There’s a dead lady in the empty lot, the one where the two-story drug store used to be before street artists claimed the adjacent brick walls as their canvas, before the city gave up on the owners after the owners gave up on resurrection and razed the charred skeleton of their livelihood, before the fire that burned my gran’s coat and pocketbook because she had to run down the stairs and out the front door without them.
They dropped her off in the middle of the night, the dead lady. Three people in dark coats in a dark don’t fuck with me SUV, parking lights illuminating puddles along neglected asphalt. I was on the stoop across the street. They didn’t notice me or if they did, they guessed I wouldn’t interfere, which would be correct. My eyes tracked the action over the cherry that flared whenever I took a long drag, studied how different these buildings looked reflected in the shiny, spotless door panels of a vehicle, too clean, too shiny to belong here.
They put the dead lady there because her husband was there, too. Not physically, not anymore. No, he’s long gone. But she isn’t there, either, just her ashes. That’s what happened. The three of them showed up, popped open the little box, shook her out along the edges where tall weeds have worked up through the crumbling foundation, where painters kick empty liquor bottles out of the way before they get to work and the corner where delivery drivers whiz, where a stack of Taco Bell wrappers sit under a rock because some kid took all the food packaging with him when he walked out mid-shift and let me tell you, the little installation he created in the decaying masonry shell is better than a lot of art I used to see uptown.
Whatever is left of her body, that’s where it is now, disintegrated and ruined amongst the ruins, the weeds, the urine, the garbage that just sits there until someone, usually me, gets a bug up their ass about the state of things.
For the record, this town has gone to shit.
They could have taken the dead lady anywhere, could have left her in a place with pretty sunsets and fresh air but I guess she wanted to be here where it stinks a little bit all the time because of the piss and because Ralph down the way won’t pick up after his bulldog. When they had dumped her all out, the tallest lit two Jesus candles before the long-coated visitors drove away. I kept watch over the pair of flickering flames until darkness lifted into daylight. Didn’t want anybody putting them out and I was going to be sitting on my stoop all night anyway.
The only time it’s peaceful is at night. I can’t stand being aware of this place during the day so that’s when I sleep. Different folks come out in the darkness. In the daytime, people go through the motions of jobs they hate for people they hate even more. The sun goes down and all that bullshit goes with it.
I find out about the husband when I ask around. Louise upstairs has a newspaper clipping in the stacks she hordes like she doesn’t know about libraries. He was the pharmacist, the husband. The pharmacy was way in the back on the bottom floor. The place was on fire and he didn’t know. By the time he did, it was too late for him. Burned up in there. They were young, him and her, married just long enough for him to meet baby number one but not baby number two which was actually babies two and three. My grandmother would have known him, would have known her. Probably held their first kid in her arms and baked them a casserole or two because that’s what people did.
Had the local newspaper not folded several years back, Louise would have paperclipped the dead lady’s obituary to the story about the pharmacist and his obituary. She likes to put things together like that. Told me she has an archive for everyone, even me, but doesn’t like too many people to know.
Louise, man. I don’t know.
When the nights are warm and I sit out on the stoop all night, I hang out with my gran. I know she’s not there, not really, that I hang out with the idea of her, just like I hang out with the idea of that drug store. It was one of those places in town, third places, I’ve heard them called. Everybody passed through those doors on the regular. You popped into the drug store, chatted up the clerks, and somebody would have the scoop on whatever you wanted to know.
Now it’s a different kind of place. Empty and full.
That night when the Jesus candles were burning I could see the wood beam halfway up the west wall where the landing used to be. I ran up and down those stairs when I wasn’t much taller than the steps themselves. Tired me out so I’d nap good, ma would say. There’s some faded paint up high from when they first cleared the lot and someone thought to use those brick walls as advertising space. Only did it once because Willy the painter got shy about ladders like the rest of us.
I was poking around once in there once before all of the burned stuff got taken away. We all poked around after the fire. Go to anybody’s house of a certain age in this town and I bet they’ve got a few things they scavenged just to have a piece of something sentimental. Found a few die-cast toy cars in reasonable shape. Those went in my pocket along with a couple of interesting little bottles. If only I’d had a camera with me. Where the beauty counter stood was a glittering pile of broken glass because the perfume bottles exploded in the heat, but just beyond that were all these little mirrors from the powder compacts. The moon was full, I remember, and I could see it there, broken and tessellated on the ground.
I heard there’s a developer looking at this street. That’s hardly news. Heard it for years. Same story, different developers. Something always changes their mind but it will happen one day I think. Either that or this town will give up completely, leave this street to the ghosts and eventually there will be no one left to whisper the old stories, to remember the dead lady and her pharmacist husband, to care about the average tragedy this vacancy represents.
