Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [32]
Her tiny apartment was filled with nearly nine decades’ worth of possessions, most notably her spectacularly useless collection of turtles. Ceramic turtles. Stuffed turtles. Turtles on mugs, sweatshirts, salt and pepper shakers, throw pillows, calendars, and latch-hook decorative wall hangings. Turtles in every conceivable form but the original, breathing kind, as pets are not allowed in Silver Meadows. Everyone referred to her as the Turtle Lady, even to her face, which is why I can’t remember her real name. She held this title with great pride, as if it were an honor bestowed by the Queen of England in a scepter-tapping ceremony in Buckingham Palace.
One afternoon, you asked the obvious: “Why turtles?”
“Why turtles?” The Turtle Lady had replied to your query with genuine surprise, as if no one had bothered to ask this question before. This surely could not have been the case. But perhaps you were the first to ask in a very long time, the only person in recent memory to take any interest in her obsession. Her extended family was scattered around the country, you had told me, so she rarely received visitors. Only the occasional do-gooder Girl Scout trying to earn her merit badge in Geezer Appreciation. Or reformed ne’er-do-wells like yourself.
“Yes,” you pressed. “Why turtles over a more cuddly animal?”
“I’m not cuddly,” she said. “What, you think old spinsters like me have to love cats? Is that it? Are you disappointed that I’m not the crazy cat lady?”
“Okaaaaaay,” you said. “Snakes aren’t cuddly. Porcupines aren’t cuddly. Why turtles?”
“A turtle is never far from home.”
You didn’t understand. “Because it moves so slowly?”
“It carries its home on its back, ya big dope!”
You had recounted this story for me about a year later, your response when I questioned your sanity for voluntarily spending time with little old ladies like my grandmother when you had already completed your court-mandated community service. And when you delivered that line to me, you boxed your left ear with your palm, as she had when she said it herself. Despite your repeated attempts to get to know the Turtle Lady better, that conversation did not usher in a whole new era of cross-generational friendship between the misunderstood teen and the geriatric, the kind of heartwarming tale that has kept the Chicken Soup for the Soul series in print. No, it turned out to be the longest exchange you ever had.
After the Turtle Lady died, there were no local family members or Scouts to be found. This left you—a seventeen-year-old substance abuser repaying his debt to society—in charge of throwing away this woman’s entire life. A woman whom you had only met a half-dozen times.
You were told to divide her possessions into two piles: DONATE and DISCARD. Most of her belongings clearly qualified for the latter category. But you pled your case for the turtles.
“Maybe they could be donated….”
“To where?” replied the head of building management by phone because he couldn’t be bothered to show up in person. “The Museum of Useless Crap?” He chuckled at his own unfunny joke. “Look, kid, people die around here every day. And they leave a lot of junk behind. It’s my job to get rid of it.” In my imagined version of these events, I cast this character as thin and weaselly and in his late forties. He blinks too much and stinks of stale cigars.
“She didn’t leave a will?”
“Not for this stuff she didn’t,” he said. “All the valuable stuff was divvied up when she left her last place.”
Over the next few shifts, you counted, and threw away,