Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 10

“B ecause it’s too dangerous!”

I shook my head. “No, that’s ridiculous.”

Nicola’s angry huff sounded loud coming out of my speaker. “You were almost incinerated because of him!”

“No, the fire wasn’t about Campbell,” I stated, although the authorities hadn’t concluded anything yet. They’d reinterviewed me, him, Dion, and probably Alecta, although we hadn’t spoken in a long time. In fact, my last words to her had been, “You can’t run away from this!” as she, in fact, ran down the street to get away from the burning building and from her responsibilities.

“That’s the other problem,” my sister said, “because if it wasn’t about your boyfriend—”

“Which he isn’t!” I broke in. “Don’t you dare say that in front of Campbell, Nicola!”

“Ok, ok,” she soothed, but then got she angry all over again. “If the fire wasn’t about Campbell Bates, then it’s about someone else in that gallery.”

I knew where she was heading: Dion and the new developments with him. “Yes, the bombing probably related to Alecta and her drug dealing,” I agreed in order to head her off.

“Which is something else you didn’t tell me about!” she barked, but Nic wasn’t distracted for long. “I meant your other coworker, Dion. What were you thinking? Why did you do this?”

“I was thinking that he needed a place to live, and Mom has plenty of space. What she doesn’t have is enough money,” I explained. “Now she’s getting rent from him and more for utilities.” Dion had moved into our former bunkroom in my mom and dad’s—in my mom’s house. That had been small for six girls but was a luxurious amount of space for one skinny guy.

“You invited the man who just survived an assassination attempt to live with our mother.”

“Technically, she was the one who invited him,” I corrected. “And even more technically, it wasn’t an invitation. They signed a lease, so it’s all legal.”

“Technically,” she repeated. “Technically?”

“You said that the assassination attempt was about Campbell, anyway,” I reminded her. “So Dion renting a room from Mom shouldn’t be any problem at all.”

“Brenna, so help me…”

“No one will know that he’s there,” I said. “It was part of the deal. He’s having his mail forwarded to his own mom’s house and he doesn’t have his name on anything related to the new address except for the lease. It’s a different neighborhood and one that he never really frequented before. He’s even driving a different car, Nicola.” That was due to the damage to his old one, since he’d parked it (illegally) right in front of the gallery in the loading zone on the day of the fire. I’d helped him deal with the insurance company and now he was driving a new crappy clunker, which no one would recognize. “He’s also not drawing attention by hooking up, which was another part of the deal,” I continued. He’d sworn to me that he was done with women.

“I’m not going near a girl, not ever again. Look where it got me!” he’d said when we had met to discuss my idea of him renting from my mom. He’d stared down at his penis area and continued mournfully, “Something’s wrong down there. I can’t get it up.” He had then mimicked jerking off, but I already understood the problem that he was referencing. I just didn’t want to think about it.

“That’s a good thing for you,” I’d said, because I’d experienced some minor qualms about him in the house with my mother. But she was still crying over the loss of my dad, who, it seemed, had totally moved on. According to Sophie, he was living his life and doing fine.

“I don’t like anything about this,” my oldest sister broke into my thoughts, “but we have other problems. The shoes you ordered for JuJu don’t fit.”

“I’ll make them fit,” I said, and Nicola told me that if I tried anything like toe amputation, she would amputate my head. Before we escalated into actual violence, I hung up. There was plenty I had to do for this wedding that didn’t involve cutting off parts of people’s feet. The bridesmaid dresses had arrived at the salon and I was going to check them over and pick them up, and then I’d have to start alterations…

In my mind, I heard Campbell’s voice telling me that it was ok. I walked to the basement steps, though, because I needed more.

“Campbell?” I yelled.

“What’s up?” he called back.

“Can you say it again?”

“You’re doing great and this is all going to work. I promise,” he told me, and I took a deep breath and nodded. So far, setting up shop in his basement, which I preferred to call the lower level, was working out fine. There was plenty of light, plenty of space, and plenty of support from the guy upstairs—not God, but the homeowner. It turned out that he really had paid attention when he went out with his dad’s construction and maintenance crews, because he knew how to build things. He had made a wonderful cutting table for me, exactly the right height and exactly the right size, and he was working on racks and shelves for fabric storage. He was also strong enough to carry machines, chairs, and everything else I needed. He’d even put Cleo into the back of his SUV and brought her over, which made my apartment feel a lot emptier.

