It’s hot. Early July in Minnesota hot.. Humid. Buggy. Thunderstorms threatening fire and brimstone at any second.
“I do.”
It’s 2001 and at the ripe age of 25, I’m married. To an out-of-towner. Way out of town. New Zealand out-of-town. And no, New Zealand never was a British penal colony. And kangaroos aren’t native animals. New Zealand is all about the birds.
After a brief visit to New Zealand, we settled in Minnesota.
My wife’s mother wants to see her daughter. So she visits us. The cost of the trip is a factor – she’s not exactly a Hilton, so she’s frugal. So tight that she’s bought swimsuits for my wife at Goodwill. Yup, she’s a tightwad. And disgusting – who wants to put their cooter against fabric that nestled against another’s cooter? They found themselves on the curb in a big green plastic container the following Monday.
Back to the story – she’s frugal, so she likes to stay in the US as long as she possibly can during her visits. I’m told that, without a Visa, she can stay for 3 months. Unless she’s a good swimmer and wants to cross the Rio Grande some night. She doesn’t like deep water, so that’s out of the question. A Visa-less plane ride it is.
So she came over for three months in 2003. I’m also not a Hilton either, so my wife and I both work. A long way from home. We leave before 7 a.m. and get home after 6 p.m. The mother-in-law got bored that first three months and decided to bring a grandchild the next time in 2005. I could go into great detail about the horror of that stay, but let’s just say it wasn’t pretty. Strong-willed pre-teen battles over-bearing grandmother. My house turns into a Springer show each night. I learn why parents say “Both of you be quiet or I’ll turn this car around.” I nearly bought a pistol so I could fire a warning shot to shut them up. Seriously.
Fast forward to 2007. Trip number 3. This time, the MIL decides to bring along another grandchild, age 10. Child’s mother sends the 10-year-old over with a cell phone so she can stay in contact with her. Like most 10-year-olds, she has borderline ADHD. Seriously can’t sit still for 1minute. We have games to see how long she can go without talking. Invariably, she can’t last more than a minute.
Said 10-year-old ADHD chatterbox and aging mother-in-law decide they want to go into town. Neither can drive for a number of reasons: New Zealanders drive on the wrong side of the road. They also have no car. I’m not independently wealthy. Two cars are hard enough to afford.
So they take our wonderful mass transit. That means a big ole’ Metro bus painted with the local FM rocker’s logo. Yup, you guessed it, there’s an X in their logo.
And that’s where our story gets interesting.
The 10-year-old ADHD chatterbox and the aging, gray-haired mother-in-law take the bus to the mall. The 10-year-old has the aforementioned phone, purchased in New Zealand, in her pocket. Have we mentioned she can’t sit still? The phone slides out of her pocket, no doubt during one of the many times she fidgets in her seat, anxiously awaiting her final destination so she can buy crayons, or Barbies, or little stuffed animals. Cell phones? Those are for grown ups.
So they exit the bus, cell phone possibly lodged in the seat. Enter Tawanna. Possibly with her child Daedae. Maybe her boyfriend Taurean is taking her to Kentucky Fried Chicken to celebrate just getting released from the clink, little knowing that he’ll soon return to a new cellmate name Bubba. Tawanna is from a humble background. Raised in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the Midwest – Indianapolis, Chicago, East St. Paul – Tawanna has a good heart, but doesn’t have much hope for climbing the financial ladder. She was born poor, will live poor, and will die poor. Her poor credit has already precluded her from owning a cell phone.
Maybe she’s commenting on Taurean’s new Boston Celtic Kevin Garnett jersey or asking him if she likes her new four-inch nails, when she’s interrupted midstream by the sight of the phone. Praise Jesus! She glances nervously around, hoping no one sees her deposit the phone in her purse. Now she can call her baby’s daddy, her aunt in Chicago, even her long lost friend in Indy who is traveling down the road to prostitution and an early death.
Then she stops to think. Is it right to take this phone? Who does it belong to? How could I return it to them?
And that was it. Guiltlessly, she took it home, and proceeded to call everyone she knew. It was time to catch up with long-lost friends.
Meanwhile, ADHD 10-year-old and the gray-haired mother-in-law return home. ADHD settles onto the couch to watch some cartoons and reaches into her pocket for her phone. There’s no phone there. Ah well, there’s cartoons to be watched.
Hours later, she informs gray-haired mother-in-law about the missing phone. Gray-haired mother-in-law, who, to be honest, hates that modern technology, tells her it will show up.
Me and the misses arrive home. We eat supper, chit-chat, go to bed. No mention of the lost phone is made.
