Post #5: Boxes on Boxes

He’d always had the worst handwriting. No wonder Officer Conway’s people didn’t know what it read. Not that it would’ve served them much purpose anyways. She’d be keeping that picture, instead of allocating it into one of the bins for disposal of some sort.

Donna had decided to clean out some of the stuff — stacks of miscellaneous papers and books, old clothes that the kids had outgrown or left behind or that she herself had no occasion to wear anymore — piling up around the apartment, sorting them into garbage bags or bins for donation to the Salvation Army. She’d enlisted Nina to try and sell some of the bigger stuff — electrical appliances, chairs and pillows, toys and tools — on online marketplaces.

There was a knock at the door. Donna looked at her watch.

“Come in Bea,” she called to the entrance. “I’ll be right out.”

Bea liked to stop by for a couple minutes when she came by with the mail.

“Are you moving out or something?”

“No,” Donna replied. “Not at the moment, at least.”

“What’s with all the boxes then?”

“Just cleaning some of this stuff out. I don’t need a whole lot of it since the kids don’t live here anymore.”

Donna hadn’t told anyone yet, but she’d been thinking she didn’t really need the space in this apartment anymore either.

“This is a lot of rooms for just one woman though,” Donna continued. “I have been thinking about downsizing, even if that means just moving back down to the second floor.”

“People on this floor would never get their mail if you did that!” Bea was laughing. “But I was worried you might be moving out of the building, I’m glad to hear that’s not what’s going on.”

She headed towards the door.

“Alright, I’m gonna finish the route then head back to my little room.”

“See you later Bea.” Donna closed the door behind her.

Truth was, she was considering moving out of the building. She’d gotten an offer for a managerial position at another one of Grumble Bee’s locations in town, and it seemed to her like the last of her roots at the Foxberry would be more or less cut off if she made the switch. After all, Nina and Tommy weren’t at Columbia Middle or High just a few blocks away, and she had no family here.

What Donna did have left in Apt. 602 was memories, many of which took some sort of shape in the very items and papers she was sorting for disposal.

Post #4

The frogs had forced Grumble Bee to close only a few minutes after she got there in the morning.
Donna enjoyed working there much more than she did her job at the gas station. She’d been working 
there for the better part of a decade so she had the respect of the younger employees and some 
managerial responsibilities. Her bosses were good people: the Godwin’s. A married couple who’d
just recently moved away from the neighborhood and closer to their franchise’s two other locations, 
they’d helped her navigate the relationship with Officer Conway and his people when Tommy had his 
run-ins with them.

Donna often thought she’d be better off dropping the job at the gas station: the shifts were terrible 
and lonely. But she worried she’d never leave the neighborhood if she did that, and it was that same 
sense of wanting to get away some that drove her to initially follow the frogs which were parading away 
from the river.

Some folks were trying to carry them back to the water, but when she went to pick one up, it hopped 
away from her hands. She walked alongside the trail of green beasts heading east, away from their 
homes downstream of the old Glenn plant. They’d said they’d be cleaning that area up when the plant 
closed some years ago, but if even these slimiest of creatures couldn’t stand the water anymore, she 
figured the river was soiled beyond repair. If the frogs had been there for the meetings and 
announcements posted around the Foxberry that Glenn Electric had put in place when they withdrew, 
they’d feel the righteous sense of violation many of the plant’s former employees felt to this day.

As she walked with them, they continued to avoid her. They left a gap in their file at the level where 
she walked alongside, but would gladly brush other passers by. It did really seem like it was just her 
they didn’t want to come in contact with.

I’m not responsible for the destruction of your home, she thought. That broken promise wasn’t mine 
to keep.

Maybe they felt her guilt though, and assumed she must be the one to blame for their troubles: 
animals, like children, sometimes understood what they couldn’t articulate, sensed when something 
was off even when they couldn’t possibly conceive the gravity of a situation.

She wanted to follow them to the place they’d go because their old life wasn’t viable anymore; 
see what they’d do now that the time for cleaning up and making amends was over and a saga was 
irreversibly closed; would they end up coming back to the same place, stuck on the injustice of their 
home’s contamination? She remembered she had some papers to square away, for the rent due by 
the week’s end. So she turned around and headed home, turning off the path of exodus as soon as 
she could to put out of sight the victims of a past left unsettled.

Post #3

It was already 9:15; Donna should’ve been at Grumble Bee over an hour ago. Officer Conway had taken his sweet time coming in though, and then she could imagine that Regan was talking his ears off.

She saw her walking out. She had her head down and was taking quick strides, and didn’t even acknowledge her next door neighbor waiting in the hall. “Regan’s definitely ready to get out of here,” Donna thought.

Donna headed over to Conway’s office near the back of the station. She was familiar with the room. When Tommy was on probation, she’d go in and meet with Officer Conway every couple of weeks to make sure there weren’t any snags. Boy, Tommy had some real problems with authority.

Officer Conway’s personality hadn’t really helped either at first. He always had to come off as the biggest man in the room: that’s why he set up his office to intimidate people who’d gotten summons: he was a big man in that big chair in the darkened room, blocking the light from the window.

“Hey Donna,” he said as he moved back to open the blinds up. “You read the summons right?”