Yes, I was totally set. It was all that I needed, nothing more was necessary at all, except maybe an extra set of hands to help me sew. Or, maybe, if Campbell had wanted to use his hands in other ways…

My phone started ringing again, and it was a different sister wanting to talk about wedding details, and also about why I’d let my former coworker move in with our mother. It helped them both, I kept saying, and then Sophie asked me a question which I didn’t care to answer: “When have you ever wanted to help people?”

I was too busy to worry about what she thought and I’d never cared, anyway. I rushed out to the bridal salon in Campbell’s SUV, which had a lot more room to hang the dresses that I was picking up. Then I had to stop at the fabric store for thread, and then I had to talk to the caterer (again), and there were eighteen thousand other important things that I had to get to, immediately, or everything might have fallen apart for this wedding. If that happened, I thought that Juliet might fall apart, too. She’d come over to my new lower-level workroom the night before to try on her dress and I had discovered that she’d lost more weight.

“JuJu, you better start eating!” I’d told her. “You’re going to look like a scarecrow if you don’t.”

“I don’t have any appetite,” she had answered, which wasn’t like my sister at all. Due to her devotion to athletics, she’d always eaten mounds of food, more than at least two or three of the rest of us, combined. She’d pressed her palm against her stomach.

“Don’t tell me,” I’d said, rolling my eyes. “You’re pregnant, too?”

Then her own eyes had filled up with tears, which was something I still couldn’t get used to seeing with her. “I wish I were,” she said. “I just got my stupid period.”

“You’re bloated and the dress still fits like this? Holy Mary.” I’d eyed the waistline, considering how much more I could take it in. “I’m going to make you eat a sandwich before you leave here. Juliet, calm down! You’ll have plenty of time to have babies with Beckett. Aren’t there enough of them in our family already? Why would we need more?”

“Brat,” she’d said, and then she told me if I poked her with another pin then I was going to have a real problem on my hands. But she’d stopped crying, and she had eaten with me and Campbell. Then, when she’d gotten home, she’d sent me a message.

“What’s going on with you two?”

And the answer was obvious: nothing. Nothing like any of my sisters were thinking, anyway, but my indispensable plan—my plan to become an essential part of his life—was working even better than I could have imagined. He’d admitted that he’d opened his lower level for my use because he was bored and needed structure, and I certainly had things for him to do, like errands to run and calls to return. He seemed to have plenty of other activities, though. Like, he was volunteering at his favorite kids’ charity because he loved it, and he’d been so upset about cancelling the big fundraiser that his former company had sponsored. He was also heavily invested in finding a new job and he was looking all over the country. He had looked all over the world, actually, and he’d told me that he didn’t mind the thought of moving very far away. No one would know him, he’d said. It would be a relief.

My phone rang, again, and now I wasn’t ignoring it like I used to. I thought fondly of the days when I used to look at the screen and think, “I’m not picking up and she can suck it.” Times had changed and I was always picking up, even from numbers I didn’t recognize—like right now.

“Hi!” a voice told me.

“Alecta?” I asked suspiciously. “You have a new number? What do you want?”

“Guess where I’m calling from?”

I really wasn’t in the mood to play this game with her, or actually, even to bother to speak. That didn’t affect our conversation.

“I’m at the airport on my way to Laos! Isn’t that exciting?” she asked, and again, she didn’t bother to wait for my reply. “I know,” she continued. “It’s like I’m in a movie, right?”

“You business just burned down,” I was goaded to say. “What film genre were you thinking about?”

She ignored that, just like she’d always ignored my requests to have a plumber come fix the sink in the employee bathroom so that it had running water all the time, instead of only sporadically. “I was trying to get in touch with Dion but he’s not answering, and neither is his mom,” she announced. She meant the woman who was her own sister, but Dion had told me that they didn’t get along at all.

“Maybe they’re mad that you ran away while he was in danger and then never talked to him about his lost job,” I suggested, and wondered why I was bothering.