The following day, the lost phone is mentioned after the ADHD 10-year-old and gray-haired mother-in-law perform an exhaustive search of the house. No sign of the phone.
We immediately e-mail her parents to tell them the phone is lost. We tell them to call the phone company to cancel the account. No response. A second try elicits the same response.
A couple miles away, Tawanna is gasbagging on the phone to Lajinta, her old friend from Indy. She learns her boyfriend is going to the clink for dealing crack and beating Lajinta like a red-headed stepchild. Lajinta is in a hard place and thinking about turning tricks to make some quick money. Tawanna tries to talk her out of it, hoping she can get through.
She does. She thanks Jesus that he sent her this phone. Without it, her friend would undoubtedly be heading on a path toward hell.
Fast-forward a month. We’re packing for a trip to South Dakota when an unexpected e-mail arrives from the ADHD 10-year-old’s parents: They have a $1,200+ phone bill. They have attached a partial bill. Could we please take it to the police and see if they can do anything.?
We privately mock them. What kind of morons don’t cancel a lost phone that’s halfway around the globe?
But then the wife, who is rankled by the nerve of some people who think it’s OK to take a little girl’s phone, decides to set things right. She examines the phone numbers on the bill and at random calls one. An old lady answers. She butters her up, calling her “sweetie”, and kindly explains what happened. The old lady denies any knowledge of the phone. The wife plays another card, indicating the police have the records but that we just want the phone, no questions asked. “Could you help me out, Sweetie?” She says she lives with two grown sons, maybe one of them has it. She’ll ask around.
The wife continues her crusade, calling numbers in Indiana and Illinois to no avail.
Tawanna returns to her home that she shares with her aunt and brothers. Her aunt is waiting “Honey,” she waives her finger, “you betta git that phone ya found. The po-po gonna git ya.”
Tawanna’s worst fear is realized. She doesn’t want to go to jail. Who will care for DaeDae? She grew up in broken homes, raised by her aunt.- she doesn’t want the same for her child. He’s such a sweet boy.
“Here be da number. Ya go-on an’ ca dis young lady and give da phone back.”
Tawanna thinks for a second. There’s no way they could prove she has the phone. All she needs to do is throw it out. It hasn’t worked for the last couple of days, anyway. It’s of no use to her anymore.
But that wouldn’t be right. Mustering all her pride, and a few lies, Tawanna calls my wife and tells her she has the phone. But she can’t bring herself to admit it was her using it. “It was my boyfriend. He’s in jail now, but he left the phone. It’s on my dresser.”
Wife: “Can I meet you somewhere?”
Tawanna pauses. “Um, I’m leaving for the dentist. Do you want to meet me there?”
So they plan to meet at the dentist in a half hour. The wife, for some reason, decides it’s safe to go into East St. Paul alone, unarmed, without a police escort. Heck, one of our dogs may scare away the perp, but she decides to trust Tawanna not to pull any funny business.
The wife arrives at the dentist office located at the corner of White Bear and Minnehaha in East St. Paul. The buildings across the way are boarded up. Rusty cars, popular in the 80s, line the streets, some sporting only two or three tires. Formerly glorious middle-class homes now sport broken windows and 12 inhabitants. It’s a tough area.
She waits. And waits. And waits. She nervously taps the steering wheel. She begins to wonder if Tawanna will show. And then, as all hope seems lost, a woman and four young men cross the street nearby. The men sport gold chains, baseball caps, diamond rings, baggy pants. Tawanna, though nearing 2 and half bills, is wearing tight stretch pants and a plain black tank top. She has what Dave Chappelle calls a ba-donk-a-donk. As they near the dental office parking lot, the men stop. Tawanna looks around and then continues toward the door. Call it intuition, call it a hunch, but the wife knows this is the keeper of the phone.
She opens the door: “Tawanna?”
“Wha?”
“Do you have my phone?”
“Yes.”
The one-sided exchange was made. The phone was returned to its rightful owner. My wife thanked Tawanna for returning the phone. They talked. Tawanna’s between jobs and may leave the city in search of a new life. She repeated that it wasn’t her that used the phone.
But the phone tells a different story. Pictures of DaeDae, Tawanna’s family and her friends attest that she did indeed use the phone.
And now, as she sits in her new one-room apartment in Chicago with DaeDae, Tawanna feels alone. Phoneless, penniless, and in a new city, she doesn’t know where to turn. Where will it lead? Crack, tricks, prison? Or McDonald’s, a meager existence and death alone in a cold, dark room? If only there was some way she could call someone to talk through her depression…
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