The Anniversary

Daniel stood at Rhona's door with a flowerpot in his hands. He rocked back on his heels, testing the wood. It gave under his weight and bounced him back; the wood was strong, but Rhona hadn't cleaned and sealed it this spring, and now in July it was too hot. He hugged the fern, and it stirred all around him, a thing all legs and hands in the dusk; fronds crawled on his neck like centipedes. He couldn't reach the doorbell, so he knocked on the screen door with the side of his foot.

Rhona's footsteps passed in the back of the house. He tracked her from room to room by the changing tone of her shoes on the floors he had laid, slate in the kitchen, hardwood in the living room, but the walls were as thin as ever. "Olivia, get the door!" she called, and in response, the television in the front room grew louder: fast music, an insincere scream.

"Olivia!" Rhona called again, and then she opened the door herself, with a pan of macaroni in her left hand, the cheese a drift of orange powder on the milk. Her hair was braided, loose around her ears like a bird's wings but tightly twisted halfway down her back.

"You're giving them mac and cheese for dinner? Again?"

"Hey." She pushed the door back and caught it open against her shoulder so she could stir the powder into the milky noodles. "It's a buck for three boxes at the salvage grocery. You want your kids to eat steak, talk to the guy who's three months behind on child support." She pulled her mouth to one side in mock puzzlement. "Who could that be, now I wonder?"

"There's no work."

"I'm working." She peered through the fern at Daniel's face. "Ten hours a day at the gas station, selling lottery tickets and energy drinks and herbal Viagra. Sometimes even gas. You can't be here. It's not your weekend."

"You could at least put tuna in it."

"What do you want?"

Today was the day the two of them had been divorced for as long as they'd been married: three years and seventeen days. Some kind of crazy anniversary, that was. He wanted to ask her if she knew, if she remembered. He wanted to check up on things. Rhona, the house, the kids. He held the fern out to her and she took it.

"This was on the porch," he said.

"That's where I put it."

"You can't put plants on the porch. It'll rot the wood. Look." He pointed to the mark the flowerpot had left, a black spongy circle on the porch floor. "You can't do that."

Rhona set the macaroni down on the table, on top of a stack of junk mail and pizza flyers. She took the fern from him and knelt to fit it into its black spot, perfectly aligned. He looked down at the back of her neck, white underneath the mahogany rope of her hair. Her neck was well-made, the tendons standing up strongly on either side of the pale hollow where the skull hinged onto the spine. He used to rub her neck and shoulders, finding the roots of those same tendons and circling them with his thumbs. She would sigh and fall backward into his body. That was a long time ago.

Rhona stood up, wiping her hands on the bathrobe. "It's my house," she said. "You can't be here."

"Can I talk to the kids?"

"Sure. Talk all you want. Next weekend."

Rhona shut the door. The latch turned, then the deadbolt. Three years and seventeen days. She'd changed the locks but nothing else. The trim around the door was flaking, the carriage lamp was full of dead moths. Daniel got into his old truck, wincing as always at the noise it made going from first to second gear - that lurching unready moment, when more and more often the engine would stall out, leaving him halfway through an intersection, or rolling silently backward down a hill. This time it shifted, and he accelerated up Roberts Mill Road, where seventy years ago all these little houses had been as neat and alike as wooden blocks.

He'd made a set of wooden blocks for Olivia when she was a baby, but she chewed all the paint off one of them, and Rhona took them all away. He'd made a wooden train for Little Danny, and the kid got a splinter in his palm. For Christmas last year, he'd bought them that big Sony TV they were watching now, with the volume turned up so loud they couldn't even hear their own daddy's voice at the door. The TV made the front window blue, the brightest window on the street.

Roberts Mill Road, so brisk and pretty in the pictures Rhona's grandmother had shown him before she passed, was broken and empty now. Half the houses were rotting shells, some of them boarded up, others empty-windowed and roofless to the sky, home to bats and locusts. Most of the people who lived there were the people who'd stayed when the mill closed in the 1980s, old people who'd spent ten years waiting for the mill to open again and then, when they gave up hope, twenty more years waiting to die. People said the mill was sold for condos and office space, but people were always saying that, and the kudzu grew thicker as the window-glass crumbled away.

Daniel slowed at the corner of Roberts Mill and Highway 13, where the last three mill houses in the row showed signs of life. A big blue dumpster stood in front of the middle house, full of gray carpet, long splinters of baseboard and quarter-round. Light poured from every window on the house on the left, the bare bright glow of working light, and Daniel watched as two men in white overalls and facemasks carried a sheet of dirty drywall out and heaved it into the dumpster. His sister's boyfriend's Dodge was parked in front of the third house; so Morley was working late, and Denise was alone. Daniel turned left and drove to Denise's house.

