Chapter Two
TWO
CHARLIE
Death tickles Charlie Moore’s doorstep.
The single-story, two-bedroom, one-bathroom house he shares with his parents and grandparents in Slatington, Pennsylvania, sags into its foundation like a shingled, forgotten mausoleum on the literally named Cemetery Street.
Many years ago, on a walk home from school past the white-painted church with its foreboding bell tower, Charlie’s erstwhile friend Max asked, “How can anyone live on a street where people go when they die?”
Charlie stopped whistling, shrugged and said, “We get on just fine.”
Nothing feels fine now as Charlie straddles the property line between the weather-battered headstones and the rusted mailbox with peeling numbers on its side.
He doesn’t need X-ray vision to know what’s inside the hefty envelope from the local bank stamped URGENT: OPEN IMMEDIATELY in violent red lettering. His heart twists.
Foreclosure looms over the house on Cemetery Street, like a wrecking ball set to swing with his family and their belongings still tucked inside.
Unable to stay still when it’s nearly dinnertime and he has mouths to feed, Charlie marches up the overgrown grass, a phantom funeral procession close behind him playing an awful dirge.
The outside of the house on Cemetery Street has seen much better days, but the inside fizzles with warmth and personal touches.
Every wall is covered with framed, sepia-touched photos.
The bulbs in the old light fixtures blaze in the gray overcast of a soon-to-be-stormy summer day.
The shoe rack overflows with sneakers, work boots and snow boots that should’ve been brought up to the attic for storage many months ago, but who has the time?
The pantry is mostly stocked, and the well-loved kitchen table where they sit down for meals and trade stories and play games of gin rummy stands as the one family heirloom that hasn’t been lost or sold.
How can anyone live on a street where people go to die? he thinks again.
Easily, when love practically flows through the electrical circuits.
However, the Moore household might be no more, once the bank comes to collect. Charlie sets the teakettle on the weak burner and one of two frozen meals in the microwave before opening the letter, even though it’s addressed to his parents and he already knows what it says.
Under the brrrr of the microwave, Charlie clicks his tongue at what he reads. One more month of missed payments and the bank will be forced to file foreclosure proceedings with the court.
Upset rises thick in his throat. Not only is he upset with the bank and a cruel repayment system set against people like his family, but he’s upset with his family, too. His parents promised him they would seek out a mortgage modification before it got to this.
They can’t pay the back mortgage, and they certainly can’t pay a lawyer to represent them in court. What then? Will they be thrown out on the street?
The beep of the microwave finishing nearly scares him out of his heavily tattooed skin. He sets the letter down and singes his fingertips on the scorching plastic of the container. Thankfully, he doesn’t drop it, or one of his grandparents would have to go without dinner.
Will that become the norm? Will they continue to be food insecure?
Charlie’s head whirls with the unthinkable. They already make do with so little. His grandparents claim the primary bedroom. His parents live out of the spare. And he camps out in the living room.
Max annoyingly comes to mind again as Charlie’s eyes sweep over the plastic, scratched TV stand, the vacuum-lined popcorn carpet, and the well-loved brown couch at the foot of which a folded fitted sheet and a feather pillow sit.
“How can anyone sleep in a room meant for living?” he recalls his old friend asking.
Charlie sighs. How will they get by now?
At the door to the main bedroom, Charlie uses his exposed elbow to knock twice.
On the inside of his forearm is one of his many tattoos.
It is a house cat with a pair of scissors in one hand, a tongue clutched in the other, and a lit cigar dangling from the corner of his open mouth.
A speech bubble overhead says, “I got it.”
He has always had a penchant for sardonic comics and an artistic eye for the alternative.
At sixteen, as an act of rebellion after being denied permission, Charlie did a stick-and-poke star holding a water gun on the inside of his ankle.
The first time he wore no-show socks that summer, his grandmother damn near keeled over from shock.
Especially after he said, “It’s a shooting star! ”
“How could you, Charlie?” his mom said.
“You said I couldn’t get a tattoo,” Charlie replied without an ounce of arrogance or moodiness. “You didn’t say I couldn’t tattoo myself.”
To this, nobody could argue. A loophole had been detected, and he earned a dash of begrudging respect from his elders.
But as he did more online research into what it took to become a tattoo artist, he learned about “scratchers”— self-taught, at-home tattooers who disregarded apprenticeships and licenses and, sometimes, even the sanitation necessary to prevent basic blood-borne pathogens.
While he’d gamble on himself, he wasn’t about to put anybody else’s health at risk.
From then on, Charlie vowed to play by the rules so he could take a true shot at his dream career. He honed his drawing skills through YouTube tutorials and told himself he would eventually bring his design portfolio to the local tattoo parlor in search of an apprenticeship.
But, at eighteen, he learned that apprenticeships were not feasible for someone like him with so little money and so little free time, so instead of giving tattoos, he got them.
Lots of them. When he was able. They didn’t fill the hole where his dream used to be, but his time under the needle came close, and he liked the way they looked on his body once completed.
“Come in,” calls Grandma Moore through the bedroom door in a weakish voice.
Charlie schools his expression and uses his hip to twist the loose knob. The door sails open and slams against the wall behind it. Grandma and Grandpa Moore sit up in bed, backed by two tall towers of slouchy pillows.
