It takes much less time to get through the bulk of the list I’d created. The U-Haul drop off lot is right across from a strip mall with a Dunkin’ Donuts where I pick up a big ass black coffee and a couple of donuts. It’s already warm as hell, so I sit inside in the air-conditioning and eat, and then I take my time sipping my coffee and planning. The strip mall has a laundromat and a grocery store, and I file that information away for later.
I also sift through the paperwork, but to be honest, I barely know what the fuck I’m looking at, so I call Karen. She’s got an attitude. As usual.
“How can I help you, Mr. Delisle?” she breathes as if I’m interrupting her busy ass day. And so what if I am?
“Good morning to you too, Ms. Barber. I need to get someone to come look at the house, right? To start the renovations?”
“That you do?”
“Because the house has to be renovated based on some codes, right?”
“Many codes, actually?”
I take a sip of coffee instead of cussing her out. “Do you have any recommendations of local contractors or whatever? I only have so much time to do this, right?”
“That is correct, but no, I don’t have any contacts. That’s not really my area?”
Another sip of coffee. “Well, do you have any idea where I can get some recommendations?”
She takes a deep, aggrieved breath, and I take another sip of coffee, preparing for some more bullshit, but she’s shockingly helpful.
“You need to go make contact with someone at the city planning office. I filed your paperwork yesterday, so they’ll be expecting you. It’ll look better if you drop by to see them sooner rather than later.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Small towns,” she says dismissively. “Anyway, I’ve heard that they have a list of contractors approved for city renovation projects. Even if they don’t, ask Raeshawn; she’ll know someone. She knows everyone.”
“What’s Raeshawn’s last name?”
“There’s only one Raeshawn.”
One more sip of coffee.
“Anyway, whoever you get to come look at the house, just make sure that they send the invoices to me, and I’ll pay them from your aunt’s renovation trust.”
It takes me a second to process that she’s being helpful. “Oh. Th-thank you.”
“These are the terms of your aunt’s will.”
“Uh, about that. You said there was money to help me get set up, and like, that house needs to be cleaned, like…everywhere. Can I use it for that?”
“Hmmm,” she says.
On the other end of the line, I hear a drawer slide open and the rustling of paper. I hold my breath and pray silently.
“Yes,” she finally says. “That’s acceptable.”
“Fuck. Really!? Thank God.”
“Mmhmm, do you need a recommendation for a cleaner?”
“Do you have a recommendation for a cleaner?” I ask incredulously.
“I do. I can give you the number or set it up for you.”
“No, no, please, set it up for me,” I say. I’m not lazy or anything, but the weight of all this shit on my shoulders is a lot. A week ago, the most I had to do was make it to work on time, keep my employees from fucking up the fries, and then pay my rent and bills on time. Literally, that’s all I had to do, and if I’m keeping it a buck, I didn’t always succeed. So, I will take literally any offer to take some of this shit off my shoulders, even if the offer is coming from Karen. “Thank you. Thank you so much,” I say sincerely.
“Mmmhmmm,” she says and then hangs up.
“Asshole,” I mutter under my breath, but there’s no heat in my voice. Not really. After a weird morning, my stomach is full, there’s caffeine making the neurons in my brain fire, and I have a few things off my plate.
I drive through town at a slow crawl, just below the speed limit, so I can see what I can see. I don’t know anyone here, and I still haven’t looked up a map of the city yet, so I try and map the town as I listen to the GPS direct me toward City Hall. When I pull into a parking spot, I have to dig into my center console and turn over my car mats to find enough change to put in the meter.
The walk from the car to the building is barely a few feet, but I’m sweating just a little bit by the time I make it inside.
“Excuse me,” I ask the woman at the front desk.
She looks up at me and smiles. “Yes?”
“Um, I’m looking for the city planning office?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Um…no? Do I need one?”
“It’s not strictly required, but Mr. Davies isn’t the most organized, so it helps. What do you need?” she asks and sucks her bottom lip between her teeth.