"Go away," she said, but held the door open as he walked in.

"Got a beer?"

"Mama will kill me if I give you a drink. She'll rip me into fluffy little shreds and tie me to a mop handle and clean the floor with me. Go away."

Daniel's father was a drunk who had left his wife with two small children and a mortgage thirty years ago. Officially they were still married, and every now and then he showed up, damaged, broke, and swear-to-God sober; over the years he'd stolen six cars from her, and thousands of dollars in carefully hoarded cash, and all the jewelry she'd ever owned, even the silver necklace with her name written on a grain of rice. When Daniel asked her why she didn't just divorce him, she clasped her hands. "Seventy times seven is what the Lord said." She'd acted as if Daniel were an alcoholic ever since he was thirteen, smelling his breath, and taking soda cans from his hand to taste the contents.

Denise took Daniel into the kitchen and gave him a bottle of something that looked like Budweiser. Morley brewed his own beer, using recycled bottles. This batch was dark and grainy.

"He's been putting coffee in it," Denise said. "Trying to make it hangover-proof. You know, the coffee's built in."

"Does it work?"

"Not so much. You get real wasted, but then you don't pass out. You just stay awake and get drunker. Typical Morley plan if you ask me."

He drank. It tasted worse than it looked, but at least it was beer.

"So Mama called, told me about the carpet," Denise said.

The coffee grounds grated against his teeth. "It was time."

He'd moved home again after the divorce, back to the old farmhouse ten miles north of the Roberts Mill. His parents had never farmed, but his father had bought the place planning to sell the land for thousands an acre when the developers came. It was beautiful flat land, easy access to Highway 13. Perfect for a strip mall, apartments, a small subdivision - even if the county bought them out to build an exit ramp, they'd make money. But then the mill closed, the developers never came, and the mortgage chained to the McCulloughs to the land they didn't know how to work.

They leased their fields to a farming cooperative that grew cantaloupes, their pasture to a neighbor who had tried a variety of livestock over the years and had just discovered emus. They were hell's own poultry, as smart as a stupid dog, with a way of kicking through fences and climbing gates. Whenever they got loose, they headed for the farmhouse, where they followed Daniel's mother from room to room with expressions of lifelong devotion. Or maybe they were threatening her. With emus, it was hard to tell - those bugged-out eyes could mean anything - and it was hard on the carpet too. Daniel had found a deal on berber remnants and had spent the whole day yesterday, while his mother was working at the daycare, replacing the carpet in her living room.

She had thrown him out. There was nothing wrong with the carpet, she said. She was going to rent a carpet steamer, she didn't want him spending money on her when he was behind on child support, she didn't want people doing things to her house, the carpet was blue and she hated it. If he could work so hard where he wasn't wanted, let him go and get a real job instead of asking other people to buy birthday presents for his kids.

There were no jobs in Roberts Mill, a town named after a thing that was dead. It had never been a real town, only a place for people to sleep between shifts at the mill. He could leave. He couldn't remember why he'd never left, or why Denise was still here. Back in high school, she'd said that Roberts Mill was a pimple in the armpit of America. Yet here she was, in a double-wide in the shadow of the mill, driving twenty-five miles each way to cook in a middle school down in Greeneburg. Working all day just to keep herself in gas money. "This is the worst beer I ever drank," he said.

"Want another?"

She opened one for him, and then one more as Morley came in with a pizza box. Drywall dust powdered his hair white, and he had a red welt on the bridge of his nose, where his safety goggles had pinched. He collapsed expressively in a chair - Morley was a long tall man, and his body seemed to have more moving parts than other people's - and said, "Mold. Don't ask."

"You're working on three mill houses?" Daniel asked.

Morley opened the pizza box, took two pieces and layered them, toppings together. He pushed the box toward Daniel. "Heard your mama threw you out."

"Yeah, whatever. You try to do something nice for someone."

"See, there's your first mistake. Nobody wants nice."

"Can I crash here?"

Denise said "Yes" and Morley said "No" at the same moment. They looked at each other. "For tonight," Morley said.

"A week," Denise said.

Morley nodded. "A week. No more. You got work?"

Daniel laughed darkly. "Work, he says. Like that happens."

"The mill's sold."

"Yeah, and there's money in emus."

"It's sold. Almost for sure, is what I heard. Condos and offices. Look, the county's growing, right? It can't grow south, there's no room, Woodland Road's a parking lot -"

"Nobody goes there any more," Denise said softly, "it's too crowded." She laughed to herself and opened another beer.

