The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck

Author:Dale Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Mischief + Mayhem Publishing

CLAUDIA EXPRESSED NO SURPRISE when I told her she could move in. She didn’t seem very enthused for that matter, merely nodded at her aunt—the door to Nellydean’s apartment stood open when I descended the stairs, and their low voices carried into the stairwell—and then we took the phone downstairs to Nellydean’s office and looked up the name of a moving service in the yellow pages.

“Kevin From Heaven.” Claudia’s fingernail drew a wobbly crease under his name. “I like rhymes.”

When we got back with her stuff Claudia attacked my mother’s old apartment with the kind of industry only the truly idle can muster. Away went the silver dress, out came the 50s, a pair of jeans with a fifty-inch waistband Claudia cinched in with a Gucci belt, “’Cause the girl got to look good no matter what she doin’.” Over the jeans she wore a faded blue T-shirt, “Reggie’s,” she told me, and at first I thought she meant the shirt but then I saw she was pointing at something that looked suspiciously like a come stain. She tied a do-rag with the knot over her forehead, “Mammy style or gangland style, depending on your point-a reference,” pulled on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, grabbed a mop and declared, “Sistah’s gone do some cleanin’ now. Yassuh, sistah’s gone make this here dust bucket shine like nobody’s bizness.”

I left her then, headed upstairs to get my own apartment ready. But a half hour later I was back. I thought I’d see if Claudia had any pot—thought maybe that would calm the visions that danced before my eyes, or at least give me an excuse for them. But in the sparkling living room I found only a bucket of oily gray water: neither Claudia nor her mop was anywhere to be seen.

“Claudia?” I called, wandering to the back bedrooms. But the only sign of her was the boxes we’d brought in earlier.

I lifted the flaps on a couple. Her clothes smelled faintly of perfume, as did her bed linens, and her own face smiled at me from every one of the pictures she’d brought. Most were of her and someone I assumed was Reggie, but there were a few family shots as well. She was darker than her brothers, I saw, who favored the light-skinned, fragile-looking woman who figured in only one sun-blanched Polaroid. It had been taken in the garden behind the shop, and Nellydean was in the picture as well, as agelessly old then as she was now, a slight scowl on her face. The three teenagers were ranged between the two women like a bulwark, and I had to wonder if the old bag had ever liked anyone besides her niece.

Suddenly my mind flashed on the mantle in Claudia’s father’s study: Claudia had told me both her brothers were dead, but beside her mother’s brass urn there had only been the one other. I looked at the two boys in the picture again, wondered if their ashes were

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