Unburying Hope Page 4

  “I think there’s a hole in your heart,” Frank said.

  Celeste shook her head. “I doubt it. What if he’d been a loser? My life was fine.”

  “You might not have been so poor if your mom had had two incomes.”

  Celeste took in a slow breath. “She had two or three incomes and it was never enough. Is that what fathers are good for? Money?”

  “No. They look you in the eye and tell you they’re proud of you. They see you, they give you the feeling that you matter.”

  “My mother tried to do that.”

  “She sounds like she was amazing, always working a couple jobs to take care of you. I’m just saying maybe having a father would have gotten you out of this funk a long time ago.”

  “Well, no one showed up to do the job.”

  “Then you can father yourself.” Frank leaned over and put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “What?”

  “My dad always said that part of growing up is turning on your own inner radio to hear yourself say the mother or father things. He said he was there to say it enough times until you started saying it to yourself. So you can father yourself, get yourself moving. You keep clipping pictures of cute Victorian houses, let’s move somewhere warm and get better jobs. We might just have our asses handed to us on a platter any day now with pink slips, so we need an escape plan. Let’s get you out of here before the cops find you tagging some building, before they put you in jail with the riffraff.”

  Celeste rubbed the back of her neck. A few years after her mother had died, she’d spent four frozen January weekends indoors, wrapped in an electric blanket, watching marathons of TV movies with dreamy fathers who played basketball with their daughters, sat them down for talks about how boys should treat them, told them they could be anything they wanted to in life. She imagined turning on a radio in her heart with the deep voice of one of those men.

  Chapter Seven

  The giddiness from the shopping had worn off within an hour of returning to work, and it was helpful that today’s customers were all meek. She didn’t have to pay much attention to their stories.

  Except for him.

  He unexpectedly sauntered in, hugging the left wall near her desk, tanned with piercing blue eyes, grown out tousled hair covered the dent in his forehead.

  When he first came in, months back, he’d had a military buzzed haircut, the hardest muscles she’d ever seen and he would have been handsome except for the visible dent in his forehead above his left eye. When she glanced at it, he leaned in and mumbled that it was from an unexploded rocket. He’d been on patrol in Afghanistan, he’d said, his third or fourth deployment, she couldn’t remember. Lucky it hadn’t exploded when it hit him, he’d said, or he’d be soaked into the desert sands, thousands of miles from home. She’d once seen an old man at the rooming house she grew up in, a German WWII vet with a similar dent from a grenade that hadn’t gone off.

  He was wearing a black t-shirt and his usual washed-out camouflage pants with tennis shoes. He had stopped wearing his camel colored hiking boots, she noticed.

  He’d come through the double doors a few times over the last few months, hovering at the back wall, cocking his head left and right, waiting until there were very few people in the lobby. He stood until her line lightened and she’d fidget, keeping her eyes either downward or fixed on the hapless customer in front of her, engaging them more than usual, stalling, ‘What about your cable, do you still have cable?, challenging them about other bills that they’d put first.

  He was still there, only four paces from her window when she looked above old Mrs. Tensin’s head. He was staring right at her, a glint in his eye, a shy grin on his face, bright white teeth. She wondered how he could be so well kept and yet need to beg to have his monthly cell phone bill extended, month in and month out.

  Sure, good-looking men came in occasionally. Frank would tap his pocketknife on the counter three times real fast when one walked in, and he’d time his customer interactions like a Swiss watch to be the available teller when the handsome gay man hit the front of the line. If he’d only work as hard for the little old ladies, Jeannie joked, he’d have the desserts that the elder customers brought to her to sway her to waive fees. But Frank didn’t want chocolate ginger cookies in a bag wedged into the payment drawer. He wanted a date. And he was usually on target. Sometimes the customer was at the employee entrance to pick him up at the end of the workday.

  Celeste always left work alone. A quick stop at the grocery store on the way home, a few cocktails while she made dinner, then she’d either go out to a bar to listen to jazz or she’d stay in, clipping home interior photos from Coastal home magazines or reading her tropical romance novels until the words became blurry and the bottle was too hard to pour.

  But this guy. She knew he was flirting, in the way he quietly tapped on the glass right near her face, the way he awkwardly smoothed in towards the squawk box and lowered his voice, not out of shame but to force her closer to hear him. His tentative ‘darlin’s, his preposterous stories, she’d blush, sputter a little, doodle on the deposit slip he couldn’t see. She’d take his cash through the little hole and then tap on the keyboard, bypassing the overdue fees and restoral charges. He must have known he had her, and to seal the deal, he’d put one hand up on the glass, cajoling her to put hers up too for a high five. He wouldn’t leave until she’d do it, and she could always feel Frank staring at her, his eyebrows raised with a smirk, so she’d raise her hand and slap the glass quickly, then shuffle her papers and yell, ‘Next!’

  He stood at the window, finally. Her heart raced and she stared at his right ear, it stuck out a bit from his brown, wavy hair.

  “Hi, Sugar.’

  “Hey, Eddie.”

  He pushed several twenties through the hole, “Didn’t get my bill last month.”