“Uh, I just got to town, and I need to talk to someone about renovating my house?”
“Oh,” she says. “Then you don’t want to talk to Mr. Davies, anyway. You wanna talk to Raeshawn.”
“Yes! My lawyer said she might know some contractors I could talk to.”
She nods at me and purses her lips together. “Mmmhmmm. Raeshawn know everybody. Lemme see if she’s in her office.”
“Thanks.”
I cross my arms on her desk and look around.
“Ms. Caulfield, there’s someone here to see you about the city revitalization plans. Mmmhmmm. What’s your name?” she asks me.
“Noel Delisle,” I tell her.
She stares at me, and her mouth falls open. “You at the old Randall house?”
“No, Sophie Delisle’s house. That was my aunt.”
“What’s the address?”
“2320 Fleur Belle.”
“You hear that, girl? The old Randall place. Mmmhmm.”
I squint down at her while she nods and keeps humming to whatever the woman is saying on the other end of the phone. When she hangs up, she doesn’t look me directly in the eye, and she definitely isn’t flirting with me anymore. “Ms. Caulfield is free. You wanna take the stairs to the third floor, turn right, and you’ll see her name outside her door.”
“Uh…okay. Thanks. Is there… Is there something I should know about the house?” I smile at her, flirting for real this time, trying to coax whatever she was thinking when I told her my address out of her.
It doesn’t work.
She looks me in the eyes again, and I can see she wants to say…something, but she doesn’t. “Ms. Caulfield is a busy woman.”
There’s a fire under my ass as I jog up the stairs and down the hall. Ms. Caulfield’s office is the last door on the left-hand side of the hall. All the doors are closed except for hers. I knock on the glass window to get her attention. She looks up at me, and I’m struck by how much she looks like Karen, but if Karen could smile.
“Are you related to Karen Barber?” I blurt out before we can even say hello to one another. “She’s my lawyer, and—”
“We look like twins. We’re not. Our moms were, though. She’s my first cousin,” she says, quick and matter-of-fact as if this is an answer she’s given thousands of times in her life.
“Oh,” I say. “Okay. Um, I’m Noel Delisle.”
She nods and ushers me inside. “I figured. Come on in and have a seat. How can I help you?”
I take a deep breath. I know this is only my first full day in Alexandria, but I’m already real tired of explaining myself. “So, I took possession of my late aunt’s house, and I need to get it renovated as a condition of the will and the city’s guidelines?”
She nods. “Mmmhmm, do you know much about Alexandria?”
“Nothing,” I breathe out. “Literally not a thing. I didn’t even know my family had a history here. I thought we were from Shreveport.”
She opens her mouth and then presses her lips shut as if she’s stopping herself from saying the first thing that came to mind. Her nostrils flare as she takes a breath before she starts speaking. “Alexandria’s a small city. Good people. Good land. But we can’t compete with New Orleans or Houston or some of the bigger cities around the region, except with the cost of living. We’ve been actively courting new residents recently to buy up some of the abandoned properties.”
I nod and listen, but to be honest, I don’t need to know all this.
“However, even though we want new blood in town, we don’t want to lose the character of our city. We don’t want to erase our history. So, we have a number of restrictions on the kinds of renovations possible for some of our more historic homes. Like yours.”
I shift in my chair, thinking about the receptionist’s face. “Is my house historic?”
She pauses before responding again. “Yes,” she says carefully. “The Randall House used to be the Randall cotton plantation.”
“Excuse me?”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re in Louisiana, Mr. Delisle.”
I sigh and nod. “Yeah. Sorry. But a plantation? The plot of land isn’t even big enough for that,” I muse out loud, thinking about the front lawn that wraps around the house to the backyard. I haven’t ventured around back there. The house is on the end of a cul-de-sac and definitely has the biggest lot in the area, but not enough for a plantation. Right?
