The Tenant

By Katrina Jackson

Noel

 

Okay, so my life is officially at rock bottom. I'm 26 with nothing more to show for myself than a mountain of debt I can't pay back because I just got fired from my job as an assistant manager at a third-rate fast food chain. So, when I get a phone call from a rude lawyer telling me that my great aunt Sophie has died and she's left me a house - a whole damn house! - in Alexandria, Louisiana, I jump at the opportunity to skip out on next month's rent, since I can't afford it anyway.

 

I maybe should have thought about this a little bit longer, because what I find when I get to the house on 2320 Fleur Belle Court is a two-story Victorian dump. The floors creak, the water temperature is either ice cold or scalding hot and I swear it feels like there's someone watching me.

 

I'm pretty sure this place is haunted.

 

Ruby

 

Of course, this house is haunted. I've been here since 1933 and nothing is getting me out of here, especially not Noel Delisle. His people stole this house from my cold dead hands, and he'll get what his ancestors had coming.

 

Too bad. He's the prettiest Delisle I've ever seen and sometimes I swear he can see me and feel me.

 

I can sure feel him.

 

Content Warnings

Mentions of slavery
Mentions of physical abuse
Mentions of Rape
Drowning murder

Gunplay

Use of a racial slur

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katrina Jackson
• Release date: Oct 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393313342

Katrina Jackson

Katrina is a college professor by day who writes romances by weekend when her cats allow. She writes high heat, diverse and mostly queer erotic romances and erotica. She also likes sleep, salt-and-pepper beards, and sunshine. I'm super active on twitter. Follow me: @katrinajax

Book preview

Content Warnings

Mentions of slavery

Mentions of physical abuse

Mentions of Rape

Drowning murder

Gunplay

Use of a racial slur

1

Noel

There are perks to being the crazy aunt’s favorite nephew.

I mean, sure, I had to spend a disrespectful amount of my childhood scooting from side to side on her couch, trying to keep the backs of my thighs from sticking to the plastic. And yeah, I had to pretend like the industrial-sized peppermint candy nuggets she always had in those ugly crystal candy dishes all over the house didn’t make my eyes water, burn my tongue a little bit, and obliterate my ability to taste anything besides sweet for at least two hours. But all in all, Sophie was probably my favorite aunt, especially after she got a Costco membership and started buying her Werther’s Originals in bags bigger than my tiny body.

Okay, sure, sometimes Sophie’s obsession with me meant that I had to sit at her Formica kitchen table from the sixties, my short legs swinging from the too-big-for-me chair, watching my cousins and our friends play in the street outside Sophie’s house while she told me some story about what Alabama was like in 1910 or whenever she was a child. I didn’t pay attention, but I nodded along like I was. She didn’t seem to know the difference.

Anyway, I’m telling you all this to explain how I got in this strange position. It didn’t start at Sophie’s Formica table. Well, part of the story starts there. Part of the story also started just after the turn of the last century. But the most direct path to get to all of that really started two weeks ago. I really can’t believe that’s all the time that’s passed; it feels like so much more. Like a century more. But nope, it’s only been two weeks since I was an assistant manager at a shitty fast-food chain in the good part of town, a place I’d worked at since I was a freshman in college. It was supposed to be just a part-time job to pay for books, but then my fool ass decided to get a liberal arts degree because I believed the recruiting hype from my favorite professor, Dr. Ljungberg, that I could do anything with a BA in Liberal Arts. Six months after graduation, I popped up in his office like Maury to tell him that the lie detector had told me that that was a lie, and also, the burger joint where I was still working was having a two-for-one cheeseburger deal.

So anyway, two weeks ago, I was living my worst mid-twenties life when my boss, Marc with a c, the regional manager, pulls me aside during his bi-weekly visit to my store to tell me that the company is restructuring — aka they’re letting me go, aka I got fired — but also, Can you work the rest of your shifts this week?

Yeah, you read that right. My boss fired me and asked to open the restaurant for the next five days because my shitty ass company is like, really shitty. I mean, I said yes, because I needed the money — shitty company, shitty pay, no severance, and definitely no health insurance — but if I could have told Marc to shove that job up his ass, I would have. Instead, I worked the next four hours of my shift like a chump, trying to figure out if I have enough money to cover next month’s rent and if maybe my upstairs neighbor was serious about being willing to make it rain on my ass whenever I was ready to open myself up emotionally. He meant sexually, which is why I’d rolled my eyes at him when he made the proposition.