They’d come to know each other though, through Tommy’s ordeals, and Donna realized that he was in fact more devoted to his profession, and later on to those he was meant to “Protect and Serve,” than he let off.

“I did. But I don’t think I can be of much help. I hadn’t talked to him in several years — I wouldn’t know about his health situation.”

“Yes, but…” the officer seemed to search for the right thing to say. “We’re trying to find out all we can about the man.”

“I’m guessing it doesn’t have to do with ‘heart failure’ then, does it.”

“Right. So I know that you were close with him for a long time. Y’all grew up together, is that right? And he moved over to this side after Tommy was born. Ms. Reed said she remembers him going in and out of your house often on weekends when she was younger but that she hadn’t seen him on the 600 floor for several years now.”

“Indeed.”

“So… you were good friends with Mr. Evans?”

“Yes, Officer,” Donna said. She moved the chair back and stood up. “Again, i hadn’t had a conversation with the man in years, I don’t see how I could be of use to you.”

“Well, hold on a minute then, Donna. We found this in his wallet in between some cards, and a couple others like it. We couldn’t really make out what it was but I thought you might shed some light on what it was.”

He handed her a small, fading picture. Must’ve been about two and a half by four inches big, and on it was a woman with her arms around two kids on the edge of adolescence. A boy and a girl. A taller man was cut off by the left edge of the picture.

“Yes,” Donna said. “That’s me and… Mr. Evans and my family. I… “ her voice trailed off. She picked up her purse. “Could I take this with me?”

“I... s’pose so,” the Officer replied. “We don’t have much use for it here. There’s something written on the back too but I couldn’t make sense of much of it besides a date. And bein’ that far back, it wouldn’t help us with anything.”

“Thank you then Officer.” Donna turned towards the door, holding the picture at her chest. She turned it over in her hands.

“Birthday 1981. Dee, Ma, and Me,” it read. “At Home.”

Post #2

Donna accepted the call.

“Hey mama!”

Nina’s voice was a welcome sound.

“Hi honey. How’d your classes go this week? You feeling all better?”

Nina had come home for the long weekend last week because, supposedly, she’d been
feeling under the weather. But Donna could tell that she’d been more homesick than anything
else. And about ready for a break from her roommate.

She listened to Nina talk for a while. She went on about her Physics class and all that the
concepts that she had to learn before the “midterms.” Most of what her daughter was
describing was going straight over Donna’s head. She herself had never gone to college;
she’d just continued helping her mother with the daycare’s operations for the year after high
school.

“I saw something on one of my Colombia friends’ Twitter about someone dying in our complex,”
Nina said. “What happened?”

“I’m… not sure,” Donna responded stoically. “They found a man dead in the parking lot a few
days ago. Do you remember Mr. Evans?”

“Yeah… he used to stop by for dinner sometimes or something like that, right?”

“Yeah Nina, something like that,” Donna responded.

Nina had a club event she was getting ready to go to, so the two bid each other goodbye and
Donna sat back in the kitchen chair.

“Or something like that,” she thought. “He used to come most every Sunday after church!”

For a couple hours in the afternoon, he would help her with whatever needed fixing or
maintenance around the apartment, and he’d entertain Tommy and Nina with stories and
games while she made dinner for the four of them. Sometimes he’d stay later after the kids
went to sleep, especially in the first couple of years when she was figuring out how to manage
the kids on her own. But later on, as their relations headed south, the time came where the
chair opposite Donna at the kitchen table was never occupied during those Sunday dinners.

Donna hadn’t spoken with him in years now. Their falling out had left her bitter, and though
she’d be intermittently bothered by the unspoken, unclarified truths between them, that was
nothing compared to her experience these past two days. Every aspect of her everyday life
seemed to remind her of their suspended past, that, now, she’d never get to attempt to reboot.

Post #1

The previous day had never really ended, it seemed. Her current work schedules
made the last couple of days each week real tough: she worked the graveyard shift
over at the gas station downtown from 9 Thursday evening until 3, then rode the bus
back to its stop near the Park and walked to the Foxberry, where she hopefully would
get a few hours of sleep before her 8 A.M. shift at Grumble Bee.

This past night, though, she got no rest at all. She was worrying about Tommy, as usual.
It was Nina who’d left just earlier that week, but Donna wasn’t worried about that. No, her
daughter had always had a head on her shoulders: shoot, that’s how she got to be one
of the three Colombia High kids in her class going to State on scholarships. She knew
Nina’d call over the weekend as they’d arranged.

But Tommy? Donna hadn’t heard from Tommy in a few weeks now. The last she knew
he was still staying across town with that girlfriend of his, working at the garage. He was
in a better place than he had been but Donna knew from experience how quickly things
could turn South with Tommy.

Maybe now that Nina had moved out she’d go back to a smaller apartment. Rent was
cheaper down there and she would be able to drop a couple shifts at the station and hopefully
get better sleep.

Had Donna not been working the graveyard shift, she probably would've been home when
Mrs. Rose from down the hall came knocking with news of Mr. Evans' passing. But now as
she listened to the 7 o'clock news while preparing the coffee, she heard the anchor read out
a headline that shot through her heart.

"Yesterday evening a middle-aged man was found dead in the parking lot of the Foxberry
apartment building near the power plant. Mr. Evans, a long-time resident of the complex, was
deemed to have suffered a heart attack and died before medical help arrived."