Part 1
It was a comfortable house, if not modern or luxurious. They made do with air conditioning units precariously mounted in the windows during the hot humidity of New England summer, and the vintage oil burning furnace still managed to keep it livable in the winter. Roger wasn’t sure when the house had been built; it wasn’t old enough to be significant in any way, but the design felt to him like maybe the 1930s. It had a front porch, and an asphalt-shingled detached garage with old-fashioned barn doors. He just parked his car in the driveway, and hadn’t been inside the garage in months. He avoided the garage because of memories, not that they really resided in there. The garage had been where his father had always parked his prized car, a blue Ford LTD sedan.
Roger wasn’t sure why he found the garage so off-putting. The house itself didn’t bother him, even though he’d grown up there. You’d think it would trigger even more memories of his parents, but it didn’t. Maybe it was because of the association with the car, and his dad’s feelings for it. His parents had been in that car years ago when the accident killed them. And the garage had been where the car had been kept.
Roger lived alone in the house that was now his. He was not the homemaker his mother had been. He was not the handyman his father had been. He managed to keep the lawn mowed, maybe because that had been his chore since he was 12. But all the rest was in slow decline. The house needed painting. The kitchen faucet had a slow drip that his father would have seen to right away. Some of the floorboards creaked more than they used to. His father had known what to do about that, too. Roger had lived alone in the house for seven years now, and while he realized he was lucky, in today’s economy, to own a house before he turned thirty, he couldn’t seem to manage to tend to it properly.
He couldn’t tend to anything properly, really, at least in his own estimation. He had been in college when the accident happened, and after sleepwalking through the funeral he never went back to campus. A lawyer — his parents’ — had laid out the situation afterward. Roger was the sole heir. They had owned the house free and clear. Roger received a respectable inheritance besides. The insurance settlement from the accident, which had been caused by a truck running a red light, was more than respectable. Roger thought he would take a little while, maybe a couple of months, to gather his thoughts, then decide what he was going to do with the house, the money, and his life.
That had been seven years ago.