“I need someone to go see my mother,” she told me. “It’s going to be you.”

“You want me to go see Chic Cathay?”

“Ugh, I can’t stand when people call her that. Her name is Shyril Stanke,” she said. She had momentarily forgotten to use her excited, upbeat voice. It was a tone she employed to make sure that we were all aware of how much fun she was having and how much she was enjoying herself, because it was important that everyone was jealous. In the same flat voice, she continued, “I can’t stand when people have to use fancy pseudonyms to prop themselves up.”

“Your real name is Ann Stanke,” I pointed out, because I had seen her tax documents.

“Will you go over there or not?” she asked loudly.

“Why?”

There was a long silence. “Remember how you wanted her to help you with designing stuff? Well, she will.”

This made no sense. “If I go over to your mom’s house as a favor to you, she’ll get involved in starting my label? What are you talking about?”

“I’ll send you her address. You need to give her a message,” she stated. “It’s to help her.”

“What? Why does she need help?” I asked, very confused. They didn’t get along, as far as I knew, and when had Alecta ever cared about anyone else? That question reminded me, suddenly, of when my sister Sophie had recently asked something vaguely similar about me…anyway, I’d never even heard Alecta talk much about her mother, except sometimes to brag about local celebrities who had been in their orbit due to Chic designing for them.

“I ran out of time to say something before I left, something important,” she told me.

“So text her.”

“I don’t know if she has a phone,” my former boss said, which could have seemed unbelievable except that I knew how Alecta operated. “If you stop by, you can talk to her about how to start your business and I’m sure that she’ll have a lot to say about her amazing experiences. She’s Chic Cathay, after all.” The words sounded a little bitter. “It’s, like, vital that she hears this from me.”

“You need me to relay a message that’s so important it has to be delivered in person,” I stated. “Alecta, that doesn’t make any—”

“Oh, they’re boarding my flight,” she interrupted, and I did hear some garbled noises that could have come from a loudspeaker. “You have to tell her.”

“Tell her what?” I snapped, exasperated. “You haven’t said what your important message is.”

“It’s, uh, that everything’s fine.”

“I’m not going over there to say—”

She cut me off again, and so help me, it was for the last time. “Tell her that everything’s fine, that I’ll behave myself, and I’m going to stay in Laos. It’s going to take so many hours to get there and you know how I don’t like sitting down, but at least it gives me more time to memorize the language. I’m so glad I was taking those lessons. I knew they’d come in handy!”

“You were learning to speak Lao?” The more she told me, the less I seemed to understand. “How long have you been planning this trip?”

She still didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. “See ya! Or, probably not, since I’m not coming back. Let her know, ok? Let her know that I said goodbye, and everything’s fine. I’m, uh, staying the course. I guess you should also say that I love her or something.”

“What does it mean that ‘everything’s fine?’ What course are you staying? And why are you moving to—”

She had hung up, and I seethed at my phone for a moment. As I did, she sent the address of her mom’s house. “What in the heck is going on?” I quickly typed back, but the message didn’t go through.

I stared at the screen and her last text. I recognized the street as part of the Palmer Woods neighborhood near the northern edge of the city, closer to where Campbell lived in the suburbs. If I wanted, I could go to Chic Cathay’s house and then continue right on to his, to drop off these dresses, trade cars, and maybe make dinner. We hadn’t really talked about how much time I could spend at his place, but he’d made references in the past to how he’d put in long hours at the Ghregg Bates Financial Group. I remembered him saying that it wasn’t just when he was at the office, that he kept working when he went home and also spent time on the weekends doing his job.

He would understand why I needed to be in his lower level so often. And the fact that he was there with me, well, that was a nice bonus because he was so nice. We were eating lunch together almost every day, and a lot of times we had dinner, too.

But about Alecta’s request…yes, I had plenty of other things that I needed to accomplish, but I had to admit that I was very curious to see how Chic Cathay lived. I also wanted to know the real reason that Alecta wanted me to go and see her, because it couldn’t have been only about that dumb message. Would Chic actually help me to become a fashion designer if I randomly arrived at her house and said that her daughter loved her?

