unsettled him. It had come out that when P.A. called T’s mother, he had called from Larry’s phone. The police questioned Larry but released him. It still twisted Jori up inside. Why was his daddy with P.A. that night? Exactly two weeks after the funeral, a teacher snapped at Jori and he snapped back. He kicked the teacher in the shin and ran home. The police followed him there, the teacher having called them.
When Pana heard about it, he made Arleen a deal. If she left by Sunday, he’d return her rent and security deposit; if she didn’t, he would keep her money and evict her. Children didn’t shield families from eviction; they exposed them to it.2
Arleen took the deal, and Pana was nice enough to help her move. She pulled her dishes out of the clean cupboards and took her decorations off the walls. When Arleen had finished stuffing everything into trash bags and recycled boxes, Pana loaded his truck and drove Arleen’s things right back to storage.
Arleen had lost the pretty house and felt miserable about it.3 “Why it’s like I got a curse on me?” she wondered. “I can’t win for losing. No matter how hard I try.”
—
Arleen called Trisha and told her how angry the landlord was when he found out she had been going door-to-door asking for a joint. It really was the police visit that did her in, but years of hardship had taught Arleen how to ask for help, and one particularly effective method involved addressing a person’s guilt, framing things so that someone looked like a real bastard if he or she turned you down.4 “The least you can do is to help me if you’re the one that got me put out.”
Trisha told Arleen to come on over.
There was a new street memorial on Thirteenth Street. Jafaris noticed it. “Someone got shot there,” he said in his six-year-old voice. When they arrived at the old address, the boys ran up to Trisha’s apartment to see Little. But Little was dead. A car had ground him into the pavement. When Trisha told Jori, he tried to keep himself from crying. He paced around Trisha’s apartment and sleeve-attacked the snot sliding from his nose. He found a foam mannequin’s head. There was always random stuff like that lying around Trisha’s place. Jori knelt over the head and turned it faceup. He hit the face with a closed fist. He kept hitting it. Soon he was grunting, and his punches flew faster and harder and louder until Arleen and Trisha screamed at him to stop.
Trisha didn’t hide the fact that she had begun turning tricks. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. Men would just show up, and Trisha would take them into her bedroom, telling Arleen, “Look, I’m about to get us some cigs.” Trisha would emerge later with eight or ten dollars. Once, Jori walked in to find a man in bed with Trisha, his pants on the floor next to them and her lipstick smeared. In crowded houses, there were no separate spaces, and children quickly learned the ways of adults.
Trisha kept at it even after her new boyfriend moved in. Arleen sensed that he encouraged her to. She also figured it was the boyfriend who told Trisha to raise Arleen’s monthly rent to $150, from $60. The man went by a string of nicknames; Trisha called him Sunny. He was a thirty-year-old man who had just served five years for selling drugs. Skinny, with a smooth walk, he bragged about having nine children by five different women and joked about taking a spatula to Trisha. When Trisha got money from johns or her payee, Sunny would take it. If Trisha called after Sunny on the street, he would ignore her and later hiss, “Don’t call me ‘babe’ in public.” Trisha would ball up under the covers with her clothes on or sit on a windowsill and light a cigarette, its smoke coming alive in the breeze like a raging spirit that had only seconds to live.
Sunny’s parents and one of his sisters moved in soon after Arleen did. Trisha’s small one-bedroom apartment, which was in bad shape to begin with, began to buckle under the weight of eight people. The toilet broke and the kitchen sink started leaking. The leak got so bad that the floor filled with water that would ripple when Jori stepped in it. He spread old clothes on the ground to sop it up.
“It looks like
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