The New Elvis Read online

  The woman approached, extending a business card as she did so.

  Ramona loosened her grip on the cracked pool to accept it, and Jarrod, ashamed of the tug-of-war with his wife, stepped a few respectful feet back.

  Ramona was filled with contempt. “Child Protective Services!”

  “Yes, ma’am. I believe Officers Napier and Wedder came out this week to tell you that you need to clean up your yard?” Angela looked around at the debris and stacks of rotting wood, bricks, containers, and trash bags stuffed with someone else’s unwanted belongings. A broken preschool xylophone pierced the side of one bag, its keyboard rusted and discolored. The thirty-two-gallon tubs overflowing with items from thrift stores, the garbage bags stuffed with merchandise, the haphazardly-stacked pile of car parts and tools, the fallen palm branches, the tipped grill that spewed charcoal, and the bundled newspapers and magazines near the fence—all noted by the officers—hadn’t been moved or discarded. “Are you making any progress?”

  “Does it look like it?” Jarrod asked.

  Angela smiled at him. His frustration was palpable. His nails were chewed and dirty, his plaid shirt was ripped in front, and sweat dripped from his furrowed brow.

  Ramona wasn’t about to calm down. “I thought this was about code violations.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Tell her what can happen if we don’t get the yard up to code,” Jarrod prompted.

  “I believe that you’ll need to pay a fine, and then, after that, if the yard is still not brought up to code, you’ll go to court. With sufficient evidence, your home can and will be taken from you if you can’t or won’t comply with the law.”

  “How is that?” Ramona raged. “We pay our mortgage every month!”

  “That’s not the point,” Jarrod told her.

  Angela remained calm. “I’m here about your son.”

  Pressed up against the side of the garage, Logan listened closely.

  “The officers seem to think the inside of your home might present…” She paused to choose her words carefully and ascertain she had Ramona’s full attention. “The inside of your home may not be a safe environment for your son. You’re going to need to clean up inside, too, so we can inspect the living conditions and make sure there aren’t any rotting floorboards, exposed wires, mold, and the like. If conditions are unsafe and remain so, Logan can and will be taken from you.”

  Ramona was apoplectic. “This is Wendall’s fault, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Wendall?”

  “My brother! My brother called you!”

  “No, ma’am. I assure you, my coming here today was based solely on reports the officers filed.”

  Ramona spat on the ground at Angela’s feet. “I don’t believe you.”

  The woman reached deep inside her purse and extracted a slip of paper, which she handed to Jarrod. “I’ll stop by in the next week or two, unannounced, to check in on you.”

  Ramona tried to swing the unwieldy pool at Angela and nearly fell down. Her face was red with rage. “You do that! You just try and come back and take my son!”

  Then she collapsed and began to sob, one hand still clutching the pool.

  Chapter 18

  Zella wore a pink flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off and a nondescript, faded mauve baseball cap for her afternoon of work in the backyard garden. She was planting miniature hollyhocks when Ryan skateboarded through the back gate and down the concrete path next to the pool. Nana was paddling about in the water to cool off from the heat, but when she saw Ryan, she clambered out of the shallow end, shook her fur vigorously, and ran to him.

  “Hey, girl.” He fell onto the grass beside the path, and she jumped on top of him, giving her coat another shake, soaking him.

  “There’s a towel on the lounge,” Zella shouted, giving a wave.

  Before she called to him, Ryan hadn’t noticed his mother. Taking his skateboard with him, he got up, got the towel, gave Nana a thorough rubdown, and went to sit beside Zella. “This is a great time,” he told her. His nearly-year-round tan hadn’t faded during the recent bout of rain that lasted more than ten days, and he was looking healthy, if a bit somber. Year round, they spent hours in the yard, swimming, barbecuing, and gardening. A bit of chill meant nothing as long as the sun was bright.

  Zella raised the brim of her cap. “A great time for what?”

