Unburying Hope (5 page)

She wanted the sweater, it felt so light on
her skin.
 
She looked again at the
price tag and grimaced.
 
“Okay,
just this one thing, though.
 
And
the underwear.
 
And the
camisole.”
 
She couldn’t bring
herself to take off the new sexy bra and underpants.

“It’s not a thing, it’s a work of art.”
 
He winked at her.

She put on the black camisole and tenderly
pulled the green cashmere sweater back on.
 
She smiled, clutched her old sweater to her heart, then put
it in her purse.
 

They grabbed a few other pieces off two sale
racks on the back wall, dresses, above-the-knee skirts, two boxes of mid-heeled
shoes and a pair of boots.
 
They
all added up to much less than the cost of the green sweater.
 
She paid for her fragile pile, letting
the saleswoman reach under her clothes for the tags for the lingerie she had
on, then she let her snip the tags off the sweater so that she could scan them.
 

She knew that Frank could sense her
schizophrenic response, it was fine to put them on here in the store.
 
But could she wear them out on the
bland streets where half the stores had ‘For Lease’ signs in the window?
 
There was a huge difference between
walking in the illusion of Detroit in car commercials where chrome shone and
doormen stood in gilded uniforms, and the reality of Detroit, as she knew
it.
 
The grit that hung in the air
from a demolished overpass nearby might coat the soft threads of this sweater.

Chapter
Six

“How’d you survive this long alone here in
Detroit”, Frank asked, as they walked back to the office for the afternoon
shift.
 

“I grew up here.”

“You don’t have any family around?”

“Nope, I’ve told you that it’s just me.”

“Really?
 
Why are you so enraged, then?
 
I mean, I stand with you, but I thought you were protesting for your
family.”

“I watched so many people around me lose
everything my mom worked for.
 
The
worst slap for me was losing the big be-all, end-all electric car factory from
Hamtramck.
 
It just made me so mad
that all those workers hung on year after year through the bailout, trusting
that the car companies would keep them with them in the lifeboat if the
government saved them.
 
But as soon
as the car companies got their millions, they off-shored everything.
 
The one hope we had was that they’d do
something dramatic to get us off our oil addiction and the electric car was a
dream come true, good old American ingenuity.
 
And they started making it in Hamtramck, and I was only
painting the HOPE stencil everywhere.
 
I had hope.”

“This place has gone to hell, it’s clear, and
no one around the country seems to care,” Frank said.
 
“I saw the steam coming out of your ears when they said they
were moving that factory to China.”

“I’ve got nothing against the Chinese, goddamn
it,” Celeste cursed.
 
“But the
American guys, our guys, they utterly betrayed us.
 
They gutted us and took American dollars and are going to
make the damn electric car in China.
 
China!
 
Detroit doesn’t stand
a chance if the bankers robbed us blind, then the car companies kick our hearts
in.”

“You don’t have any aunts and uncles?
 
What about your dad?”
 
Frank reached out to hold her
hand.
 
“Come away with me, my dear,
we’ll move somewhere that’s not dying.

“I never knew him and, nope, my mom’s all I
had.”

“Wow, I’m the middle of five kids,” Frank
said.
 
“I grew up in chaos.
 
I bet you want to have a million
kids.
 
NOT. HAHAHA,” Frank laughed.

Celeste nodded facetiously, “Sure, a whole
slew of them, the little wet-nosed criers.”

“Are you lonely?
 
I mean, were you lonely before me?”

“No.
 
I’m happy alone,” she said.

“But you’ve been working here in this dead
zone, helping people you’d never connect with outside of the office.
 
And you’ve been sitting in this cubicle
for how many years?
 
I’ve been here
a few months and it’s driving me insane.
 
It’s drab from morning until they lock the door behind us at closing
time.
 
Except for you, that
is.
 
I probably would have quit and
moved back home if you hadn’t been a desk away.”

