Chapter 4 - The House on Alder Lane
Harold and I bought the little rental house on Alder Lane forty years earlier.
It had crooked gutters, a rotten back porch, and a furnace that rattled like a coffee can full of nails.
Harold repaired the porch himself.
I painted the kitchen while Tyler, still in diapers, slept in a playpen beneath the window.
We paid off the mortgage one double shift at a time.
Harold drove deliveries by day.
I worked as a school secretary, then took evening bookkeeping jobs.
Sometimes we ate soup three nights in a row so we could make an extra principal payment.
People saw a two-bedroom house.
I saw winters when the furnace broke, birthdays celebrated with homemade cake, and Harold counting quarters at our kitchen table.
After he died, I kept the rental.
The income helped cover property taxes and repairs on my own home.
More importantly, it gave people a decent place to live.
The current tenant, Denise Walker, was a nursing assistant raising a ten-year-old son named Caleb.
She paid on time, planted tomatoes beside the porch, and called me whenever a pipe sounded wrong.
Two months before the plate, Marissa had visited with a bottle of wine and a smile that looked perfectly harmless.
“You're one person,” she said.
“Why do you need two houses?”
“Because one is my home and the other is a business I built with Harold.”
“Mom and Dad could take better care of it.”
“Denise already takes good care of it.”
Marissa's smile thinned.
“You're choosing strangers over family.”
“No, I'm keeping a promise.”
I meant the promise I made to Harold beside his hospital bed: no matter how old I got, I would never let anyone bully me out of the life we'd built.
The next day, Denise called.
A strange man had photographed the rental's windows and measured the driveway.
He told her he'd be moving his parents in soon.
She sent me his photograph.
May you like
It was Marcus.
And he was holding a set of keys I'd never given him.