  Ryan reached for the vintage Alva skateboard Mr. Edwin had given him after winning it in a storage auction. It was flipped over so the wheels and the angular “Alva” in black script on wood the color of honey showed. “See these wheels?” He spun the back two. “They’re kryptonics. That’s what the old-school skateboarders rode on in concrete skate parks and swimming pools because they’re the hardest ones made. I was thinking of doing some aerials in the pool. You think we can empty it?”

  Zella reached for the skateboard and flipped it upright so the angularly scripted Alva logo, in red and gold on black, was visible. She ran her fingers over the sparkly grip tape. “Are you serious?”

  “Totally.” He lay down in the grass and stared at the clouds. One had a perfect hole in the center as though a cannonball had been shot through it.

  “You’ll probably have to damage the drain at the bottom so we have a plausible excuse to empty it. Otherwise, your dad would never go for it.”

  Ryan couldn’t believe his mother was humoring him. “You’re kidding.”

  Zella shrugged. “Maybe. So how are you doing with the magic rings?” She had given him a set from her days in Vegas, and he had been practicing the illusion of joining and separating them in front of his bedroom mirror.

  “Fine. Still working with them.”

  “Do you want to help me with some of these?” Zella indicated more than a dozen potted pink hollyhocks she wanted planted in front of her lilac shrubs.

  “Only if you tell me more secrets from the days you were an understudy for that magician’s assistant. You know, before Dad took you away from all that and you had me.”

  “Ah, yes, career thwarted.” Nana came over, settled herself, and put her head on Zella’s bare knee. “You want to know more magic. Where do I begin?”

  Chapter 19

  “Wendall, is that you?” Ramona stomped around the living room, knocking over boxes and containers like a rampaging animal.

  It was four in the afternoon. Logan’s dad was at work, and his mom was yelling at his Uncle Wendall on her cell phone. A fleeting impulse to dash from his room and jump on her back to get her to stop rippled through him. Instead, he sat down in the doorway to his room and leaned against a container full of yard sale clothes that were too large for him.

  “You did this!” Ramona raged. “You never liked me being a mom, and you’re going to have Logan taken away! What am I talking about? You should know! You’re the one who sent CPS here! Well, City Code Enforcement is crawling all over us for violating their precious regulations, aren’t they?” She paused and took a gulping breath of air before she continued. “No, that part’s not about Logan, it’s about the house. We’ve got to get the house up to code or—well, they gave us a warning, but I had a little trouble getting rid of some stuff. Everything means something to me! Jarrod tries to throw it away, and I tell him, ‘Easy for you, it don’t mean nothing to you, it’s easy for you to throw it away, but it means something to me’. There’s a court date set on the seventeenth. They slapped us with a fine, and now they’re going to put a lien on the house! They’re going to condemn it! Where are we supposed to live? And CPS is up my ass like a blind man in the woods! Something about the floorboards going, the ceiling caving in, exposed wires. Said the place stinks, like they can’t even breathe in here. Well, I’m breathing fine, and I don’t smell anything. They want me to admit I’m doing something wrong and endangering Logan! Do they care about me? No! They care about Logan. Well, that’s the big tip-off, isn’t it? Once they got involved, I knew it had something to do with you! You always wanted a son, didn�
�t you? Well, you can’t have Logan, got it? You’re trying to get me to lose MawMaw’s home and my son! I’ve hated you my whole life, and I despise you even more now! And for your information, that night at your clinic, I did see Elvis, and I’ll take that truth to my grave!”

  Ramona disconnected the call and threw her cell phone across the room. When it hit the edge of MawMaw’s portrait, it cracked, slid down the wall, and ended up behind a stack of board games she’d snapped up at a rummage sale. Ramona collapsed into a heap in a compact space between two thick cubes—one containing candlesticks and broken lamps, and the other, moth-riddled blankets—and began to cry.

  Logan picked his way down the hall and into the living room, wading through debris to reach her. After school that day, he’d put on dirty Spider-Man pajamas, which he’d outgrown but still loved. His brown eyes widened at the sight of his mother reduced to a wailing mass on the threadbare carpet.

  She stopped long enough to notice Logan’s bare feet. Then her eyes traveled up to his smudge-marked face. “Hi, honey. Go get my cigarettes for me, will ya?”

