What Brings You Back Home (2)
Serial fiction: a woman returns to her hometown with a dark plan...
This is part 2 of the serialized story What Brings You Back Home. You can read part 1 here. Paid subscribers can listen to this story here.
Driving through West Mobile on her way from the airport, Rebecca sees a subdivision where the pecan grove used to be. The subdivision isn’t new, but it’s new to her. It looks like it sprung up in the eighties, one of a few dozen such subdivisions that rose up in that era of expansionist promise, each with a name splashed in cursive across a grand entrance. The entrances were usually made of brick, often whitewashed. For some reason, the developers in those decades gravitated toward the word “Plantation,” as though it were aspirational rather than shameful, a word without a history. This one is called Plantation Estates. The whitewash has faded, leaving the bricks a muddy shade of gray. Someone has done a nice job with the landscaping, though, a wild tangle of hot pink azaleas blotting out the first four letters, so that the sign reads -tation Estates.
The subdivisions spread west toward the airport starting in the eighties and on through the nineties and beyond, out across the pecan groves and pastures. The subdivisions were once populated by people who liked their houses clean and new, who thought “previously owned” was a kind of a curse, people who didn’t appreciate the charm of the old homes on Dauphin Street, who didn’t like what was going on downtown, the genteel old ways losing ground. Now the city is booming, and people move to Mobile from all over, not knowing West Mobile from Dauphin Street, picking houses online, surprised by how cheap they are, in comparison, but surprised they’re not even cheaper, because, after all, it’s Alabama. Not that long ago, four hundred grand would get you a mansion in Mobile. Now it just gets you a decent house.
Like the other subdivisions along this flat stretch of green, the luster has worn off of Plantation Estates. The community pool has gone mossy. The tennis courts are unkempt. The houses weren’t built to last, and it shows. People love it here anyway, their own hot, humid slice of the Southern dream. Which is different from the run-of-the-mill American dream, by the way: friendlier, and with more mayonnaise. Besides, who needs a community pool when you have a cleaner one in your back yard, and you don’t have to share?
At the end of the seventies, her parents bought ten acres of land where Plantation Estates now stands. Her mother’s get-rich-slow scheme involved pecan trees. She and her brother spent one sweltering summer on what her mother called “the land,” plucking pecans out of the dirt where they landed, collecting the hard brown shells in black garbage bags, which they transported in the family station wagon to a nut processing facility way out I65. It took at least two hours to fill one garbage bag. She and her brother each earned $2.50 per bag.
Like the other subdivisions along this flat stretch of green, the luster has worn off of Plantation Estates. The community pool has gone mossy.
Rebecca remembers it as a summer of sunburns, raw fingers, and high hopes. At some point the family abruptly stopped going to “the land.” She doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t know if they sold it, or if they lost it—her family seemed to always be losing things in those days—or if they never really had it. Maybe they made a down-payment on the land, and that was it. Maybe it was done with a wink and a handshake, and the raw deal was so embarrassing in hindsight that her parents never mentioned it. They were, by all accounts, a sweep-it-under-the-rug kind of family.
How perfect is it that her target lives in that subdivision? Not in the biggest house, but in the second-biggest. On a quadruple lot, no neighbors on either side or behind—a tennis court in the back, a miniature golf green to the left, a swimming pool to the right—because he likes the privacy, and he can afford it. He bought the house when his boys were still small, when the subdivision was still going up. He was a different person then. Rebecca surmises this from old television interviews and newspaper profiles. Back then, the senator was moderate and unassuming, capable of surprise, a man whose actions belied a compassion often at odds with his peers. What changed, she wonders. At what point did he turn the corner, and why?
A note on this story: This is part two of a serialized story that originally appeared in Alabama Noir, edited by Don Noble and published by Akashic Books. For years, I have had the idea of further developing this story, perhaps into a novella. I keep setting it aside and returning to it. Hopefully, sharing the story here will help me to grow it past its current ending. I’ll be posting it one segment at a time here on Novella and will see where it takes me.
Read this story in order: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5
Thank you again for reading Novella with Michelle Richmond!
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Thank you again for reading Novella with Michelle Richmond!
This looks really interesting so far. I like the theme of old school re housing evolving into the new via subdivisions. And prominent people can somewhat similarly evolve. I am wondering about Rebecca and how she arrived to where she is now. Little clues make us curious. I like the name Rebecca for the protagonist. Saw a magnificent 127-foot ketch that looked traditional though modern, named "Rebecca" in a hidden away NYC marina west of Wall Street that was apparently making a pit stop on a sail around the world. It was newly built from the design of a famous marine architect for an anonymous absent wealthy owner. Rebecca is a name that suggests elegant mystery. This novel looks great and it reminds me that many if not all of Charles Dickens' novels were serialized so you are reviving an old form through a modern publishing platform. Looking forward to the next installments.