IRIS
She’s dead.
No matter how many times those words roll through my brain, I still have a hard time believing it’s true. Gran has only been gone a little over a week now, but accepting that I’ll never see her walk through her front door again still cuts like a knife.
“Did you find it yet?” Birdie asks as she sits next to me on the living room floor of the trailer I grew up in while Gran raised me.
I shake my head as I continue to sift through the box of papers in front of me. “We’ll never find the deed to this place at this rate.”
Birdie shoves her blond hair out of her face as she continues to dig through the box in front of her. “No shit. Obviously Gee-Gee didn’t believe in a filing system. Are you sure it can’t be anywhere else?”
“No,” I reply. “All of Gran’s paperwork is in these two boxes. It has to be in here somewhere.”
I flip through a couple more papers, and then bingo! “Found it!”
“Thank God,” Birdie says as she shoves the box away and relief floods her dark brown eyes. “I was beginning to think it was a lost cause.”
I take the paper out and examine the deed closely. Willow Acres has been in my family for generations. It all started when my great-great-grandfather opened up part of his farm for his daughter and her husband to pull a trailer onto the property to live. Since then the trailer park has expanded to now hold fifteen trailers, with most of the tenants living here since I was a kid. My place isn’t glorious; it’s no mansion by any means, but this one-thousand-square-foot trailer has been home to me since my mother ran off when I was four and never came back.
“Good, now we can take it down to Mr. Stern so he can get everything switched over to your name, and we can grab lunch while we’re out.”
I sigh as I think about the near-negative balance in my checking account. It hasn’t been exactly easy since I returned here. I left almost two years ago to move to New York because I’d convinced myself that once I got there I’d be a big star on Broadway someday, but as of last week I was still just a server at a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Paying for my one-way ticket back home nearly broke the bank. If I stay here much longer, I’m going to need a job.
When Birdie takes in my silence, she wraps her slender arm around my shoulders. “Come on, Iris. It’ll be my treat. I know you’re starving. We’ve been digging through this junk all day.”
Almost as if on cue my stomach rumbles loud enough for Birdie to hear, and she raises her eyebrows at me to say told ya before she smacks my leg. “All right. Off your ass. We’re eating.”
I laugh at my best friend as she snaps to her feet and then pulls me up. Birdie and I go back, way back. We had that whole sandbox love thing going on. Her grandmother, Adele, lives next door to our place, which meant Birdie was my number-one playmate when she came here every weekend while her mom partied hard. As we grew up we stayed close, because after a while, her mother left her with her grandmother too. We understood each other.
I shove my hair away from my face as I straighten my black T-shirt.
“Girl, I love those cutoff shorts. Where did you get them?” Birdie asks.
“Oh.” I stare down at my too-short shorts, feeling embarrassed to be wearing something so skimpy, but they were the last clean bottoms I brought with me. “I made them. I cut off an old pair of jeans I found at a thrift store to make them.”
“Creative.” She fishes her keys from her purse. “Do you think we should stop at the library and see if you’ve gotten any responses for the ad we put on the Internet for the empty trailer?”
I nod as I follow her out the front door, locking it behind us. “Yeah. I could definitely use the rent money. Hopefully, someone responds.”
“It sucks that we don’t get any Internet out here,” Birdie says as she unlocks her Corolla and hops inside.
Once inside with her, I buckle my seat belt. “I know. I miss having the modern conveniences of the city. My cell service doesn’t even pick up the Internet out here. We’re so behind in the times.”
The car’s engine cranks alive and Birdie backs up and starts toward the road. “As soon as you get the deed swapped over into your name for the park and are ready to go back to New York, I want to go with you.”
“Really?” I can’t contain the excitement in my voice. “When did you decide this?”
She shrugs. “After hearing you talk about the city all week long and how much I’m missing out on by sticking around this little town. So, when you go back and get settled, let me know and I’ll hop a plane.”
I frown. “I never meant that it’s not nice here—it is—I just don’t want this life, you know? I want to see my name on a grand marquee for doing something I love, not be stuck in the trailer park for the rest of my life.”
“And you will,” she assures me. “It’ll just be even better that I’ll be there with you to see it all happen.”
Willow Acres sits just outside the small village of Sarahsville, Ohio. The largest city around is Cambridge, and even that is a solid thirty-minute drive for us. We don’t have much here. Most stores are mom-and-pop-type places that are privately owned. It really is like stepping back in time.
Which is exactly why I had to get out of here.
