Lemons in the Rust Belt

The Walmart on Route 460 outside Youngstown was fluorescent-lit the way a hospital is fluorescent-lit: with the kind of brightness that makes everything look slightly sick. Kelly Miller stood in Aisle 14, restocking bottles of water, and watched a man in his forties buy a six-pack of water and a lottery ticket and put them on the counter with the same hand.

She rang him up. He did not look at her. She did not expect him to.

Kelly was eighteen, small, quiet, with hands that were permanently damp from handling other people's groceries. Her father was disabled from a factory accident. Her mother worked two cleaning jobs and came home every night smelling of bleach and exhaustion. Kelly had a younger sister, Brianna, who was thirteen and already had a spreadsheet in her head of every way she was going to escape this town.

Kelly worked at Walmart on weekdays and took GED classes on weekends at the community college in Cleveland. She drew flowers in a spiral notebook she bought at the Walmart -- honeysuckle, mostly, because it grew everywhere, even here, even in the cracks between the sidewalk and the strip mall, even in the rusted-out parking lots where the factories used to be.

Rachel Thompson was her roommate. They shared a two-bedroom apartment on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, rent-split between them because neither could afford to live alone and the commute to work was shorter that way. Rachel was outgoing, fun, the kind of person who could walk into a room and make everyone feel like she had been there forever. She worked at a fast-food restaurant near the stadium. She had been seeing a guy named Marcus for three months.

"I'm telling you, Kel, he's different," Rachel said one evening, sitting on the edge of Kelly's bed and picking at a loose thread on the blanket. "He's quiet, but it's like a good quiet. Like he's listening to everything instead of just waiting for his turn to talk."

Kelly was drawing in her notebook. She did not look up. "Everyone is different until they're not."

"That's not fair."

"It's not supposed to be fair."

Rachel sighed. "You're impossible when you're like this."

"Like what?"

"Like you're already disappointed in everything before it happens."

Kelly put down her pencil. She thought about saying something smart. She thought about it for exactly two seconds and then thought about the rent she had to pay next week and the GED math test she had to study for and her mother's back that had been hurting since October, and she said: "Sorry. I'm just tired."

Rachel patted her knee. "I know. I'm just -- I really think he's different."

Kelly nodded. She went back to drawing honeysuckle.

---

Rachel followed Marcus to a burger place off I-77 on a Wednesday night. She found him with Taylor and Taylor's friends, sitting at a booth in the corner, eating fries and drinking soda and laughing in the way that people laugh when they are trying to convince themselves they are having a good time.

Rachel walked in. She held a bag with a lemonade in it -- homemade, something she had made herself because Marcus once mentioned at 11 PM in a text message that he liked things sour, and she had made it the next morning before her shift at the hotel, with lemons she bought at the dollar store and honey she took from the dispenser at the front desk.

She walked up to the table. Taylor looked at her like she was a smudge on the window.

"Who's this?" Taylor said to Marcus. Not "who is this." "Who's this." As if Rachel were an object that had wandered into the wrong frame.

Marcus looked at her. He looked at the bag in her hand. He looked at Taylor and then back at Rachel and said, to Taylor's friend: "Hey, what's up?" He turned his body away from Rachel the way you turn your body away from weather.

Rachel stood there. She said, "I brought you the thing." She held out the bag.

Marcus took it. He said, "Thanks." He did not ask her to sit. He did not introduce her. He opened the bag, set it on the table next to a plate of fries he was not going to eat, and turned back to Taylor.

Taylor laughed at something. Marcus laughed too, but his laugh was one note lower than hers, as if he were performing laughter without quite believing in it.

Rachel went home. She texted Kelly: "It's fine. Don't worry."

Kelly texted back: "Worry is free. I don't see why I shouldn't do it."

Rachel texted back: "You're annoying when you're funny."

Kelly texted back: "I'm funny when I'm annoyed. It's a package deal."

---

Rachel went to a garage in Dayton. A woman with a YouTube tutorial and a borrowed laser machine offered her "cosmetic enhancement." Rachel said yes because she was twenty years old and believed, as twenty-year-olds do, that if she just changed the right thing -- her face, her hair, the way she walked -- someone would finally look at her and say, there. There is someone worth noticing.

The results were swelling, infection, a face that looked like it belonged to someone else for three weeks. Rachel went to the emergency room at University Hospital. Her mother was furious. She told Rachel to come home to Dayton.

