"Meema," I smiled, releasing Miss. George's arm and reaching across the table to cover her meaty hands with my own.
"Look at you," she gushed, pulling her hands away to bat at the tears on her cheeks. "Finally home. Come on, sit. We'll get you some lunch."
"No thanks, ma'am. I ate on the plane. I need to go see if the motel has any openings and settle in."
"Motel?" she gasped and I felt my eyes close as I took a deep breath. Crap. "You will not be staying at the motel. You have family 'round these parts. Unfortunately, I am all full-up right now but maybe Cassie..." she said, gesturing to a cousin I remembered as nothing but a tattle tale when we were kids, all bleach blond hair and too-dark tan as an adult.
"I don't want to put anybody out, Meema," I said, shaking my head.
"Well why can't he just stay at the apartment?" Cassie asked, clearly as jazzed about the idea of me crashing with her as I was.
"Apartment?" I asked, brows drawing together. Last time I was in town, there were houses and there were trailer parks, but there were no apartments save for the one or two on top of the stores in town.
"Your father's apartment," Cassie said, her tone at once authoritative and disdainful.
"What happened to the trailer?" I asked and saw most of the eyes at the table look down or away. "Ah, I see," I said, shrugging. I did see. He lost it. It was a piece of shit on more land than he could afford and he was never good at holding down a job. "So dad was staying in an apartment," I prodded as everyone stayed stubbornly silent.
"Brand spanking new place off of Clark," Miss. George said, nodding at me. "Private in the ground pool and tennis courts and everything," she added, sounding excited about the prospect.
Across the table, my grandmother had hauled her purse up off the floor and had it sitting on her lap, rummaging around the contents. "Here they are," she said, producing keys and jingling them at me until I took them, all the while I bit my tongue so I didn't tell them that my dead father's apartment was the absolute fucking last place in the world I wanted to spend the night. "2B," she told me with a nod.
I pocketed the keys and started to slide back out of the booth. "Right. I am going to go get settled in then."
"You sure we can't get you to stay for some sweet tea at least?" my grandmother asked but the look in her dark green eyes, the dark green eyes I inherited from her, were threatening me not to take her up on her offer. She did, after all, need to cry and moan to her ladies about her loss and having the only person in the world who might contradict her claims of her sainted son's passing was not going to get her the kind of attention she craved.
"No ma'am. Next time. Ladies," I said, turning to the table as a whole and giving them a smile that made more than one of them blush, "always a pleasure."
With that, I left the diner, making myself take the walk back to my car slowly even though all I wanted to do was run, put the pedal to the floor, and get the fuck out of there. Instead, I got into the car and slowly turned it in the direction of Clark Street. I had no actual intention of staying at the apartment, mind you, but curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to check it out. Then I would go right to the motel and get a room.
The thing that I never appreciated growing up was how green Alabama was. Back home, the wilderness was tamed into perfectly manicured lawns in the suburbs and completely missing in the more industrial parts of town like where I lived. But as I drove down the streets, all I saw was various shades of green. Old oak trees were bent over the street, moss hanging off the limbs lazily. It was soothing enough to have some of the anxiety slipping away. I wasn't, by nature, an easy person to rile. But there was something about family, about facing your past, that made even the most level-headed of people lose their cool.
Clark Street Apartments was a three story building made of brown brick. Each apartment had small balconies which were cluttered with various items. As I was told, out back I could see a pristine Olympic-sized swimming pool and a tennis court off to the side. It was all nice and new and, from what I could guess, way out of my father's price range. I grabbed my bag and fished the keys out of my pocket. It didn't surprise me when the front door wasn't locked. It didn't even surprise me that there was no one manning the front desk. This was the South. No one locked their doors. No one saw the need for added security.
The halls were a fresh shade of grayish-blue with all the doors to the apartments painted white. There were no obnoxious paintings on the walls and the hardwood floors were waxed and shiny. I took the stairs up to the second floor, finding six apartments. At the end of the hall was my father's.
And the door was open.
I stiffened slightly, hearing noises from inside, inwardly having flashbacks to coming home from school and finding people stealing our shit because Pops owed them money. I dropped the bag silently outside the door and pushed the door open, quietly making my way across the floor toward the sounds I heard in the open kitchen area.
"Come on you stupid, evil thing," a female voice said, but it wasn't low and angry like the words sounded; it was said in that high, soothing voice women used on animals and children, like she was trying to coax something.
I rounded the kitchen counter to find a woman kneeling on the floor in the corner, trying to reach underneath the cabinet for something. My eyes drifted over her backside. Her short jean shorts were doing nothing to hide the round ass and shapely thighs. Her white tee was riding up slightly as she bent forward, revealing a few inches of her back. Her long black hair was in a low side ponytail, all glossy and begging to be touched.