Sky Court, page 1
Sky Court
Circuit Breaker Books LLC
Portland, OR
www.circuitbreakerbooks.com
© 2022 by Faith Mosley
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Book design by Vinnie Kinsella
ISBN: 978-1-953639-14-1
eISBN: 978-1-953639-15-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942661
This book is dedicated to my brother,
Eric Brian Mosley
1965–2022
Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Part Two
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Part Three
Forty-Four
Acknowledgments
Share Your Opinion
About the Author
Part One
One
It was almost ten. The local radio station announced the big basketball game had ended. River City High was the winner, so I should have been celebrating with everybody else. Everybody else included the entire school and most of the town. Because this is a small town, people tend to get very excited about high school sports. I wasn’t celebrating, though. I was wiping down counters in the Wise Owl, the café I work at after school. This was a Friday night, so we stay open until eleven. Most nights I have to be home by nine because the Wise Owl closes at eight, but my grandfather lets me stay out just past eleven on Fridays because these are work hours. Those are his rules, and since I live in his apartment, I abide by his rules. Even though he is eighty-three and I’m seventeen, we’re a lot alike. We like plain clothes, KFC, and taking walks. We’re both kind of quiet people, so rooming with him has worked out pretty well.
I wiped down the counters slowly while listening to music on the radio and imagining my future life as a tugboat captain on the Mississippi. I imagine quiet days and nights pulling barges or breaking up thick chunks of frozen ice so the river boat gamblers can keep partying into the night. I’ve never seen a Black woman tugboat captain before. I wonder if I’d be the first one. I daydream a lot because my current life is not great. It’s not horrible, but it’s not really too interesting.
I started to put the chairs on top of the tables when the door swung open and a red-cheeked man staggered into the café and sat at the counter. He was sweating, which was weird because it was probably thirty degrees outside. His sandy hair stood up in all directions. He slurred his words. I had to lean in close to hear him.
“Just coffee,” he said. I poured him a cup of coffee and watched him closely. The phone was only ten feet from my hand, and I’m pretty fast. It’s not that he looked dangerous, but he definitely looked troubled, wild, possibly drunk. I was more curious than scared. I’m a real watcher of people. I like to walk the streets of River City and take in all that life has to offer—faces, shoes, clothes, ways of talking, desperate stares, interactions between people, people and pets…everything.
This man looked around the café with eyes darting everywhere, like he might need a quick getaway. We were near closing, and my boss, Andy Hardwick, was out on a break. I decided to be kind. He looked like he could use the comfort. I offered him the last slice of pie. It was lemon meringue, and I don’t like that kind of pie, so it was no problem offering it to this strange man. He accepted it and downed it in about four forkfuls. I refilled his coffee.
“Have you ever been in jail?” he asked. His plate was scraped clean, and he stared into my eyes.
“No,” I said.
“Well, I may be going there,” he said and sipped his coffee. His face relaxed after he said that, as if an enormous rock had been lifted off his chest. He started to cry and wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his ripped, down coat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I felt scared but nosy too.
The man leaned over the counter. His eyes pleaded for me to understand. I could smell his breath. It had a whiskey smell to it even after coffee and pie. I know the smell. My grandfather drinks whiskey on Friday nights. He says it’s a holdover from his working days when he’d celebrate weekends.
The man told me he’d been driving a box truck for work. He worked at some place in Galesburg, which is about sixty miles away. He’d been listening to the basketball game when he started out. About halfway to River City, we won, and he was excited and tired but wanted to celebrate because he went to River City High thirty years ago and even played basketball—which was almost hard to believe because he was pretty beefy. But he was also tall, so back then he’d probably been smaller. Anyway, he pulled over at a liquor store—The Pony Express—and bought a bottle of Wild Turkey. This was his way to celebrate. His eyes got big when he said this, and I refilled his coffee cup because I wanted to hear more from this strange man. He then said he sat in the cab of the truck and cranked the heat and just started tugging at the bottle trying to forget about his wife who had left him and taken his only friend on the planet, his seven-year-old daughter. He said he drank until it was hard to see, and then he started the truck back up and drove onto the road and just didn’t care what happened. He said it was almost like he wanted an accident. He said the snow had started by then, just a light beautiful snowfall that reminded him of the first snow when he was a kid in River City, before girlfriends and marriage and a kid and his wife leaving him, before a mortgage he couldn’t afford, before everything. He cried a bit as he unloaded all this on me, and I tried to follow it all. It was hard listening to this adult who had so much pain in one body.
I put on another pot of coffee and poured myself a bit because I didn’t want to miss any of his words. The man said the snow picked up quickly. I know he was right about that because it was still snowing. And it was beautiful. Even from inside a tiny café, the snow was beautiful.
