity that she didn’t want him to have.

“Its good news,” he said, eyeing her over the mug’s rim as he drank down some coffee.

“Yes,” she paused. “Yes, yes, it is. I know.”

“You’re in shock, that’s okay. Normal. Anyway, I’ll get things started with the bank and call you in a couple days with more information. I just wanted to bring you the good news in person.”

“Yes. Great. Thank you.”

De sat at the kitchen table for a long time, watching her cup of coffee grow cold. Her house. Gone, or would be, could be in thirty days or so. A month to pack up a life. She hadn’t really prepared. She’d thought she was ready, or maybe didn’t really think about what getting ready would entail, didn’t really think about what ‘ready’ meant. Where would she go? An apartment? De had never lived in an apartment. Never. She moved from her parent’s house to a small house she and Walter had rented to this house. She hadn’t thought about it before, but could she live in an apartment? How different would it be? She didn’t know, couldn't quite fathom.

De rested her face in her hands. They were sore today, the wind did bite a little and settle in her joints. She rubbed the back of her neck. She needed to get out of the house. She needed perspective.

De got into the car and started the engine. She didn’t drive much, never had. She wasn’t a bad driver, but Walter had enjoyed driving, had enjoyed driving his wife and kids around. De didn’t mind, but she enjoyed Walter’s pleasure more than she enjoyed driving herself. After he died, she didn’t take the care out for a month. She would wait until one of her kids came by to run errands, or walk to the market, or take the bus.

“Mom, you have a car, why don’t you just use it? Are you worried about your eye sight or something?” Kyle, her youngest, had asked.

“My eyesight? There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight?”

“Then what’s your problem?”

She hadn’t thought of an answer that she thought he would understand, so she just started driving herself around.

She let the car rumble for a minute before backing out of the driveway. The radio murmured quietly in the background as the world went dusky around the edges of her headlights. She had driven through the gates of the middle class couple faux mansion subdivision, before she realized where she was going.

There were street lights on, but no house lights, no tv screens blinking. So they hadn’t sold the houses after all, De realized. The houses had begun to degrade through neglect and mistreatment. There were swirls of scarlet paint across the facades “Niko was here”, “Fuck you Susie!”, “Go to Hell” and other things she couldn’t make out. There were No Trespassing signs everywhere, which were obviously not doing much good. De pulled her car up in front of the house she and Agnes had toured. This was supposed to be a wonderland. An island of middle class opulence to protect one from the cares, demands, and smells of the rest of the word. A way to blindly ostracize oneself. “Optional upgrades” De sighed shaking her head. It was sad, but they really had been such useless things.

A security car pulled up behind her. “Ma'am, this is private property,” the uniformed young man said with as much authority as he could muster as he walked up next to her driver's side window.

“Oh, I know. I’m sorry, I just got a little lost.”