Penny

Once I get to the St. Louis airport, I can already feel the air is different. I’m back in middle America. Back in the heartland, as they say. My “home.”

It kind of makes me shiver.

The lady at the car rental counter is uncomfortable in her bright yellow uniform, I can tell. She pops her gum from between her molars as she unfolds a map in a practiced way and circles a few things with her pen, drawing lines between them with way too much pressure. After I sign the rental agreement, she gives me a prepackaged smile and gestures toward the parking lot, telling me to pass the competing rental car signs until I get to the one where my car will be.

I don’t travel very often, but this all seems sort of familiar. I’ve been up and down the East Coast for work, usually within a few hours. Usually with Wanda, I just realized. She’s like my better half, probably the kind of woman I imagine I am when I’m not being pushed around by my boss or Ethan’s teachers or life in general. Wanda doesn’t take any crap from anybody. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always think that is me, too.

It’s late, and it’s still Friday. I activate the GPS instructions with my thumb and follow the handy dashboard screen to the highway that will lead me back to Beaumont, Illinois. Home of Justice College and the Kirkman School of Management. Or, it’s probably more precise to say Beaumont is Justice College. I don’t think the town would exist if the college didn’t.

The pit of my stomach is all knotted and tense, getting worse with every passing mile. I open the window to inhale the misty farm and asphalt smells of the long stretch of highway between here and there. Unlike the East Coast, the landscape here is really flat, so flat I could probably see Beaumont on the horizon if I squinted.

I really don’t want to do this. It seems incredibly pointless. If Nathan hadn’t been such a complete jackass to me today, I’m sure I could have withstood Wanda’s peer pressure. But now I am thinking this is kind of a vacation. And I deserve a vacation.

Besides, I already paid for it. It’s not like I have limitless vacation funds rolling around my bank account.

Which reminds me, I should probably feel bad about that too. I’m about to see a bunch of people I knew from fifteen years ago, when we had no idea how everything would turn out. Some of them are probably rich. Some of them are probably married lottery winners with new tits and mutual funds and extra cars that they keep in their third and fourth garages just for fun.

And here I come: single mother with a two-bedroom house, nonexistent love life, and a frustratingly dead-end career.

At least I got tits, I remind myself. After I had Ethan, I got to keep the maternity boobs indefinitely. So that’s nice.

Just smile and nod, I tell myself. People only want to talk about themselves anyway. If anybody asks, I can lie. Or I can change the subject back to them. That always works.

I have used that trick at least a thousand times. It’s one of the reasons I’m so successful at my job, though you wouldn’t know it if you talked to Nathan. People like me because they can brag to me. I’m interested. Or at least I pretend to be interested. I make a safe space for them to talk about how great they are. Really can’t go wrong with that.

The hazy smudge on the horizon tells me that yes, I am getting closer to Beaumont. Somewhere along here there’s supposed to be a Motel 6 coming up. I have a reservation. Yes, a reservation in a Motel 6, which strikes me as funny somehow. Motel 6 seems like the sort of thing you just pop into when you’ve had too much to drink after line dancing way out in the boonies. Like, who goes to Motel 6 on purpose?

This girl, that’s who. The kind of girl who has a coupon, that’s who.

Finally I do see the yellow sign for the motel rising high in the air. There is a truck stop sign just below it and the golden arches of a McDonald’s, which makes my stomach grumble. It’s late. Too late for French fries, I am sure.

On the other side, I spot a billboard for Crosswind Estates, which is a surprise. After all this time? My mom mentioned it right after I graduated, because it was an ambitious project that took a lot of legwork with the county and no less than six farmers’ land. One of those farmers was a good friend of my mom, and she had all kinds of gripes about the entire process. In the end, she did decide to sell her land, but she got an extra 10 percent just for being a pain in the ass. That’s an important lesson, my mom had told me at the time. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you really want.

