Amy Burns

Homes

When Jenny Gurley was fourteen her father moved the family to Louisiana to start a business installing above-ground pools. By August, her father had only ‘mounted’ two pools, her mother was getting nervous because the savings was running out, and her grandfather was constantly on the phone asking her mother, “Why’d you marry that stupid son-of-a-bitch?”

When the money was all but gone they rented a white, clapboard house, only two miles outside of town but as good as twenty. There were five rooms in total, put together about as soundly as a sinking ship. The yard flooded frequently, and when July’s power bill came in at $322.18 her father said no more air conditioning. They kept the windows open and mosquitoes slipped through tattered screens. The summer of 1983 ran long, and Jenny spent weeks of it sleeping on sweat-soaked bedsheets and trying not to scratch cherry-red mosquito bites.

By November Jenny’s mother had had enough of Louisiana and she told her husband so. He wasn’t bothered. He was staying out nights and sleeping with Karla, a woman who drew flat beer out of dirty taps for a living. By Christmas Jenny and her mom were back in Birmingham and settled under the hung ceiling and fluorescent lights of her grandparents’ basement. The atmosphere around the house was one of ‘I told you so.’

Jenny wanted to be left alone. She didn’t really like for people to touch her, except for Michael, who lived next door and who, by early February, had managed to ‘do it’ to Jenny four times. Michael said it was good but Jenny wasn’t sure, and when she told him she didn’t want to do it any more he told her that was fine because everybody at school was making fun of him for fucking her in the first place.

In early April somebody in her grandfather’s Bible study class decided it was only right to tell him what they knew. What they knew was that Michael had been seduced by Jenny. The grandfather went ballistic. He never addressed Jenny directly but he brought down a hell-fire attack on her mother. They went at it for days, screaming and crying, and Jenny, hearing every word, refused to come out of the basement, even to eat. Her grandfather wouldn’t let her mother take anything down to her either -- he wanted Jenny to come up and face him. Jenny rationed a Snickers bar she had in her purse and sipped sparingly from a flat, hot Sunkist that she found half full in the trash.

After a week of this Jenny stole eighty bucks out of her mother’s wallet and took off. She got on a bus and went back to Louisiana. Apparently her father had ditched the idea of pool installation and had started a new business. There was a handwritten sign in the front yard and he’d painted the words Day or Night Locksmith on the side of his truck. Jenny knocked on the door and a woman answered wearing little of nothing and holding a frying pan full of scrambled eggs.

They looked at each other for a long time before the woman said, “Hey, you hungry?”

Amy Burns is a writer and editor currently living in Alabama where she taps away at the keyboard all day -- spinning yarns and tall tales, ghostwriting for the masses and editing a new literary journal called unbound press -- all the while humming “Oh Susanna,” unfortunately out of tune. You can email Amy here.