That was hard to believe, and it was much more likely that Alecta had lied about it, just like she’d lied to me about making the lease payments on her car after it had been repossessed.At first, she’d said she had been great about keeping up with those and the problem was that the dealership was crooked.But then she’d finally admitted the truth: she hadn’t realized that she was on was a long-term schedule of remittances.She had sent in money a few times and then stopped, figuring that she’d done enough.

I very much doubted that she was moving to Laos for good, because she wouldn’t have been able to handle that in the long-term, either. It sounded a lot like the time last summer that she’d told Dion and me that she was joining a “group” that lived collectively and in harmony with nature in Montana. It had turned out to be a cult in a few dirty tents, and when the temperature had dropped below fifty at night, she’d come home to Detroit to sleep indoors. Shortly after that, she’d left for Oman where it was a lot warmer, and that hadn’t lasted either.

I must have come to a decision about where I was going without realizing it, because I had headed north on I-75 and then I exited on Seven Mile Road and went west. Chic Cathay lived on a beautiful street, as many were in this part of Detroit. I imagined what her house would look like: classic, because this was a fancy, old neighborhood, but I thought that she’d have some interesting touches of modernity or other quirks to make it a Chic creation. Like, maybe the landscaping would…

I slowed the car. Had Alecta had given me the right information? That was, of course, not a given, since she was the one who’d been paying taxes under her real name but also with the wrong social security number. But I had to believe that she’d know her mother’s address. This was the place? I stared at it. No, there were no interesting touches of modernity and there was no quirky landscaping; there was none of that, like, there were no plants except for one tree that looked dead to me. Yes, it was still early for things to have budded out, but it appeared to have been an evergreen, and now it wasn’t green at all. Neither was the grass that remained in what should have been a sweeping front yard. Besides a few patches of scraggly groundcover, it was mostly dirt.

And the house itself? You could see that once, it had been a showpiece of neo-Georgian architecture, but now it seemed neglected and more than a little sad. The window in the gable on the left side had apparently been broken, and it was boarded over. A keystone had fallen off above another window on the first floor and one of the pillars that supported the portico above the front door was cracked and listing at a noticeable angle. Really, there were a lot of noticeable, serious problems, and I bet there were even more you couldn’t see—like there might have been holes in the roof that you wouldn’t have known about unless someone sweet and helpful walked around up there for you.

And this was Chic’s house? Chic Cathay? I’d looked at so many pictures of her designs and the famous people wearing them. I’d studied shots of her at parties and events, always looking perfectly styled. This was how she lived?

Yes, it was entirely possible that Alecta had gotten it wrong, but I went to the front door and rang the bell. When I didn’t hear a noise coming from inside, I knocked, too, and then I did catch something.

“What in the hell do you want? I’m not converting or buying it,” a voice told me, a querulous, weak voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Are you Chic Cathay?” I asked back. No one answered, so I continued. “I’m Brenna Curran and I used to work for Alecta. She asked me to come by here and give you a message.”

The door swung open, revealing a dark interior hallway and a woman who might have been Chic. I wasn’t sure, though. I had met her only once, and while she’d obviously looked older than her pictures at those nineteen-eighties parties, she had also been dressed to the nines in an electric purple suit and matching coat that I’d recognized as her own creation. She’d had an amazing wig, too, a towering pile on her head that, along with her high heels, made her seem taller and regal.

She didn’t look that way now. She was tiny! She was so much smaller than I was, and I wasn’t the tallest Curran sister or even the second-tallest (that was Juliet and Grace, the two who deserved it the least). She was currently tying a scarf around her head but I could see white wisps of hair under it, and she wore a ratty, terrycloth robe and house slippers like my grandmother had sported when she’d been alive.

“I remember you,” she said. “You thought you were going to have a career in fashion. How’d that work out?” She cackled. “Not quite the cakewalk you expected, I bet.”

“I didn’t expect a cakewalk and it’s none of your business how it’s going.” I gave her the same stare that I’d employed with the rude woman at the grocery store who’d bothered Campbell, but it didn’t have any effect on Chic Cathay. She stared back and coughed without covering her mouth. “I was supposed to tell you that Alecta loves you. Goodbye.”