But now…

Well, let’s just say a lot can change in a very short amount of time. I know that now more than I did then.

Anyway, I was driving home after my shift when I got the call.

Your great-aunt Sophie is dead.

The lawyer is a bit more delicate when she tells me after she confirming my identity, but not by much. And what’s the point of delicacy when it can’t change the outcome? No use beating around the bush; that’s what Sophie would have said.

Besides, Sophie was old — hell, Sophie was old in my memories — and I think I’ve been preparing myself for her death for most of my life. I don’t feel sad — or at least, I try not to let my sadness overwhelm me — because when I was a kid, Sophie used to lament to me that no one should outlive all the people they loved. That seemed a bit harsh, at the time, since Sophie had four living kids, and I was only sitting on her sweaty plastic couch because we were blood, and I was supposed to respect my elders. But as an adult, I think I’ve begun to understand what she meant a little.

Sophie was born in 1940. Even though she’d technically been born just after, she had so many of those weird ass quirks that people who’d lived through the Great Depression shared, and everyone sympathized with and pretended were normal. She also had some Civil Rights Movement baggage, but those mostly manifested in all the ceramic Afrocentric figurines she had all over the house and were much more tolerable than the canned goods stashed in her pantry, and garage, and spare bedroom. She also had a garage full of toilet paper and tried to barter for the price of clothes in JC Penney, but that could be just old lady behavior, I don’t know.

The point is that my great-aunt Sophie was weird and funny and smelled very strongly of White Diamonds and mothballs all the time. She was also known to use her cane for corporal punishment, so it paid to be her favorite. She’d still used her cane to nudge the back of my knees every now and then, but the rope of her annoyance was much longer for me than anyone else. Sophie loved her kids, her grandkids, and for some strange reason, me. But the point she was making, that I think I only really get now she’s gone, is that so many of the people in her life were long gone; her husband, all her siblings, most of her friends, her oldest daughter, hell, even her enemies. All gone. She’d been the last woman standing for my entire childhood. Well, standing is a bit of a stretch. She was the last woman breathing, with the help of an inhaler and then an oxygen mask sometimes. It takes her dying and me being at rock bottom basically, for me to finally understand that Sophie was tired.

Now I’m not pretending to know anything about what it was like to be a Black woman born in the middle of the last century, but I do know that even thinking about someone born in the middle of the last century is lowkey depressing, and I think Sophie felt the same.

But now she’s dead. May she rest in peace.

So, when the lawyer on the other end of the phone tells me Sophie has died, I think, Great. Good for her, but I only make a solemn huff that the unknown woman can interpret any way she pleases. By this point, I’d driven home to the shitty two-bedroom apartment I share with three roommates in my old Honda Civic hybrid. I park my car, turn it off, and then just sit there, staring at my phone as if I can see this unknown lawyer through the screen.

Are you able to be present at the reading of her will? the lawyer asks.

Oh, no, I say. Absolutely not. I’m broke. I can’t come back to California.

That isn’t entirely true. I have a bit of money — and I mean ‘bit’ in the literal sense. I have a couple hundred dollars saved for a rainy day. Unfortunately, I’ve had a few more rainy days than normal recently — new tires, a broken windshield, Sallie Mae — and I have an even smaller bit now than I used to. And since I no longer have a job or any hopes to replenish what I’ve had to withdraw recently, I know that my savings account might as well be my checking, meaning it’ll be empty soon.

So, buying a plane ticket from Atlanta to Oakland on no notice is an absolute impossibility. I almost laugh at my dire straits, but I don’t, because…you know…death. I don’t want this lawyer to think I’m laughing about Sophie. Although, I know Sophie would find my poverty as funny as she found my liberal arts major.

Not California, she says.

Huh? I’ve zoned completely out, and getting back into the moment sucks and kind of hurts.

She sighs before answering me. I’m definitely her worst phone call of the day. Your great-aunt asked that part of her will be read in Alexandria. Louisiana, she clarifies.

Why? I say.