  She felt her lips go numb, her eyes sneaking full frontal peeks at his freckled cheekbones; they had the dusky burn of too much sun. She tapped on her keyboard, embarrassed. “What’s the phone number?”

  “Well, if you’d ever call me, you’d know.” He stood there nervously, still holding the ends of the $20 bills.

  “I don’t remember, sorry, Eddie.”

  He rattled off his number and she entered it into the computer. The screen lit up and she read the prompts. She read the ‘Paid To’ date, it was 57 days ago.

  “You’re looking good.” He leaned into the window and pointed, “Your hair is getting longer.”

  Eddie wasn’t handsome in an angular way, he wasn’t good looking in a way that made you snap your head in surprise as you tried to get a second and third unobtrusive glimpse. But he did have the endearing soft facial features of the friendly kid who’d swung next to you on the playground structure in third grade. He had an unarchitectural face, with flush cheeks, light brown eyebrows, gray blue eyes, a nose that was straight with a ski jump at the end of it. But his lips. They looked infinitely kissable, she thought, pillows that stretched from the middle of one cheek to the other, and as much as he tried to coax her out of her uncharacteristic silence, she wanted to coax a warm smile out of those lips, to see those eyes light up.

  He didn’t smile often though. Frank was right. He looked like an old-movie cold war spy who thought the enemy was everywhere. His half grin melted her, but it was always taut with an unspoken worry about something she could not see, some memory playing in the back of his mind that kept the grin from settling in. The heaviness of his inner life locked his facial features, as though a little boy, full of his life joy, had had his greatest dreams stomped into a thousand shards. There was a terrible sense, Frank said, that Eddie had been disconnected from any sense that he was safe.

  Frank, who had the experience of many short term relationships, had months ago blocked Celeste from her initial instinct, which was to jump into Eddie’s life with the intent to surround him with thoughtfulness, stability, kindness. Safety.

  “I do see how he comes in here, proba
bly more to practice getting along with people and to see you than to actually keep his phone going,” Frank said, but he always repeated his mantra, “You can’t fix someone, you can only fix yourself.”

  So time passed with intermittent moments within which Eddie stood on the other side of the glass, his boyish face scanning the office in jittery bursts of movement until he faced her. His glistening eyes would soften, his lips would part and embarrassment hijacked the gray in his cheeks, flooding them with rosy warmth.

  Emboldened by her similarly interested nervousness, he’d come out of his war-shocked shell. His eyes focused on her and Celeste felt, for the first time in her life, seen, deeply seen by a man.

  The flirting used to be subtle, airy. He’d lean in and tell her he’d take her out to dinner on the fees she waived for him, but the teasing always stopped short of an actual date. It felt like he couldn’t yet cross some unseen emotional barrier to let her be close, that he needed the glass barrier as a protection.

  Then more time passed between his visits, so much time that she couldn’t easily waive fees and she stopped turning the screen so he could see it. He was losing his manly heft, his face was hollowing out and he didn’t walk in with the same primal hunting skills he once used. He seemed haunted now.

  Part of her sometimes wished Frank would take him, but the flirting still aroused her and whenever he walked in the double doors, she shifted forward in her seat, speeding up all her customers until the heated moment that he sidled up in front of her and spoke with his amber gravelly voice, and, like today, she’d touch the money he placed in front of her and for a moment they were almost in physical contact and he’d tug the bills back towards himself, her heart would leap into her throat and he’d stare at her, she’d focus on the cloudy blue of his eyes, the raised eyebrows above and, finally, his tentative laugh would break the moment, he’d let go of the bills, tap on the counter between them, put his hand up for the high five that she was now prepared for, tell her ‘Keep my number and call this time”, and saunter out the double doors, his hair glinting in the sunlight, like rays on the dark Detroit river on too-sunny days.

  Moments would pass before she felt the presence of another customer and she’d tear her eyes from the outside doors to look down at the bills in her hands. She counted the $20 bills and rang in his payment, waiving the reinstatement fees, hitting the ‘special circumstances’ key that bypassed the need for a supervisor’s approval.

  Always, always it seemed that right behind him stood a mother with obnoxious fighting kids. A brat would whine, the mother would lift the worst offender up onto the counter, putting the dirty diaper up against the plexiglas and Celeste would wave her hands angrily, ‘Kid OFF, no kids on the counter!” until the mother would pull the toddler to her hip, torn between glaring at Celeste, hushing her now-sobbing child and the need to get her damn phone back on.

  Frank would laugh from his desk a few feet away, and Celeste would huff until the warmth of her hand from his plexiglas connection was gone. Back to counting piles of small bills, playing God with penalties and restoral fees until the line lightened and she could daydream about a life she’d never had but could slip into for five minutes, with warm air, tropical breezes blowing through the open windows of a shingled home, the view of moonlight over an ocean and the love of a good, strong man.