On a whim, instead of turning left to get to Motel 6 and the McDonald’s French fries that certainly await me, I turn right toward the development. Almost immediately the road is plunged into darkness. It is still very much a farm road, with ditches on either side and gravel shoulders. No lights, except the light reflecting off the rolling mist on the fallow fields.

Clicking on my brights—which takes a few tries, since I don’t even know where they are on this car—I squint through the windshield and slow down dramatically. The last thing I want to do is hit a deer out in the middle of nowhere after I just promised the rental car company to donate an internal organ if I should bring it back with a scratch on it.

It seems weird that there is not a development here, but eventually I roll up on the rather magnificent brick arch over half the entrance. Not the whole way, just the half that doesn’t face the highway traffic, strangely enough. Kind of a lonely metaphor, having the Crosswind Estates sign pointing way out to miles and miles of farm fields, never seeing the traffic from the highway that won’t go here.

Turning slowly, I realize quickly that there is no development here. It must’ve been abandoned fairly early on. And from the look of the construction, featuring nicely designed all-brick townhomes and single-family homes arranged around what would probably have been parks and shared spaces, I figure construction couldn’t be more than four or five years old. Ten at the most. It must have taken a long time to get off the ground, only to fall right back into the ground after they built a few models and laid out the streets.

For somebody like me, who plans these developments for a living, this is a mixture of excitement and sadness. I can see what the designer was thinking. Lots of sidewalks, encouraging people to greet each other and walk places instead of being in a neighborhood where people only ever see each other through car windows. Open spaces to encourage sports, children, and exercise. Basically the height of a livable suburban environment.

“In the middle of nowhere,” I remark out loud. “No shopping, no jobs. Classic error.”

I’ve actually seen this kind of thing a lot. Before 2005, easy financing made construction of subdivisions seem like a great investment. They pushed farther and farther into farmland, dragging suburbanites with them. Shopping soon followed. People took over corn and alfalfa fields and turned them into uniform developments of slightly curving streets with nearly identical, brick-fronted, vinyl-clad hives for a fairly generic class of people.

But when the economy suddenly tanked, the money pulled out. Lots and lots of subdivisions got abandoned. Like everything else, it probably took a couple of years for the news to make it to southern Illinois. They were probably still building for a few more years, not realizing the subdivision was already dead.

“Zombie construction. Great name for a company,” I mutter wryly.

As I circle back through the subdivision and its predictable U-shaped design, I note the overall plan, building it in my mind like a movie set. Despite the inconvenient location, it really is pretty nice. That is, it would’ve been nice. Now it’s going to be just something that people forgot, something people can bicker about what should’ve been, maybe a place where teenagers will stash their drugs or learn graffiti or get impregnated.

It’s a bummer.

“Bummer Construction. That would be funny.”

An orange banner catches my eye just before I get back to the main road. Public notice. Auction.

Leaving the keys in the ignition, I get out and trudge through knee-high weeds, praying that I don’t get snake bit or covered in burrs.

“Wow, would you look at that,” I mutter to myself.

Public notice… Auction…

By order of Stinson County Clerk’s office, the Crosswind Estates development in its entirety will be auctioned on the courthouse steps to satisfy a tax lien.

There’s a bunch of other words on the sign, but they kind of dissolve into gibberish. Tax codes. Something about all materials, lands, improved and unimproved. A phone number. And a date and time: Sunday morning, nine a.m.

My heart begins to pound. I trudge back to the car and sit in the driver seat for a few minutes, staring at the sign while the engine vibrates the car slightly.

I can’t, I tell myself. I just couldn’t.

It’s impossible. There’s no way.

Of course, people buy things for practically nothing all the time.

Which is what I’ve got: practically nothing. Not a whole lot of money at all. Not nearly enough. And even if I got this place, what would I do with it?

It’s impossible. It’s crazy.

I definitely shouldn’t.

I should probably just go and see what happens though. My mom will want to know.

Yeah.