The man said he was getting closer to River City when, for some reason, he took the turn off to the peak, which is what locals call the collection of rolling hills that overlook the river. It’s where kids park and make out. He said he just needed to see something or relive something—he didn’t know which. The turnoffs were all wet and soggy with the snow, and he slowed down in his big truck to be able to make the tight turns. He said he wanted to go to a spot that was secluded, a spot that he and his wife used to go to and fool around. He said he should have slowed down, but didn’t see the car in time and swiped it hard. He said the car slid down a hill, and he parked and ran through a curtain of snow to get to the driver’s side. He yanked open the door and found two teenagers in the front seat, two young men with letterman jackets on. He said their pants were down. Both of them had their pants down. He shut the door gently and called 911. He said he just wanted to get outta there. He didn’t want to have to explain any of this. It didn’t make sense, anyway, and he didn’t want to be connected to any of it. He’d given his name to the operator before he realized what he’d done, and that’s when he jumped in his truck and drove here.
“You believe me, kid?”
I didn’t know what to say. Luckily, I didn’t have to say anything. Two police officers entered the café.
“Are you Larry Dale?” the tall, gray-haired one asked. I recognized him, and he nodded to me in an official way.
“Yes, sir,” the man said.
“You reported an accident?”
“Yes, sir,” Larry said. His face was red again, and his hair looked bad even though he’d smoothed it down a bit as he talked. He looked at me with big, scared eyes. I just looked back at him. I didn’t know what to feel.
“Would you mind coming with us to the station? We need to get a statement.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. The three white men walked out of the café. “Thanks for the coffee,” Larry called out as the door closed behind him. I waved.
Just then, Andy came back from his break.
“What was that all about, Casey?” he asked, leaning over the counter but still staring at the door.
“The guy with the police accidentally hit a car,” I said.
“Oh. I was afraid he’d started trouble in the café.”
“No. Everything here is fin e.”
“Okay. Why don’t you knock off?”
“I haven’t mopped the floor yet.”
“Alberto can do it first thing. Go ahead on home.”
I said okay and got my coat and backpack from the storeroom. Andy was a pretty good boss. He was forty-seven and had firm opinions and a full head of gray hair. He said he started going gray in his twenties, that going gray early ran in his family. I liked that he didn’t seem to care. He’d often say, “These are the cards I was dealt.”
On my way home, all I could think about was Larry Dale and his story, which was more like a confession. His eyes and his hair. So many pent-up feelings. He was about thirty years older than me and had been through a lot, practically a war. I wondered if I would look so wild and desperate at forty-seven. Would I even get to that age? I looked up at the sky and opened my mouth and tried to taste the new soft snow that was falling.
Two
I sat alone at a table near the door and watched the popular kids laugh and talk, take pictures to post on social media, and throw food at each other. No one knew that the returning heroes of last Friday’s game, Trevor Morrison and Steve Jones, both sporting fresh white casts soon to be covered in signatures, had been found in Steve’s car with their pants at their ankles. Their car accident was big news, but there was no mention of how they were found. I knew because the man who hit them told me. I still wasn’t sure what it all meant, but when the excitement died down for a moment, I noticed a look. It was a subtle look from Trevor to Steve. I don’t know what it said, but it certainly said something.
Rowena Miller, who also sat alone, waved to me out of nowhere. I raised my hand at her and then turned to the window.
I eat alone because I don’t really have friends at River City High. I had a fun hangout buddy in my sophomore year, but she moved to St. Louis with her family. Most of the kids at this school have known each other since kindergarten. That’s small-town life. I didn’t show up here until freshman year. Until that time, I lived in Chicago. A few years before I moved here, my mom left a note on the kitchen table and never returned. My dad didn’t give me any explanation other than “Adults change and sometimes need to be on their own.” He and I lived alone in a small apartment, but then my dad wanted to remarry, and his new girlfriend, Mirlayna, moved in. She wore a lot of makeup, fake eyelashes, and fluttery, sensual clothing. She didn’t like me at all. I tried to be nice to her, but she always stared at my hair, which is a natural short afro. She hated that I only wore jeans and t-shirts or sweaters, and she sometimes made rude comments about my lack of fashion sense. My dad tried to help us like each other, but nothing worked, not even the trip to Disneyland. I’m not sure why this was his strategy since standing in lines all day under a hot sun surrounded by screaming kids is not exactly my idea of a good time. Mirlayna didn’t enjoy the trip either. That was about the only thing we ever agreed on. After the trip to California, my dad helped me pack up my few clothes, some books, and my record player and then moved me down here to west central Illinois to live with my grandpa in a small apartment complex called Sky Court.
