Chapter Five #2
Circulars advertising charms and an old fur muff that looks like it has mange go in the trash can.
Paperbacks go back onto shelves unless they look like something I want to read or the pages look too crumbly.
A basket of leather gloves, some of them stuck together from being too close to a heating vent, goes into the trash as well.
No matter how much I throw away, there’s always more.
Piles slide into one another and confuse me about where I was clearing last. There are dozens of wadded-up plastic bags, one with a pair of earrings and the receipt still attached, others holding a random swatch of cloth or the crust of a sandwich.
There are screwdrivers, nuts and bolts, my fifth-grade report card, the caboose from a toy train, rolls of PAID stickers, magnets from Ohio, three vases with dried flowers in them and one vase overstuffed with plastic flowers, a cardboard box of broken ornaments, a sticky mess of something dark and melted covering an ancient radio.
As I pick up a dust-covered dehumidifier, a box full of photographs spills across the floor.
They’re black-and-white pinups. The woman in them is wearing wrist-length summer gloves, a vintage corset, and nylon panties.
Her hair’s styled like Bettie Page’s and she’s kneeling on a couch, smiling at the person taking the pictures, a man whose fingers show up in one of the pictures wearing an expensive-looking wedding ring over his black gloves. I know the woman in the pictures.
Mom looks pretty good.
The first time I realized I had a talent for crime was after Mom took me out—just me—for a cherry slushy.
It was a scorching summer day and the leather seat in her car was hot from the sun, burning the backs of my legs just slightly unpleasantly.
My mouth had turned bright red when we pulled into a gas station and then around back, like Mom was going to put air in the tires.
“See that house?” she asked me. She was pointing to a ranch-style place with white aluminum siding and black shutters.
“I want you to go through that window in the back by the stairs. Just shimmy on in and grab the manila envelope off the desk.”
I must have stared at Mom like I didn’t understand her.
“It’s a game, Cassel. Do it as fast as you can and I’ll time you. Here, give me your drink.”
I guess I knew it wasn’t a game, but I ran anyway and I boosted myself up on the water spigot and poured through the window with the boneless grace of little kids.
The manila envelope was right where Mom’d said it would be.
Nearby, piles of paper rested under coffee cups stuffed with pens and rulers and spoons.
There was a little glass cat on the desk with what looked like glittering gold inside it.
The air-conditioning made the sweat dry on my arms and back as I held the sculpture up to the light. I tucked the cat into my pocket.
When I brought the envelope back to her, she was sucking on my slushy.
“Here,” I said.
She smiled. Her mouth was bright red too.
“Good work, sweetie.” And I realized that the reason she had taken me instead of my brothers was just that I was the smallest, but it didn’t bother me, because I also realized that I could be useful.
That I didn’t need to be a worker to be useful.
That I could be good at things, better than they were, even.
That knowledge sang through my veins like adrenaline.
Maybe I was seven. I’m not sure. It was before Lila.
I never told anyone about the cat.
I stack the photographs, with a few more of Grandad and Lila’s dad in Atlantic City in front of a bar. They’re standing with an older man that I don’t know, arms draped over each others’ shoulders.
I sweep layers of dust from under the couches and chairs until it billows up and chokes me.
When I flop down to rest, I find a notebook shoved under one of the cushions, filled with Mom’s writing.
No more racy photos, just boring stuff. “Oil tank removal—buried” is scrawled on one side of the page, while the other side reads, “get carrots, chicken (whole), bleach, matches, motor oil.” Two pages later there are some addresses, with one circled.
Then a script for calling a car dealership and talking them out of a rental car for a week.
There are a few more scripts for different scams, with notes on the side.
I read them over, smiling despite myself.
In a couple of hours I’m going to run my own scam, so I better study up.
In our family—maybe in every family—there’s this idea that the kids take after someone from another generation.
Like Philip is supposed to take after our granddad, my mom’s father.
Philip’s the one who dropped out of high school to join up with the Zacharovs and got his keloid necklace a few years later.
He’s big on loyalty and stability, even if he pays his rent by busting kneecaps.
I picture him in forty years retired to Carney, chasing a new generation of worker kids off his lawn.
The family legend says that Barron is just like Mom, even though he works luck and she works emotion. Mom can make anyone her friend, can strike up a conversation anywhere because she genuinely believes that the con is a game. And all she cares about is winning every single time.
That leaves me to be like my luck worker dad, except that I’m not.
He was the person that held things together.
When he was alive, Mom acted normal most of the time.
It was only when he was gone that she started chasing around millionaires with her gloves off.
The second time a guy woke up at the end of a cruise a hundred grand lighter and head over heels in love, his lawyer called the cops.
She can’t help it. She loves the con.
I tell myself I’m not like her, but I have to admit I love it too.
I flip through the notebook, looking for I don’t know what—maybe something familiar, maybe just some secret that will make me laugh.
As I turn more pages, I find an envelope taped to a divider.
Written beside it are the words “Give this to Remember!” I rip it open and find a memory charm, silver, with the word “remember” stamped on it and an uncracked blue stone set off center.
It looks old, the silver tarnished black in the grooves and the whole piece heavy in my hand.
Charms to throw off curse work, charms like the ones Audrey has hanging around her neck, are as old as curses themselves.
Workers make them by cursing stone—the only material that absorbs a whole curse, including the blowback.
Then that stone is primed and will swallow up a curse of the same type.
So if a luck worker curses a piece of jade and wears it against her skin, and then someone tries to curse her with bad luck, the jade breaks and she’s not affected.
You have to get another charm each time you’re worked, and you have to have one for each type of magic, but you’re safe.
Only rock is effective, not silver or gold, leather or wood.
Certain people prefer one type to another; there are charms made out of everything from gravel to granite.
If what I’m holding is a charm, the blue stone is what powers it.
I wonder if Mom grifted some ancestral heirloom or if it actually belongs to her. It’s kind of funny to think of forgetting a memory charm. I tuck it into my pocket.
While cleaning the living room, I find a button-making machine, two plastic bags of bubble wrap, a sword with rust staining the blade, three broken dolls I don’t remember anyone owning, an overturned chair that creeped me out as a kid because I swore it looked identical to one I’d seen on television the night before Barron and Philip dragged it home, a hockey stick, and a collection of medals for various different military accomplishments.
It’s almost noon by the time I finish, and my hands and the cuffs of my pants are black with filth.
I throw away stacks of newspapers and catalogs, bills that probably went unpaid for years, plastic bags of hangers and wires, and the hockey stick.
The sword I lean against the wall.
The outside of the house is already piled with garbage bags from the morning’s work.
There’s enough stuff that we’re going to have to take a trip to the dump before long.
I look over at the neighbors’ tidy houses with their manicured lawns and brightly painted doors, and then back at my own.
The shutters hang off kilter on either side of a row of front-facing windows, and one of the panes is broken.
The paint is so worn that the cedar shingles look gray. The house is rotting from the inside.
I’m in the process of dragging the chair out to the side of the road when Grandad comes downstairs and dangles the keys in front of me.
“Be back in time for dinner,” he says.
I take the keys, gripping them hard enough for the teeth to dig into my palm. Leaving the chair where it is, I head out the driveway as if I really have an appointment to be late for.