Chương 3
For a few seconds I stood in the sunroom listening to the old radiator tick beside the windows.
The house had central heat, but the radiator was original and decorative, restored because I liked the ridiculous little clank it made when the pipes settled.
Dad would have hated it.
He believed any machine making an unnecessary noise was asking to be taken apart.
My phone buzzed again.
This time Jenna had added, I mean it.
I picked it up.
Tell anyone what?
Three dots appeared immediately.
Then vanished.
Then appeared again.
Finally she wrote, About the mortgage.
I stared at the screen.
Mom had been inside the house less than forty minutes and had already handed me something Jenna clearly considered dangerous.
I typed, I wasn’t planning to.
Jenna answered, Good.
That should have ended it.
Instead, less than a minute later, another message appeared.
And don’t offer me money.
I leaned back in the chair.
I hadn’t been about to.
The fact that she expected me to made the thousand dollars in her moving drawer feel suddenly humiliating in a different direction.
I wrote, I won’t.
Her reply came after several minutes.
Fine.
Then nothing.
I spent the rest of the morning doing what I had originally planned before my family turned tea into a financial interrogation.
I answered work messages, reviewed a product roadmap, and joined a video call from the library because the sunroom had developed an echo no amount of rugs seemed able to fix.
At eleven-thirty, Mara sent me a photo of a sandwich with the caption, Corporate excellence.
I sent back a picture of three half-eaten scones and wrote, Family excellence.
She called before I could put the phone down.
“Did she come?”
“Both of them.”
“Oh, no.”
“It was educational.”
“Did Jenna combust?”
“Not completely.”
“That’s disappointing.”
I smiled despite myself.
Mara had known me since sophomore year of college, before my family had decided that she was “the loud one” and therefore a bad influence.
She was now an employment attorney with a mortgage, two cats, and a habit of buying expensive candles she complained about immediately afterward.
“What happened?” she asked.
I looked toward the closed library door.
“Mom told me Jenna can’t afford her house.”
There was a pause.
“That feels extremely on-brand for this family.”
“I told her I wouldn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I know.”
“And now you know.”
“I know.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
Mara snorted.
“That was very fast.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Nothing is probably correct.”
“Thank you.”
“But you’re terrible at nothing.”
I swiveled my chair toward the windows.
A school bus moved slowly along the street beyond the hedge.
“I’m excellent at nothing.”
“You secretly built a company while your mother insulted your career.”
“That was technically something.”
“Exactly.”
My laptop chimed with another meeting reminder.
“I have to go.”
“Call me when someone sets something on fire.”
“And Lil?”
“What?”
“Enjoy your house.”
The line went quiet.
I looked around the library.
Boxes still occupied half the shelves.
A rolled rug leaned against the wall because I had measured the room wrong.
There was a pale rectangle above the fireplace where the previous owners had taken an enormous painting with them.
I had been living there for five weeks and still hadn’t spent a full day enjoying anything.
Buying the house had felt like crossing a finish line.
Living in it felt oddly more complicated.
There were plumbers and electricians and a woman named Denise from the historical commission who had opinions about windows.
There were property taxes large enough to make me stare at numbers even after selling a company.
There was a gate sensor that worked only when it was dry outside.
There were sixteen kitchen cabinet doors, two of which refused to close.
None of that bothered me.
What bothered me was that the house had become evidence before it had become home.
At three, I closed my laptop and went downstairs to fix one of the cabinet doors.
I had absolutely no idea how.
Dad had left me a red metal toolbox filled with mismatched screwdrivers and three kinds of pliers.
I sat on the kitchen floor with the cabinet hinge exposed and watched a six-minute repair video twice.
The first attempt made the door worse.
The second made it hang at a small, insulting angle.
By the third, I was laughing alone.
“Okay,” I said to the cabinet.
“You win.”
The doorbell rang.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and went to the foyer.
A man stood outside holding a padded envelope.
He looked to be in his late sixties, with a gray beard and a navy knit cap pulled down over his ears.
“Lillian?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Tom Keating.”
The name meant nothing to me until he added, “Your dad and I worked together.”
I opened the door wider.
Tom glanced past me, then up at the ceiling.
“Well, damn.”
I waited for the question everybody seemed to ask now.
How much?
Instead he smiled.
“Your old man would’ve pretended he wasn’t impressed for a solid twenty minutes.”
Something in my chest tightened.
“That sounds right.”
“I found something.”
He lifted the envelope.
“Been meaning to get it to you.”
I invited him inside.
He declined tea but accepted coffee after I admitted I had no idea whether the espresso machine worked.
“It’ll make coffee,” he said.
“Whether it makes good coffee is between you and God.”
He sat at the kitchen island while I fought with buttons.
Tom had worked with Dad at the regional transit authority for nearly thirty years.
I vaguely remembered him from cookouts, always standing near the grill with a beer and telling stories my father interrupted to correct.
“What did you find?” I asked.
Tom slid the envelope across the counter.
“Your dad cleaned out his locker about a month before he got sick.”
I stopped touching the coffee machine.
May you like
“He knew?”
“Knew he felt lousy.”