  “Where are they?”

  Ramona wore a blank expression as she mentally retraced her steps back from the living room into the kitchen. “The kitchen stove. On top of the stack, in a cake pan.”

  Logan made his way along a path cleared wide enough to accommodate his obese mother and entered the kitchen. Then he stood on a chair, felt around in the topmost pan, retrieved the cigarettes, ashtray, and Zippo, got down, and returned to his mother. With a shaky hand, Ramona knocked a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and took a deep drag.

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “Your Uncle Wendall. You don’t remember him. He came to see MawMaw before she met her eternal reward.”

  Ramona always used that expression when she talked about death. Even when Logan’s hamster died—lost and forgotten and crushed by a tipped dresser, she had told him Hambidextrous, nicknamed Dex, had gone on to his eternal reward, which Logan pictured as a shiny wheel to run laps on, endless Evian on tap to quench his thirst, wood shavings from a million pencils for bedding, and a boatload of sunflower seeds, walnuts, and sliced apples anytime he needed a nibble.

  But Ramona was wrong about Logan not remembering his Uncle Wendall, who, when MawMaw was on her deathbed, took him aside and taught him a song that went, “This old man, he played one, He played knick-knack on my thumb; With a knick-knack paddy-whack, Give a dog a bone, This old man came rolling home.” After memorizing the song all the way to ten and singing it together, they went outside and threw a big plastic ball Uncle Wendell had brought with him in his big white Cadillac.

  It was easy to remember a man who was kind enough to spend time with him, a man with a warm smile and an easygoing manner who smelled of tropical cologne instead of stale cigarettes and beer. When Wendall gave him a hug, Logan whispered, “Uncle Coconuts” in his ear, and the man was delighted. He laughed heartily, which empowered Logan to grab him again so he could share his secret.

  “You should stay here,” he whispered. “This place is Crazy Town.”

  Logan’s uncle raised an eyebrow. “That bad, eh?”

  Logan threw his arms around him and clung to him, not wanting to let him go. Ramona saw this through the front screen door, started to holler, and Logan and Wendall broke apart, startled.

  But Logan’s dysfunctional family life at the time of MawMaw’s passing paled in comparison to how bad things finally got. It was a time of transition from bad to worse, before Ramona began buying everything she wanted from flea markets, online auctions, and swap meets, before the house started filling up with garbage, before Ramona’s smoking increased from a pack a day to three, before she buried the stovetop with old pots and pans and stopped cooking regularly, and before Jarrod found reasons not to be home while his wife smothered her broken emotions with things, things, and more things that piled up, sagged the floorboards, made their home a dump, and threatened to eclipse them all.

  Chapter 20

  The lyrics floated from Ryan’s room, from beneath the locked door, through the gap between the wood and frame not wide enough to slip a letter through, and they pierced Zella’s heart. Putting pictures on the wall, can’t believe they never fall. Don’t believe I know them all. Who was I way back when? Sick and wrapped in torn sheets as the streets were flowing red, mangled, shredding at their feet, haloes glowing round their heads, I was lying in defeat, badly broken, nearly dead. Can you help me? Can you help? That was all I said.

  Zella shuddered, took a deep breath, and knocked. The music stopped. Inside his room, still decorated like Ariel the mermaid’s fantasy pad, Ryan fell silent. Zella tried the door handle.

  “Just a minute, Mom.”

  She heard the bedsprings creak as Ryan got up. He opened the door a crack and peered out at her. “What’s up?”

  Ryan was now sixteen, a junior in high school, dealing with an emotionally absent father and friends who were into drugs.

  “Can I come in?”

  He opened the door wide enough for her to pass through. She took a seat at his desk and turned to face him as he flopped down onto his bed and nudged his guitar with his foot so it was out of the way. He grew more handsome as each year passed, his dark hair thick and wavy, his skin unblemished, his eyes the clearest blue, his nose as classic as that of Michelangelo’s David, his jaw strong, his bottom lip so full it looked Botoxed.