"So it's got to come this way. All of it, the people, the money. Up Highway 13. And there's some federal money in it, I seen yellow hats and white hats walking around, it's happening this time, happening for sure. There's work. More work than we can do."

Daniel nodded. "That's why we won't be doing it. They'll hire some big guy from Atlanta. We'll get nothing. Maybe crumbs."

"Sure. But those are some damn big crumbs. So I picked up those three houses for almost nothing, there's no payment due on the loan for three months, got to turn them around quick. Getting them cleaned out now, plumbing and electric in a couple weeks, and I'm hiring floor guys. You want in?"

"Hardwood?"

"In those bait shacks? You're kidding, right? Laminate. Fifteen bucks an hour, cash money, starting on the seventeenth. You in?"

Another beer, and Daniel was in; Morley pulled out a notebook full of sketches and diagrams, and the two of them laid out floor plans for the three houses on Roberts Mill Road. All of them had to be gutted. Morley planned to keep them simple, with laminate floors and cream-white semigloss, but he'd invest in energy-efficient windows and wiring that would support a business. He thought one could be a coffee bar or maybe an internet café, and the other two could be little stores. The office workers in the renovated Roberts Mill would come down there on their lunch break, and spend money, "and then we can buy five or six more mill houses," Morley said, "we can build our own strip mall, a couple houses at a time."

"I'm broke," Daniel said. "I can't buy in."

"You work for me and I'll give you one third of the take."

"A quarter," Denise said.

Morley went out to the shed he had built to house his beer, and brought back six Foster's bottles, which he had filled with a pale brew flavored with orange peel. It looked like champagne and tasted so much like industrial solvent, Daniel had to go out for some air. He decided to drive back to Roberts Mill Road to look at his new investments and tell Rhona the good news - he would be rich, they would all be rich, Little Danny could have a Nintendo and an iPad too, and Olivia could have whatever she wanted. He didn't know what Olivia wanted. She was six. What did six-year-old girls want? He'd have to wake her up and ask.

His truck wouldn't start, God's way of telling him he was too drunk to drive, so he went back in for another bottle of coffee beer and told Denise he was going home.

"Mama won't let you in," she said.

"Home," he said.

But Rhona's house wasn't his home; the judge gave it to Rhona in the divorce, every inch, because she'd inherited it from her grandmother. Never mind that Daniel had built the extension when Olivia was born, a new bedroom with a screened porch so the baby would have someplace to play without being eaten up by mosquitoes; and he'd expanded the extension when Little Danny came along, adding another bedroom with a bathroom between them. The front porch, he'd built that too, along with the swing set and the sandbox with the rolltop cover so that the stray cats wouldn't soil it. He'd replaced every inch of floor in the original house, not to mention the windows. The carport, he'd built that; Rhona's was the only house on the street with a carport. For all of that, he got nothing, less than nothing; he got to pay two-fifty a month child support, half the debt for the Camry which Rhona still drove, and permission to take his kids home every other weekend. And now he didn't even have a place to take them, unless his mother took him back.

He stopped at the corner of Roberts Mill Road, surprised to see it so dark. He and Morley planned to put old-fashioned streetlights in, with big flower-baskets hanging from them in summer, and Christmas wreaths in the winter; some of the old mill houses would be little cafes and bars, and they'd knock two of them together to make a space for a big restaurant, Red Lobster or Applebee's; they wouldn't wait for developers, they would be developers themselves. So the darkness of the street startled him, and the caffeine from the last beer hummed in his blood.

He didn't know how late it was, but the fingernail moon was high and far, and Roberts Mill was a starless mass eating up half the sky. South and east, thin clouds hung low, catching and reflecting the lights of Greeneburg, a halo of money over the city. Someday the night sky would shine over Roberts Mill . . . But his humming blood said no, no, never. He had worked before, worked hard with all his strength, and all he got for it was debt, and children who did nothing but complain when he took them home every other weekend to their grandmother's house, because her TV was too small and she didn't get their favorite channels.

"Who bought you that TV, the one you watch at home?" he asked them.

Little Danny hugged his knees, but Olivia, sly as her mother said, "A TV's no good without channels. Mom says she'll have to cancel cable if you don't pay child support. No more Nickelodeon," she said with her eye on Little Danny, "no more Cartoon Network. No more Clone Wars and Scooby-Doo."

Little Danny wailed; Daniel's kids didn't play with the sandbox and the swing set he'd made for them, they only watched TV. They knew how to get to Sesame Street, and who lived in a pineapple under the sea; but when he tried to teach Little Danny to drive a nail, the kid dropped the hammer on his foot and broke his big toe.