“She loves me? Horseshit,” Chic said. “Why are you really here? Why’d she give you this address?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “She said that she wanted me to give you a message and that if I did, you’d help me with my fashion label. Which I also knew was bull, because if you’re anything like her, you only care about yourself.”

Chic didn’t dispute that.

“Alecta is on her way to Laos,” I added. “She said she’s not coming back. She said that everything’s fine, and goodbye. Oh, she also said that she’ll behave herself and stay the course, but I don’t know what that means. Maybe she’s trying to tell you that she won’t be a drug dealer there, which is a good idea.”

Her mother looked at me for a moment. “I guess you should come in,” she told me, and I did. She was a rude little troll of a woman, but I was so interested to see her house that I couldn’t stop myself. And maybe, in the back of my mind, I was still hoping that she could at least give me some advice.

“All she did was tell me what an awful kid Alecta had been and how she’d caused so many problems for everyone, especially for her mother,” I told Campbell that night, a few hours after I’d left Chic Cathay. “It didn’t sound like she likes either of her daughters, not Alecta and not Dion’s mom, either. It sounds like she doesn’t like anyone and she’s living in that dark house and never going out. It smelled just like my former atelier in there.”

“I have some news about the atelier, but continue,” he said. He scooped the green peppers off my salad and ate them so I didn’t have to, and he gave me his cucumbers.

“Thank you. What’s the news?” I asked, but he told me that first he wanted to hear more about…he stopped.

“You know, I can’t say that name without smiling,” he said, and he did. He was more relaxed today, which made me very happy to see. “Go ahead and tell me all about the famous Chic Cathay.”

“Well, her house is a mess. You can see that it might have been nice at one point, but now it reminds me of my own mom’s house. You know, blank spaces where there used to be pictures, open areas where furniture should have been placed. My dad was the one who cleaned that out, but where did Chic’s stuff go? It’s nearly empty and it’s so dirty in there.” I considered. “Maybe she doesn’t have any money left.”

“Didn’t you tell me that Alecta had no business sense?”

“Alecta has no sense, full stop,” I corrected.

“Maybe the apple didn’t fall far. Why in the hell did she want you to go over there?”

I shook my head. “I still don’t really know. They’re not close at all, as far as I can tell, so why did she want me to say goodbye for her? And shock of all shocks, Chic didn’t suggest helping me with my business and she didn’t give me any advice except when she said my lack of progress is my own fault, that it ‘sucks to suck,’ and that she could tell from my shoes how unoriginal I am. These are a classic design! At least I’m not trying to cook in my fireplace.”

“She’s cooking food in her fireplace?”

“I think so, because there was a big pot sitting on the hearth. She said that she wasn’t, and maybe it was for laundry. There was clothing and sheets hung to dry all around the rooms.” I sighed. “I had really looked up to her. In the old pictures, she’s so glamorous, and you should read what people said about her designs. They thought she would go to New York or Paris and become internationally famous, not just big in Detroit. Instead, she got kind of stuck in her aesthetic and then she quit. She walked away from her atelier in the old gallery building and she never went back to it.”

“And speaking again of ateliers,” Campbell said, “you don’t have to worry about yours anymore.”

“What? You mean they fixed the roof?”

“That was never going to happen. I checked to see about any building permits pulled for repairs at that address, but it seems like nothing has been really worked on for thirty years. Beckett wrote to the landlord about the condition of your unit.”

“Beckett, my brother-in-law?”

“Same guy,” he confirmed. “We talked about it when we went to lunch, when I found out that he wants a blue tie for the wedding.”

“Blue is Juliet’s favorite color,” I said automatically. “What did he say in the letter?”

“He knows other magic words besides ‘money is no object,’ I guess. The landlord got back to him today, and if you want out of your lease, Beckett thinks it will be no problem now.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He ate some more of the chicken I’d made. “This is so good.”

Good. I was glad that someone was eating. I’d ratted out Juliet to our big sister Nicola, saying that she was getting too skinny and I was concerned.

“Hey.You ok?”

I looked up. “Thank you for talking to Beckett about my problem, and I’ll also thank him for getting involved,” I said. “I’m relieved.”