  “I heard you’re going out with your father to see a house after school tomorrow to see how he works, what he does.”

  “Yeah. We’ve been arguing. I’m going to see if we can reach common ground.”

  “That’s very mature of you. Sounds like something a parent would say. Have you been talking to Mr. Edwin?”

  Ryan closed his eyes. He hadn’t had a good, long talk with the Edwins since the night Bea kissed Kincaid. It was as if the closeness they once shared was as insignificant now as the dust motes floating between the open slats on his shuttered bedroom windows. Neither had he been over to their house, despite its proximity to his own, though he did see the Edwins in their yard from time to time, and his mother was right—it was Mr. Edwin who had told him to make an effort with his dad before things became irreparable. Mrs. Edwin still asked him to dinner whenever she spotted him outside, but Ryan always declined. Instead, he spent his free time with three buddies who liked to get high, listen to music, and use fake IDs so they could get into nightclubs on weekends.

  “Was that a new song you wrote?”

  Despite the fact he was lying down, Ryan managed to shrug. “I’m not so sure about writing songs anymore. I haven’t been inspired for a long time now.”

  “But you’re a natural performer,” Zella protested. “Just like me.”

  Ryan sat up. “You had fun, huh?”

  “Did you know I still have a trunkful of magic stuff I never showed you? It’s in the rafters over the workbench. Come on, come outside with me and help me pull it down.”

  Curious, Ryan got up and followed his mom out of his room, down the stairs, and out to the garage. Using a ladder, he brought down the dusty silver trunk she specified, and together, they dragged it into the backyard, past Nana, fast asleep by the pool, next to her water bowl. Facing each other, they took lawn chairs at opposite ends of the latched trunk, and Ryan took a deep breath. Then Zella unfastened the lid, threw it back, and they both peered inside.

  Chapter 21

  Things were going downhill fast at the Lockhart home. In full avoidance mode, Jarrod spent more time away, chroming bumpers and selling drugs, only coming home to see if his wife and son were alive—if miserable—and had a few dollars to spend before he headed out again. Bagging drifts of accumulated goods like fallen leaves and putting them out at the curb had backfired. That week, Ramona hauled a Hefty bag back inside, dumped it out, and began to scream as she held up a plastic container of baby powder.

  She shook the container for emphasis, and it rattled. “Do you see this?”

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bsp; Jarrod’s hands were in fists at his hips, and his face was haggard. “What?”

  She sat on the edge of a set of Rubbermaid drawers and unscrewed the lid to the container, dumping the contents into her pudgy open palm. “Look!”

  Costume jewelry and rings with synthetic stones she had bought on QVC filled her hand and spilled over onto a pile of magazines stacked on the rug. She looked like a pirate sifting through gold doubloons. “This one I got last year, this one I got when MawMaw died, and this one I got just last month.”

  She held up a ring embedded with tourmaline chips, and Jarrod took it from her.

  “What is that, green bottle glass?”

  She screamed and snatched it away. “No!”

  “Who keeps their jewelry in an old baby powder container?”

  “I do! What if someone broke in and robbed us?”

  A vein throbbed on Jarrod’s forehead. “They’d never find it in this landfill!”

  “That’s right! Because everything precious is hidden in something unexpected! The first thing burglars would look for is a jewelry box!”

  Jarrod willed himself to calm down. Then, as though a switch had been flipped, he shrugged and walked to the door, looking wasted, thin, and as dirty as his son.

  “I gotta go.”

  He cast a rueful look at Logan, who stood there in gray long johns, holding a dog-eared issue of Spider-Man. On the cover, against a yellow sky, Spider-Man traversed between buildings, his right foot forward. The comic was ripped in the corner. The superhero was missing his non-web shooting hand that should have been in the upper right-hand corner.

  As Jarrod went out the front door, he let the screen door bang.

  Ramona dumped her jewelry back into the powder canister.

  “Logan, go latch that.”

  Dutifully, Logan did as told. Then, he had an idea. “Mom, you know how MawMaw’s room is the only place in the house that’s clean?”

  Ramona scoffed. “I don’t keep a dirty house.”