“My mom walked in here a few times before she
died, when GM got bailed out and dropped a lot of her union health
insurance.
 
Her medical bills were
too high and she couldn’t pay our living expenses.
 
She’d go in and they’d give her a payment plan.
 
She’d go to the water company, the
electric company.
 
I’m used to
these people.”

“Well, you have a bigger heart than I do.
 
You are a good daughter, to work there.”

“How is that related?” Celeste asked.

“You must have wanted to be kind to people
like your mother.”

Celeste shook her head warily.
 
“That’s not why I work there.”

“Why then, Miss ‘I Dress Like My Mother’?”

“I do not dress like my mother,” Celeste
gasped, realizing that yes, indeed, her old skirts and unshaped tops were so
similar to her mother’s wardrobe that she might as well have kept and worn her
mother’s clothes.
 
Which she hadn’t.
 
She’d given them away a year or two
after her mother died, after her scent had lifted from the fibers.
 
Celeste was thoughtful, “I’ve changed a
lot these last couple months.”

“Since I came,” Frank preened.

“Yes, it’s all because of you.
 
I buy cases of spray paint and get
cobwebs all over my hair walking through deserted doorways because you landed
at the cubicle next to mine,” Celeste said in a silly voice, patting his
chest.
 
“No, I think it was time
for me to wake up.
 
First, I got
this job to pay my bills.
 
It’s
been so strange for me to be able to afford things that my mom struggled
with.
 
I never pay a bill late and
I don’t have credit cards.
 
If I
can’t pay cash, I don’t need it.”

“You have poverty consciousness.”

Celeste cringed as though Frank’s words had
slapped her.
 

“No offense,” he said, “but you live like you
are utterly flat broke.
 
And you
are not.”

“No.
 
I’m not.
 
I’m good at
saving.”

“I know.
 
It’s crazy.
 
You could buy a
house.
 
And pay all cash.”

“My money is in the bank, though.
 
Banks.”

“Banks?
 
No mattresses?”

“Nah, I’m the princess and the pea,” she
said.
 
“But I’ve put some money in
a Canadian bank in case the US economy goes to hell, which by the way, it
has.”
 
She crinkled her brow.

“Smart,” Frank said.
 
“I’ve moved most of my savings to a credit union.
 
I only keep two months of mortgage
payments in the bank.
 
But I’ve
also hidden some cash, just in case the crazy Michigan militias come out of the
woods.
 
Promise me we will escape
together if they do.”

“We’ll go to Beaufort,” Celeste offered,
repeating their time-honored lines.

“I’d like to live in Savannah, near the
ocean.
 
We could go on the lam.”

They both laughed.

“But you still think Detroit is safe.
 
You’ve got blinders on.
 
There are so many dead spots here.”

“I won’t always live in the city.
 
I just want to stay for as long as I
can.”

“Did you ever know your dad?”
 

“No.
 
I don’t remember anything about him.
 
I asked my mom when I was little but she waved me off.
 
I never had a dad.”

“My dad saved me,” Frank said.
 
“I don’t know what I would have done
without him.
 
He’s the guy who
helped me come out.”

Celeste nodded slightly, remembering the photo
Frank had shown her of a wide-faced truck driver with his five kids and happy
wife.
 
Funny, she thought, that the
stereotypical nuclear family looked so at peace with their unexpectedly gay
son.
 
They’d been more upset with
one daughter for moving out West than they had been with a daughter marrying out
of their religion, or a son marrying a dark skinned girl or with Frank when he
told them in high school that he wasn’t going to marry someone like his
mother.
 
 
She’d had a twinge of jealousy at the broken nose, the open,
smiling face of his father, the man who had been present through all the growth
of his kids, letting each one blossom.
 
She wracked her brain, wondering what she might have missed, how her
life might have been different if there had been a man like that.
 
“I never missed having a dad,” she said
defensively.
 
“It’s not something I
ever knew, so how could I miss it?”

“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.