Julienne

Julienne’s house is not for sale. Her grandchild

quietly disagrees. So does the man who visits every

month, who brings with him a briefcase and a

kindly voice and a soft smile that Julienne is sure

hides something behind it—though his disagreement

is more out in the open, and she wonders if he’s

even managing to hide anything at all.

The man grows more insistent the more Julienne

declines his offers to sell him her property. He

brings construction crews with him increasingly

often — though Julienne doubts they are here to do

anything but destroy. Her grandchild looks at the

bulldozers outside the window and tells her,

Grandma, please, they’re going to evict us if you don’t let me sell. Julienne sips her coffee and

ignores them.

The house has been hers for fifty years. Before her,

it was her mother’s house, and her grandmother’s

before that. She intends to wake up in it every

morning. She intends to come home to it when she

returns from the jazz club every night. She intends

to die here, someday, asleep in a bed that is older

than she is. And she will not let her home, or the

land it lives on, change hands in her lifetime.

The man’s visits grow more frequent—as do the

hulking machines that wait in the surrounding fields,

creeping daily towards the house. He goes from

showing up every month to showing up every week,

and then every day. Julienne begins to dread that

cheerful little tap-tap-tap knocking on her door. The

he will make once he closes this deal. He has told her to name her price too many times. Her

price is nothing and everything: memories, emotions, attachments, a sense of belonging in a

place, of being tied to her home. She can’t sell that. She keeps the deal open.

Her grandchild no longer listens to her when she tells them not to talk to him. She hears their

whispering behind closed doors, sometimes, sometimes one voice speaking hushed into a

phone, sometimes two voices playing off each other. They chatter and chatter and chatter

and she’s sure her grandchild knows she’s listening, and she’s sure she knows what they’re

talking about, but they never bring any of it up to her anymore. They are a well of radio

silence.

That silence does not break when she comes home from the jazz club one night—she had an

audience this time, one she was grateful for, a couple her age she felt a kinship with, but

knows she probably won’t see again—and finds her grandchild with a man she doesn’t

recognize, packing tattered taped-up boxes into the back of a truck. She gets no answer

when she asks what’s going on. She gets no answer when she grabs her grandchild’s wrist

and demands to know what’s happening, what they told the man with the briefcase, what

they agreed to. She is met only with them pulling away and returning to their work.

A nursing home, her grandchild called it. A care facility. Funny name, when she’s in it on the

orders of someone who doesn’t care about her well-being. She’s missing all of her shows.

Singing to an audience like this, to a silent, chair-bound half-circle of people older than her

and more tired than her and more lost than her, is not nearly the same. She would prefer to

be in a club and have no audience at all than to perform for people who won’t even

acknowledge her efforts. She would rather be in her house, her home, the place she loves,

the place she can never see again. Even if she could leave—and she does want to leave, she

wants it desperately, she wants to go back to her house, cup her hand around the polished

end of the stair banister and smell the faint, but ever-present, jambalaya smell in the kitchen

from meals long past and lay down on top of the blankets on her bed to stare at the powdery

blue ceiling boards, clad in morning sun and shadow—she would return only to an empty

swath of land, cleared of the trees she used to climb, cleared of her home.