  Later, she’d sneak with Frank to the sides of City Hall, knowing that the perimeter was unguarded by beat cops that had been laid off years ago. She’d pull out her new larger stencil, unfold it and use the platinum spray paint she’d found in an abandoned auto manufacturing plant she’d skulked through with Frank. She’d spray paint the logo of the betraying car company that off-shored jobs for the electric car, and then pull out her red can of paint and spray paint blood droplets over the HOPE stencil, the stencil that had made her an underground icon, the voice of faith in a broken down, beaten place. Time to say that it was nearly over for her beloved home city. Detroit was bled too much; the leeches had been left on too long like medieval medicine she’d learned about in middle school history class. The electric car was just the very last symbol of hope for Detroit, for workers crushed by management, for management crushed by bankers.

  She would spray as many of the symbol onto the outside walls as she could without being seen. Frank would stand at the corner under the flickering streetlight that had almost been turned off when Detroit threatened to declare bankruptcy during the summer. In the autumn early evening darkness, there would be no activity on the streets anyway. The city was that far gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Celeste unlocked the upper lock then put the key into the door lock and pushed the door open over the crusty shag carpeting. The landlord had promised in year one that he’d replace the beige shag, but he avoided her during the winter months when the weather stripping failed and the snow and salt drifted into her ground floor doorstep from the boulevard around the corner.

  She reached down for her mail, four interior design magazines with photos of welcoming living rooms on their covers. She piled them in order of what she liked, the warm shoreline cottages on top, the coastal houses in the middle, the tropical condos on the bottom.

  She unpacked the paint cans and stencils and tucked them behind her raincoat in the front closet.

  In her bedroom, she carefully pulled the new lingerie from the bag she’d brought from the store, hanging her new clothes gingerly on hangers that had easily shirked their elder squatters, including the heavy navy sweater Frank had delighted in removing. Her closet had gone from a monochrome of night colors to a vibrant bouquet of jewel tones, from worn down fabrics to new sheens that made it look lit from within. She half closed her closet door, noticing that it still shone as though it was Aladdin’s cave, with the glint of the hidden treasures still visible from around the corner.

  Back in the kitchen, she dropped her purse on the small dinette table and pulled limes from the canvas sack on the counter, cutting them in half, squeezing their juice into a small mug with a photo transfer of a beach with a palm tree on it. She cracked open the new dark rum bottle and poured; the amber alcohol dulled the lime’s tartness. A few ounces of light rum, then Triple Sec and Grenadine and her Mai Tai was complete, the tangiest tropical cocktail she could remember from the days when her mother was bright and vibrant and fixed herself her one drink on Sunday after church services.

  She sat at the table, rifling through her purse for her cell phone while turning on the small computer that sat at one end. Her screensaver flashed for a moment, two champagne glasses on a remote beach, then two silhouettes in the sunset. She scraped a bit of old pasta sauce off the screen and determined not to eat dinner again with the screen facing her. She went first to her bank’s website and checked her account. The rent check had cleared, the auto-transfer of 30% of her paycheck into savings had gone through and she still had plenty of money left over after deducting what she’d spent on her debit card for her new clothes.

  She had lived frugally for her whole life. Her mother never said why her father had left, but Celeste grew up in a boarding house with her mother, going to school and coming home by herself while her mother worked jobs that changed every few years with the closing of factories.

  As a child, Celeste had eaten dinner with the elderly lady across the hall who babysat her in her own small studio apartment, sharing the cooked contents of a can of refried beans with cheese melted on top in two small bowls.

  The old lady’s hands and face were like used brown paper, crinkled and dried out. She did not like when Celeste moved on her small portion of the threadbare chenille sofa cushion. She’d yelp in pain and grab her hips and Celeste would freeze, closing her eyes to the anger. The only time Celeste had to play and dance was from 3:45 after getting home from the meandering walk from the bus stop and 5:05 when she went to sit for four hours with the old lady. She brought her backpack and could put her books on the coffee table once but the old lady grimaced and moaned when she leaned forward
and back shuffling her notebooks as she did her homework.

  Later each evening, her mother would come home, tapping gently on the door. She’d take Celeste’s hand, lead her back to wash her face and brush her teeth before Celeste crawled into the wall side of the small bed they shared.

  When she was 17, her mother left one evening for work and didn’t come home the next day. The day shift at the factory didn’t find her body until nearly noon. She’d died of a heart attack and slumped against a rarely used machine in a ball bearings plant.

  Two women in hairnets were sitting against the hallway wall in the rooming house, waiting across from her front door when Celeste wandered in after school. They’d stood quickly and put their hands all over Celeste’s shoulders, offering condolences, telling fragments of details between their tears. She’d gone quickly, the coroner had said. They handed her the keys and wallet that had been in her mother’s uniform jacket and held out a box that contained everything from her mother’s locker. They said that her mother had worked as though it were a calling, not a job. That the job was too small for her spirit.

  The funeral was tasteful, the church empty. A few of her mother’s coworkers prayed in the back pews, and her aunt came to rifle through her mother’s sweater drawer, extracting two to take home, the least frayed. She said it was as remembrance, but Celeste could feel there was an unresolved rivalry that was now being completed by the theft of her mother’s best things.

  Her aunt left her to live in the boarding house after seeing her routine with the now nearly immobile old lady, paying two years of rent with the bit of money they’d found hidden away in her mother’s small bank account so that Celeste could graduate and go to community college without worrying about being homeless.