“Your hair!” Grandma exclaims.
Charlie nearly reaches up to scrape a hand over his newly dyed buzz cut before remembering the tray of food. “Oh, yeah. I did it this morning.”
“It’s so blue!” she adds.
“Yeah.” He chose the color because it matches his favorite Gatorade flavor from childhood. Bright, vibrant, sugary. After bleaching his locks several months earlier, he needed a change. His body was nothing if not a canvas for self-expression.
Good thing his hair doesn’t have magical mood ring properties, otherwise it would have turned jet-black to signal stressed and anxious. He can’t worry his grandparents about the mortgage until he can question his parents and launch a plan of action.
On the small TV screen across from the bed, a new show on the Food Network starts. It’s one of those travel shows where an über glamorous person jet-sets all over the world trying different foods.
“I’m Larsa Vanderbell, and this is Europe Your Way.
Today I’m in Florence. Would you believe me if I told you that the best sandwich in the entire city came from a walk-up window?
Sounds fake, but let’s find out what that means.
Come along!” A tall, conventionally beautiful woman wearing slender heels on cobblestone streets struts ahead of the camera, then eats a focaccia, tomato and fresh mozzarella sandwich that looks handmade by angels.
Charlie lifts the lids on two steaming microwave dinners.
The soggy meatloaf and flaccid carrots underline how mouthwatering the food on the screen is.
Everything they eat either comes cold in a bag from the store or hot in a bag from the drive-through.
Such is the way in their neck of the woods. And in their tax bracket.
“Goodie, meatloaf. My favorite,” says Grandpa, tucking the paper napkin into the top of his worn white T-shirt so he doesn’t dribble.
Charlie mirrors this for Grandma. The gout in her fingers flares often, so it’s easier for him to feed her than risk the inevitable spills.
At first, she refused. After several soiled blankets, she grew amenable to Charlie’s hands-on assistance.
Charlie cuts up the frozen meal for her as the show plays out across the room.
Larsa’s mms and uhhs are broken up by prerecorded voiceover of her detailing the history of the family-owned eatery.
Grandma and Grandpa’s eyes never leave the TV.
They have the slightly detached glaze Charlie has only ever seen on kids scrolling through their phones.
If only his family could afford professional elder care.
Someone to safely get them up and out into the fresh air.
All they’ll have is fresh air once the roof is ripped off right over their heads.
Charlie imagines a bank giant clomping across Slatington, picking their house up in his greasy palm, and crushing it inside his meaty fist.
“Have you ever been to Europe?” Charlie asks, deploying small talk to stave off the unpleasantness roiling in his stomach.
The absolute best part about living with and caring for his grandparents is that he has the chance to ask them all the important questions many grandchildren don’t get to before they go.
Grandpa shakes his head. “Oh no. My parents immigrated from Wales and never crossed the ocean again. Money was tight. By the time I came along, the slate industry was dwindling away. My brothers always joked I was an accident of the bad economy. A jaunt on the continent was out of the question,” he says.
Charlie’s great-grandparents came over and got swept into the slate belt in Pennsylvania.
The men worked the quarries, mining for blue-gray slate with flint striations.
It was hard, manual labor that tormented their bodies, but it paid, and even though they lived in tenement buildings, they were together. They made do. Their eternal mantra.
Grandpa went into the same shrinking line of work once he came of age, but by then opportunities were scarce and conditions seemed worse. The train lines hauling slate disappeared and alternate materials being mined undercut the main export of the area.
Still they worked on. Sweating beneath the beating Pennsylvania sun.
Returning home to meals of cabbage stew cooked by frugal wives who taught or typed or sewed to add a bit to the household income and keep the children healthy.
It was not glamorous or comfortable, but it was the only way they knew.
Charlie yearns to give his family a better, more leisurely life, like the one Larsa on the TV lives.
“If you could go now, where would you go?” Charlie asks.
“With what money?” Grandpa says with a laugh, which sours Charlie’s attitude more.
“It’s a hypothetical, Grandpa,” Charlie says, stuffing down his impatience.
Grandma chews on a carrot, presumably in thought. “Italy,” she says after a swallow. “I love this program. This Larsa is fabulous. She seems to love Italy the most. All that art and history. Not to mention those fountains!”
“I’m not sure I could get around in a city like that,” says Grandpa, slapping at the crutch beside the bed. Beside that is his wheelchair. Those uneven streets and old buildings without ramps or elevators would prove difficult for him.
The slate industry not only took most of the Moore men’s youths, but it took Grandpa’s right foot.
Fifteen years ago, a loading machine malfunctioned.
A large piece of slate was dangling over the bed of a truck when a chain came loose, crushing Grandpa’s foot beneath it.
The whole thing had to be amputated, putting him out of commission in the only line of work he’d ever known.
“You heard the boy, it’s a hypothetical,” Grandma says with a wistful sigh. Wistful mostly because there was a time, right after Grandpa lost his foot, where the burden of finances went from slate slab to featherlight thanks to the lawsuit payout.
How then were they close to losing their home on Cemetery Street?
Charlie does not want to think about Uncle Buck, his dad’s only brother, and the great disappearing act he pulled.
Instead, Charlie sets his mind on how to fix this, for all of them.