Birdie pulls up along the curb to the only attorney in town, Mr. Stern, who Gran went to for all her legal needs. I grab the deed and open the door. “It shouldn’t take long. I’m just dropping this off.”
Mr. Stern’s office was once a private home. An old blue two story with a rickety, white picket fence and a small sign hanging from a wooden stake: William Stern, Attorney at Law.
I make my way up the sidewalk and into his office, where his plump secretary greets me with a kind smile as soon as I push open the front door. “Hi, Iris. It’s so good to see you. William told me you were in town to handle Gee-Gee’s estate.”
I simply nod, hating the way that everyone’s life seems to have gone on around me while the pain of losing Gran is still very fresh to me. “Is Mr. Stern in, Melody? I have the deed for him.”
Melody’s light brown braid hangs around her shoulder while her bangs are teased so high it’s like she’s stuck in the eighties. Like most people in this town, I’ve known Melody my entire life. She was the PTA president when I was in elementary school and is always into everyone’s business.
She stands and takes the deed when I hand it to her, laying it on her desk before firing more questions at me. “So what was New York like? Gee-Gee said you were doing big things up there. I’d sure like to visit that place sometime, but it’ll probably never happen. Big cities scare me.”
“It’s not that bad once you learn your way around,” I say as the horn honks outside. “I’m sorry, Melody, I’ve got to jet. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“All right,” she says as I wave and push my way out the front door.
I hop back in the car and Birdie’s grinning at me like an idiot. “You can say thank you anytime.”
“For what?” I ask with a chuckle in my voice. “I’m supposed to thank you for your impatience?”
She shakes her head. “No, for me saving your ass from Melody Schaffer. You know she would’ve talked you to death if I didn’t save you. She’s been chomping at the bit to corner you so she could invite herself to New York for a visit. This town loves to gossip. No one’s ever took off to the big city like you before, so you win the prize for being most talked about around here. She would’ve kept digging at you until she got some kind of dirt she could break her neck telling anyone that would listen.”
The thought of having Melody and her family of five in my tiny one-room apartment in Brooklyn is enough to make me shudder. And Birdie is right. Melody is the one person in this town you don’t want knowing any of your business. “Thank you.”
Birdie grins and slides a pair of sunglasses on her face. “Welcome. Now where to eat?”
After we get our fill at the local diner, we drive to the closest library, which is in Caldwell, the next town over, and sit down at an empty computer terminal and check the listing we posted earlier in the week for the vacant trailer. To my surprise there are a few replies in my e-mail. Two are people who obviously aren’t really interested, as they respond to the ad by asking me for pictures of myself. Gross. Another I attempt to reply to, but the message fails every time, while the last only leaves a phone number and nothing more.
After a long moment of debate on what to do with the number, I sigh and close out the web page.
“What are you doing?” Birdie asks. “Don’t you think you should call that number?”
“No,” I answer immediately. “Who replies with only a phone number? That’s weird and creepy as hell.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, but it could mean money.”
I furrow my brow at her. “Do you really want to take a chance and let some crazy serial killer move in next to me and your grandmother?”
She rolls her eyes. “I highly doubt that’s going to happen. Besides, whoever this person is can’t be any crazier than Jeremy. That guy is completely off his hinges.”
Jeremy is the newest tenant at Willow. He moved into one of Gran’s rentals right before she had her first heart attack six months ago, and she didn’t have the strength to deal with kicking him out when all the people around him complained. He’s rude and a constant nuisance to all the other tenants with his loud-ass cars and parties. He’s one of the things on my checklist to deal with while I’m here getting things settled.
My shoulders sag, and I wish I wasn’t this desperate for money, but the truth is I’m completely broke. Not only did Mr. Stern inform me at the will reading that I get everything that my gran owned, I get to incur her debt too. Apparently, she’d forgotten to pay property taxes on Willow Acres for quite some time, and the state is looking to collect its money. If I can’t come up with the money, the state will come and take the property, and I’m not sure where that leaves everyone who lives there. I can’t allow them to be thrown out of their homes.
The only way I have a shot in hell at saving the place is to make sure that every single trailer is inhabited. So, like it or not, this crazy number is my only real lead to finding an interested, paying tenant.
I open the web browser and reopen the e-mail so I can jot the number down. “You’re right, Birdie. Something is better than nothing at this point.”
She wraps her arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry, Iris. We’ll find someone soon.”
It’s crazy, but all my hope now rests on this one strange number.