I can’t see her, but I know what rolling-eyes annoyance sounds like. That is part of the will. Can you afford to come to Louisiana? When she’s done speaking, she sighs as if my poverty is an inconvenience to her.

I want to tell her to join the club — being poor is inconvenient as fuck to me, too — but I don’t, and I think I deserve some kind of medal for keeping my shit together on today of all days. When I don’t speak, she fills in the silence, and I’m thankful for that, at least.

Look, normally, I wouldn’t do this over the phone. It’s not strictly allowed, but time is of the essence, she breathes. Her voice trails off as if she is considering the gravity of what she is about to say next.

There isn’t any way she could have known this, but Marc did the same thing just before he fired me, and I’m triggered for a few seconds.

Is it really? I ask. I don’t want to be crude or anything, but Sophie was my aunt, so I push forward to ask what feels like a very normal question. Time, I mean, clarifying. "Is time really of the essence?" Sophie is gone.

The soul has left the building, and the body has all the time in the world, embalming notwithstanding. That’s what Sophie used to say whenever she stumbled across an obituary for someone she used to know. I thought it was the most hilariously morbid thing ever as a kid, and it’s why I liked Sophie better than the other aunties in the family. I hear her voice saying it in my head now and smile. I want to laugh so hard I can already feel tears building at the back of my eyes.

Yes, the lawyer says. Sophie left you an inheritance.

My eyes cut to the phone, and I squint at it for a fraction of a second before I take it off speaker and press it against my ear. Wait. What? What did you say?

Sophie left you an inheritance, she says again.

She did? But…why? How? An inheritance? I’ve never said an English word that sounded so foreign. My people are good, old, working-class, we can’t afford it, so you don’t need it Black. We were black and white TVs until 1990, foil around the antennas to get the premium channels, you got McDonald’s money? poor. My family is the salt of the earth, in my opinion, meaning they were vital but unappreciated and never cost what it’s worth. We aren’t the kind of people who typically have anything to leave to the next generation besides a family bible and the balance on a payday loan, at best.

Yes, she says. Per Sophie Delisle’s will, you have been bequeathed her family home.

Oh, I say, realization dawning on me and that uncomfortable bubble of excitement deflating before it had fully inflated. Yeah, I’m not moving back to California, and I definitely don’t have the money to pay California property taxes. It’s a bit gauche to reject my aunt’s inheritance, but let’s blame the shock and grief and the poverty on this faux pas. But also, my people aren’t the type to usually care about faux pas, so I feel certain that Sophie would understand. Wherever she is.

No, the lawyer interjects, sighing again. Her California home has been split between her three surviving children. I’m talking about her home in Alexandria.

Sophie got a house in Louisiana? I exclaim in shock. I actually pull the phone from my ear to look at it, as if this woman can see me through the connection, and I need to make sure she understands how ridiculous this sounds to me.

Yes.

Since when? Sophie hasn’t been back to Louisiana in over a decade, and my people are from Shreveport, I tell her. "What would she be doing with a home in Alexandria? Where is Alexandria?"

The lawyer sighs again. The sound is starting to grate on my nerves. I don’t know anything about being a lawyer, but I’d imagine that annoyed sighing probably shouldn’t be part of the tool kit. Also, if she’s annoyed, someone should remind her that this is part of her job. Not me, but someone.

Your great-aunt inherited the home from her mother, and now, she has left it to you, the lawyer says.

But like…why? Why me, I mean.

She didn’t sigh aloud this time, but I can hear it in her voice. Again, I believe this is something that will be covered should you accept the inheritance. What I can tell you, Mr. Noel Joseph Delisle, is that your aunt apparently adjusted her will to bequeath you this home sometime around 1999.

Why? I ask again, but it’s so low I’m really asking myself. Or maybe I’m hoping, wherever Sophie is, she can hear me and send me an answer, because in 1999 I was a smooth five years old and convinced I could fly like Superman if I just believed. I was also, obviously, very familiar with the local Emergency Room staff, who’d already told me that I could get a colored cast when I inevitably broke a bone or two.

It was my arm, and I chose baby blue.

Anyway. Why the hell would Sophie leave me a house? I ask the lawyer again.

"I don’t know. That’s beyond the