was rat-tat-tapping us on our shoulders.
My phone rang. I stepped in and grabbed the phone on the kitchen wall, clicked it on. Nobody was there.
Dana asked, “Who was that?”
I sat back down on the steps, told her it was a hang-up.
She went inside, picked up the phone on the wall in the kitchen. She said, “You really should get a cordless phone.”
“I will, if that one breaks,” I called out. “Checking your messages?”
“Doing a *69.”
That was the first time she’d done that to me. There was a difference in her. In us. A hardness that comes when trust has thinned. Both of us had flipped, become the other side of a dented coin. Some sort of a smile was on her face, but traces of her history were in her eyes.
Things had changed. No way to go back and be who we were before.
She said, “A recording said the call came from outside this area.”
Sounded like her skepticism wanted a stronger justification.
Dana held my hand. Gray skies darkened. Air was getting cooler.
She said, “Six times. I’ve moved fifteen times in my life. Six times in the last three years. Always packing and unpacking. Afraid to buy anything because I know I won’t be anywhere too long. I want to get somewhere and be stable.”
She told me that her landlord had sold the condo, and she’d been out all day trying to find another place to live.
“It’s easier finding somebody else a house than it is for me to find my own apartment. The areas that fit my budget are dangerous.”
“Move in with me.”
“No can do. Don’t think because we had sex that everything is settled. If we’re going to move on, we have a lot of issues we have to talk about.”
“Like?”
She sighed. “Since you’re telling me things, there is something that I did that you should know. You’d find out sooner or later.”
A steel hand clutched my heart, squeezed so tight. I waited to hear about her and another man, waited to hear her tale of infidelity.
In a counterfeit tone of reassurance I said, “I’m listening.”
“Part of your income will be going into someone else’s household. Money that would impact our quality of life. This wasn’t exactly what I had planned. That’s a whole new kinda life. I’m really into debt management, really want a quality life for myself, and that’s not just talking about money. But a lot of it is. If I sound too extreme, it’s because . . . well, okay, let me back up.”
“Okay.”
So much stress was in her body, its aroma rising from her pores. She confessed, “I’m having a hard time getting an apartment because everybody wants to do a credit check.”
She said that like I was supposed to understand, maybe ask something. I waited a second. “And?”
She asked, “Want some gum?”
I answered, “Sure.”
She opened a pack of Big Red, licked the stick top to bottom, then eased it into my mouth.
“I’m coming off a bankruptcy.”
“What bankruptcy?”
In a nervous tone she told me about her jacked-up credit, how she had run up her cards into the five-digit arena doing her promotions thing, started borrowing from Visa to pay MasterCard, from Discover to pay American Express. In the end, she’d gotten almost as much in cash advances to start over, filed Chapter 7 right after that, spent quite a bit of her nest egg when she bought her car, paid cash because with her credit rating they wanted to charge her damn near credit card rate, took real estate classes, got her career started. Not all in that order, but that was the sum of what she confessed to me. Something that would definitely make a difference if we married, would be in our faces every time we went to make a major purchase for the next seven years.
I wanted to know, “How did you get your condo?”
“Gerri cosigned. I don’t want to ask her to do that again. I want to get something on my own. People are a trip. Even when I offer them a few months’ rent up front, and I show them I’m working and show them a stub, my business cards, they look at me like I’m trying to get over.”
“Well, it’s not a forgiving world.”
“Not at all. Not at all. And these are black landlords.”
“You know we don’t trust each other.”
“With all these black-owned signs up everywhere I look, I would think that they would have some empathy for a sister.”
“Those signs are up so they won’t get