“Not now,” Raeshawn says as if she can read my thoughts. “The plantation used to take up all of Fleur Belle and across the creek. The family held onto some of the land after the Civil War, but not for long.”
“Oh,” is all I can think to say.
“Anyway, we want to restore the houses to their former glory.”
“Glory?”
“Architecturally speaking,” she corrects. “So, we created a handbook for renovations.” I watch as she opens a drawer on her desk and then passes me a thick book.
My mouth falls open, and I flip through it. I’m just skimming, but none of what I see makes any sense. “Um…?”
“The handbook is exhaustive. You’ll want to make sure that your contractor is up to date on the codes.”
“Karen said your office had a list of contractors?”
“Contractor,” she says, correcting me with an emphasis on the end of that word. She reaches into her desk and slides a card across from me.
“Pelican Contracting,” I read from the card.
“Best contracting firm in town. Licensed,” she says as if that’s a rare thing. “They know that handbook front to back. They’re quick and do very good work.”
“Alright, bet,” I say, tucking the card into the handbook.
“My cousin told you that you have a year to complete the renovations, right?”
“A year?” I exclaim.
“Guess not. We’re only talking the big stuff: plumbing, roof, electrical, all that. Just to get it up to code.”
“Fuck. Sorry,” I say.
She shrugs. “Call Pelican today. The city sometimes gives extensions, but I won’t lie to you; Mr. Davies can be a hardass about that. If he doesn’t see a significant improvement…” Her voice trails off, and she shrugs again.
I nod and shrug back.
“Welcome to Alexandria,” she says in an unnaturally cheery voice.
“They make you say that?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes and smiles, “Every damn time.”
RUBY
I’m not bored. Not really. Ghosts can’t get bored, can they? Well, if they can, I never have. It’s something about the passage of time that makes boredom feel impossible; it either moves too fast or too slow or something. Sometimes, days pass in the blink of an eye; other times, I swear I’m watching the same shadow arc across a wall for months on end.
But I think I’m bored for the first time in I don’t even know how many years, waiting around the house for that Delisle boy to show back up.
Ooooh, but when he does, it’s worth it.
I’m sitting on that bottom step, chin in the palm of my hand, staring at the front door when it creaks open. His deep dark skin is shining with perspiration, and he’s soaked through his gray shirt from the day’s heat, I guess. I can see the outline of his chest and stomach through the wet material, and it is a beautiful sight that only gets better when he rips that shirt off his body, and…well, I groan.
And I guess the house groans, too, because he stops dead in his tracks and looks all around like he’s looking for…well, like he’s looking for a ghost.
For me.
And I wonder — because I’m curious, for the first time in I don’t know how long — if maybe…just maybe…
I stand up from the stair and walk toward him. He’s looking left and right and up and down but not at me. I know he can’t see me; of course, he can’t. But I lift my hand up, and slowly, real slowly, I touch his chest, right at the center over that nice, thick patch of curly hair there.
His big body jolts, and he backs away, his hand rubbing that spot on his chest where my hand just was.
I’m smiling now, so wide, I think my cheeks could hurt if I still had a body to feel anything. Although the palm of my hand is tingling. I look down at it, and I can see the floor through the faint nothingness of myself, but I swear, I can see the feeling there, and isn’t that funny?
He curses under his breath. “What the fuck?”
I look up at him, still smiling, still confused, and my hand still tingling. “What the fuck, indeed?”
He’s still looking left and right but not at me, so I guess he can’t hear me. I watch him shake his head and then rush forward toward the stairs.
My smile only gets bigger and bigger as he gets closer and closer, and then that big body of his moves through the flimsy nothingness of me.
“Fuck,” he says, looking left and right but not back at me as he rushes up the stairs.
It’s not the first time he’s walked through me. He’s not even the first person to ever do that. But when that big, tall, sweating man walks right through the nothingness of me, this is the first time I feel something.
I feel everything, actually.
“Well, what do you know?” I whisper to myself as a plan forms in my mind.