Living with my grandpa was an adjustment because he lives in another world where cell phones, TVs, and computers are evil. I had to learn how to live life without numbing out on TV. That was tough, and I miss it at times, especially when it rains. But having no TV got me outside. Walking the town became one of my favorite things to do.
My grandpa’s name is Ernest Black, and he watched me a lot at first, but when he saw that I wanted a job and was committed to taking school seriously, he quit watching me. Now we’re more like friendly roommates. He smokes a pipe and wears a lot of sweaters and loves fried chicken.
Both Steve Jones and Trevor Morrison also live in Sky Court. We say hi sometimes, but that’s all. Just hi. Two letters. Then we look away. I’m not popular, and I’m not feminine, so I guess it would break some kind of rule for us to actually say more than two letters to each other. Sometimes I think Trevor wants to say more. We have physics together, and sometimes he lingers near my desk, but like I said, a rule could be being broken, so we keep to our own hemispheres.
The day after the return of the conquering heroes, everyone was acting normal—less high-fiving, more back to the books. Our final semester as seniors was just around the corner. Christmas was two weeks away. This was our last week of school before the holidays. I had tried to put Larry Dale’s face out of my mind, but every night before bed, I’d just lay there wondering about him and his life and his daughter, his only friend. That’s what he’d said. I wondered if he’d gone to jail or maybe lost his job. He was drunk driving.
I was daydreaming as usual, walking down the hall, barely paying attention to the shoulders I bumped into when a girl tapped me on my shoulder. She wore a plaid, wool skirt, leather calf-length boots, and a close-fitting sweater that made her look smart and different from the other girls in high school.
“Casey?” It was Rowena. She of the sudden, unexpected wave at lunch. Technically, she’s a popular person and shouldn’t be speaking to me, but since she spent spring semester in France on a Rotary scholarship, she’s seemed different in class—quiet, thoughtful, and well, her clothes were stylish and quiet too. I noticed her when I first started school here because she was pretty but not stuck up, and she smiled at me once in the library when I was a sophomore. She was a cheerleader then.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if I could borrow your notes from English last week. I was out with strep, and you seem like the only person who takes notes in there.” She smiled, and the library moment from two years ago flooded my memory banks.
“Oh, uh, yeah.” I gave her the notebook, a black spiral-bound one that I’d been very careful not to write anything personal in. I use my journal for that. She smiled again and said she’d get it back to me at the Wise Owl tomorrow night. I said okay and watched her walk away.
I walked home through the snow. My daydreams of Larry and his sad adult life had been replaced with Rowena’s warm, brown eyes.
When I returned to the apartment complex, I stopped at the mailboxes in the courtyard to get our mail. That’s when I spotted Steve Jones hanging around by the bike rack doing nothing. I stuck my key in our mail slot and rummaged around, but I watched him closely. Steve is tall, probably six-foot-three, and real skinny. He’s what my grandpa once called a handsome, dark-skinned Black boy. He said this to me as a joke, to tease me because early on I guess he could tell I had no interest in boys, and he found this kind of humorous. Occasionally, just to rattle me, he’d inform me that a handsome, dark-skinned Black boy was my neighbor. Now we both laugh at that, but he’d really laugh now if he knew that that handsome boy might not be interested in girls either. Of course, I had no proof about that, but Larry’s tale opened a door I’d never considered looking behind.
I got our mail and shut the slot door when I heard Trevor’s laugh. It’s an unmistakable high-pitched laugh. Then I saw the back of his shaggy brown head with no winter cap on. I watched them walk away together. Funny how you can know things about a person without knowing the person at all. I was tempted to follow them, but I had to get my own kitchen cleaned up before I went to work at the Wise Owl. We live on the second floor, and from the kitchen window I could see Trevor and Steve walking away from the complex heading out towards the little forest that begins at the back of the apartments. Steve limped with a waterproof cast protector snugged around his ankle. I guess he refused to use the crutches. I wondered if they were cutting through the woods to get to the mall or maybe hang out downtown or go to the movies. I wondered how it must feel to be popular but live a secret life. My grandpa came in just as I had finished doing the dishes.
“Casey Black,” he said, “how was your day?” He sat the familiar red and white bag from Kentucky Fried Chicken down on the kitchen table and peeled off his coat and cap. He rubbed his shiny bald head. Maybe he used to do that when he had hair, and it was habit. For dinner on Tuesdays he always brought home fried chicken because of a two-for-Tuesday senior special, and he loves to take advantage of a senior special. He’s eighty-three years old and always says, “I earned this.” He set the newspaper down and started to set plates out for our chicken.