Rachel packed a bag in silence. At the bus station, she texted Kelly: "Be back Friday. Save me a seat at the apartment."

Kelly met Marcus at the Walmart where she worked. It was a Wednesday afternoon. The store was half-empty -- the usual Wednesday half-empty. Kelly was restocking the bottled water aisle. Marcus walked in, buying cigarettes. He saw her.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"You work here?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't know you lived in Cleveland."

"I don't. I live in Youngstown."

They stood in the bottled water aisle and talked for five minutes. He asked about the drawings in her notebook. She showed him one -- a honeysuckle flower, done in pencil.

"That's good," he said.

"Thanks."

"You should do more of that."

"I do."

They discovered they shared a birthday. April 6th for Kelly. October 6th for Marcus. Same number.

"We should get each other gifts sometime," he said.

"We don't have to," she said.

"Yeah. We don't."

---

Kelly brought Marcus a jar of homemade lemonade the next Saturday. She left it at the scrapyard with a note that said nothing -- just "for you." Taylor found the jar. She opened it, drank it, and texted Marcus: "Your friend makes good lemonade."

Marcus texted Kelly back: "Taylor says it's good."

Kelly replied: "Taylor has good taste."

Marcus: "You're funny."

Kelly: "I know."

This exchange happened at 11:43 PM on a Saturday. Marcus was sitting on his couch, drinking beer, watching nothing on TV. Kelly was in her bedroom in Youngstown, doing homework for her GED classes. The text exchange lasted exactly four minutes. It was the most intimate thing either of them had experienced in months.

Over the next few weeks, they developed a pattern. Kelly brought lemonade on Saturdays. They texted during the week -- short messages, rarely more than two exchanges. Sometimes he sent her a photo of something he found at the scrapyard -- a rusted bicycle, a child's toy, a mirror that still reflected. She sent him photos of flowers she had drawn.

Taylor found Marcus's phone and saw the text messages. She did not yell. She said, very calmly: "Are you sleeping with her?"

Marcus said: "No."

Taylor said: "Good. Because that would be pathetic." She left. She went to her friend's house in Akron. She did not come back.

Marcus sent Kelly a voice message at 2:14 AM. It was three minutes and forty-two seconds long.

"I don't know why I'm sending this. You didn't do anything. I just -- I don't know what to do with myself tonight. Everyone leaves. They leave and I sit here and I think about how I let them. I was supposed to be somebody. I was supposed to go to college. My dad used to say I was wasted here and I know he was right and I just -- I stopped caring about something, and I don't know when, and now I'm here and I don't know how to --"

Kelly listened to it once. She listened to it again. She did not reply. She set the phone on her nightstand and went to sleep.

---

Rachel came back to Cleveland. Her face had healed -- mostly. There was a small scar near her hairline that she covered with concealer. She gave Kelly a letter.

"Read this when I'm gone," she said. "It's the truth, and you deserve the truth."

The letter said: "I did something stupid. I tried to change myself because I thought it would make someone love me. It didn't work. I'm moving to Chicago because my aunt has a couch and I have nowhere else to go. Don't be stupid like me. Be smart. Be stubborn. Be the kind of person who doesn't need anyone to love her to be okay. I'm sorry for everything. And thank you for being my roommate. You're the best thing that happened to me in Cleveland."

Marcus lost part of his left hand in an accident at the scrapyard. He lost two fingers -- not all of them, just the tips. Enough to make his left hand look different. Enough that he could not do some of the things he used to do. Taylor had already left for Miami. She sent one text: "I'm sorry. I hope you feel better." Marcus did not reply.

Kelly continued working at Walmart. She took community college classes on weekends. Ben asked her once, over coffee at a diner on Euclid: "Are you waiting for something?"

She said: "I don't know."

He said: "Okay." He did not ask again.

On Kelly's windowsill, in a chipped mug that used to hold pens, was a honeysuckle plant. It was Rachel's. Rachel had left it behind. It was growing. Not beautifully -- messily, reaching toward the window, one stem bent and twisted, another growing straight.

One evening, Marcus's phone buzzed on Kelly's kitchen table. A message: "Weather's nice today."

Kelly read it. She looked at it for a long time. Then she typed back: "Yeah."

She put the phone down. She went to the window. She touched the honeysuckle leaves. They were soft and green and stubborn.

Outside, the sun was going down over a neighborhood of boarded houses and one or two that were not.

Nothing had changed. But something was changing.

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