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 thebrrrrof 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 upsetwithhis family, too. His parents promisedhim 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 hewore 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’tgeta 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.