“You just looked really worried, not relieved at all.”

“I’m worried about the wedding,” I said. “I got an email saying that the lace for the veil is delayed, no matter how much I pay to expedite it. No matter how much Beckett pays,” I amended. “And…”

“What?”

“It’s not only the wedding. I’ve been thinking about my future lately and what happened today made me think harder,” I admitted.

He waited.

“I’ve always known that I’m not doing the right stuff if I really want to have my own label. I should be in New York. I should be sewing more, working on my social media, trying to get clients, setting up my own shop, doing all kinds of things. I don’t even have a name for it.”

“Why haven’t you done anything like that? You don’t seem to put things off,” he said.

“It’s because I’m afraid of the risk,” I admitted. “Look how it turned out with my former atelier, when I wasn’t cautious enough.”

“That’s going to turn out ok,” he reminded me.

“Luckily, but not because I made good decisions about it. Seeing Chic and how she’s living made me even more wary about the direction I’m heading.” I paused. “I don’t even know if I can make it at all. I think that I’m good enough, but so much could go wrong. People might not recognize that I have talent, since a large portion of the public has poor taste.”

Campbell laughed. “I’ll wear your clothes, for sure. I know you think I dress ok.”

“You look amazing,” I corrected. “I haven’t ever done a lot of menswear, except when I had to in school.” I thought about dressing him, doing all those fittings…that was wildly inappropriate. I was a professional!

“You and I could draw up a plan,” he suggested. “It might put your mind at ease or it might make you sure that you should do something else.”

“That would be a good idea. After the wedding,” I said, and he nodded. And I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Has anything else come of that lunch with Beckett, anything for you? Is there anything on your job front?”

“Let’s eat more chicken.”

“That means no?”

He put down his fork. “It means, I’m probably not going to get hired while there’s a cloud of suspicion over me. Even if there shouldn’t be,” he said quickly, before I could interject. He wasn’t smiling anymore, which made me sorry that I’d brought up this topic.

“I’m job hunting, too,” I mentioned. “I plan to start something new as soon as Juliet’s wedding is over. I have a few interviews set up so I’ll be ready to go.”

“Good. That’s a good idea.”

“What I’m saying is that I’ll be solvent, even if others are having problems.”

“Am I part of the problem group?” he asked, and I nodded.

“Even if you have to sell your cars, give up your savings, and sign over this house, you’ll still have a place to go.”

“Brenna. Fuck,” he said, and rested his forehead down in his hand. “You and me, living in your studio where I can reach out and touch all four walls from the middle of the room.”

“It’s not that bad!” I said. “And you’ll be able to get some kind of job, even if it’s really cruddy and if it doesn’t require your level of education, and even if it’s uncomfortable or dangerous or something. Between the two of us, we could probably afford something bigger.”

He looked up at me and breathed in and out slowly through his nose. “I don’t think that it’s going to come to that. I don’t think I’ll lose everything, but I may. I’m glad to know I have options.”

“I’m an option,” I restated, in case I hadn’t made myself totally clear. “I’m saying, I’ll be here, and you can mooch off me for as long as you need.”

Campbell put his head back down, and I saw his shoulders shake. Good, he was laughing.

“It was a lucky thing that I walked into the Alecta Alberne Gallery in January,” he said after a while.

“Yes, because if you’d waited much longer, it would have burned down and you couldn’t have gotten the present for your sister.”

He shook his head. “It was a lucky thing that I went in there and met you.”

“Really?”

“Some people run when there’s trouble, but you stuck around. In fact, you ran right to me,” he said. “You ran and pulled me out of the fire.”

“Well, we all had to get away from there.”

“You didn’t think twice. You never did—you never doubted me, and I needed that.”

“We’re friends,” I summarized, and he nodded.

Good. Good, I was glad, I told myself. I was glad that I’d decided to become indispensable, and I had enjoyed every second of that process. Along the way, it had turned into less of a “plan,” though, and more of…well, I needed this, too. And I wanted Campbell to be ok for real, not for any purposes of my own, but just because he deserved it.

“It doesn’t hurt me, either,” I pointed out. “I don’t mind you at all.”

He started to laugh again, and so did I.