Rhona sent the hospital bill to Daniel. It came last week, almost nine hundred dollars, and it didn't even include the cost of the X-ray. Daniel had broken a toe when he was little, trying to jump his bike over a ditch. His grandfather taped it up and it was good as new in a month. If he paid for Little Danny's toe, he couldn't get his truck fixed, and then he couldn't work, and Morley would get somebody else to lay his floors and hang his drywall.

If Rhona would lend him the money for the truck, if she would only let him sleep there for a couple weeks, till he was on his feet, if she would let him sleep on the couch. The idea of the couch filled him with resentment. He'd wanted to take it with him to his mother's house, but both Rhona and his mother refused. He'd always liked that couch. He'd brought it home from the Starr Motel when the county condemned the place; he'd hauled it into the house with no help from anybody, Rhona being seven months along with Olivia at the time. So what if it turned out to have bedbugs, and they had the house fumigated three times, and the pregnant Rhona went to live with her sister for a month. She had never appreciated everything he did for her.

It was a good couch, green velvet with a high carved back; it knew him well, it welcomed his body. He'd slept on it often enough, that last year of marriage. They'd probably made Little Danny on it. She couldn't keep him off his own couch, that wasn't right.

He was home. The blue television-light was gone from the windows, but the motion-sensitive carriage lamp flamed white as he climbed the steps. It was a hard climb, the porch seemed higher than usual and the top step caught his foot and made him stumble. A hundred little white moths circled the carriage lamp, and one big green one. He swatted it away.

He was home, his own house, where he had worked himself half to death making it nice for his kids. His home, where he paid for the TV and everything else. She couldn't keep him out, it wasn't right. He banged on the screen door. A light came on inside, and Rhona was at the door, tying her bathrobe. "You can't come in. I told you."

"I need to sleep here."

She didn't try to stop him, so he walked in and fell into the couch. A taste of orange revolved sickeningly in his throat. Damn Morley and his homemade beer. "I'm sleeping here," he said. "It's my couch. You can't take my couch away from me." If he could only sleep here, everything would make sense in the morning; just one night in the familiar place, that was all he needed. To be home again for a few hours, that couldn't be too much to ask.

"You can't be here." Rhona had the phone in her hands. "I'm calling the cops. Look, this is me calling 911. You'd better go."

He pulled the cushion under his head and closed his eyes. He heard Rhona on the phone: "Yes, there's a man in my house and he won't leave. Yes, I know who he is, he's my ex. He can't be here. You come and get him."

Daniel was on his feet again, and the orange-flavored thing spun up his throat and into his head. He blinked it down and reached for the phone. If he could just talk to Rhona, she would understand. The new streetlights, the restaurant, the light of money hanging low in the clouds. "Ma'am," said a woman's voice on the phone. "Ma'am, can you hear me?"

"She don't need help," Daniel said. "I'm just sleeping here is all."

"Daddy?" Olivia and Little Danny came into the living room from their extension. Little Danny wore the Scooby-Doo pajamas that Daniel's mother had bought for him, last visit when Rhona sent the kids with no clothes but what they wore; but Olivia had gone to bed in her clothes, and stood there in her favorite pink lacy dress and even in her shoes, blue eyeshadow over half her face and lipstick on her chin. She rubbed her eyes and her knuckles came away blue. "Daddy, why are you here?" she asked, and Little Danny didn't run to hug him, but clutched his sister's hand.

"I told you to wash your face," Rhona said to Olivia.

Olivia stuck out her tongue at her mother. She picked the remote off the coffee table and turned the television on, flicking through channels until she found cartoons; the theme music for The Simpsons drove its rhythm into the room.

Sirens raced down Roberts Mill Road, and blue and red lights chased each other across the ceiling; the whole street was alight. "Ma'am," said the telephone, "help is on the way."

Daniel threw the telephone with all his strength, right into the middle of Lisa Simpson's yellow face. Olivia screamed and Little Danny wept. "The TV, the TV," they sobbed, "Daddy broke the TV."

Hands grabbed Daniel from behind; a knee in his back forced him facedown into the couch, and the green velvet smelled of sour milk and dust. Cuffs snapped on his wrists. "You're going to jail," Rhona said, "this time you're going away," and he knew it was true. A cop's big hand kept his head in the green velvet, but out of the corner of his watering eyes, he saw his children, mourning over the broken television.

Sonja Condit Coppenbarger is a musician, writer and teacher in Greenville, South Carolina. She teaches at North Greenville University and the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, and plays bassoon in the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra. She is enrolled in the MFA program at Converse College. Some of her fiction has appeared on dewonthekudzu.com, spillinginkreview.com, lulu.com and etopia.com.