Matt & Zoe - Charles Sheehan-Miles Page 0,2
slide out, my combat boots slipping half an inch into the mud. That’s okay. After today I won’t be wearing them much, unless it’s for working around the house and grounds.
As always, the house looks like it needs work. Mom and Dad loved the idea of fixing up an old house, but in practice it had always been more of a dream than practical reality. I love this old house. I also associate it with unfinished drywall, cracked and dry flooring, and drafty windows. Mom gardened sometimes, and often spent hours riding the horses, but Dad’s idea of enjoying the outdoors was sitting on the old rocker on the side porch or tinkering with his car. Staring at the house now, I’m left with an empty feeling. I can’t imagine the place without them.
I take a deep breath and listen again. I can hear the horses, for sure. As soon as we get into the house, I’ll walk over to the stable and check on them. In the meantime, I look down at Jasmine, who meets my eyes with an uncertain smile.
“You ready?”
She nods. But from the expression in her eyes, I don’t think she is. She’s an orphan too, and she’s never been in this house without our parents being alive. I pick her up and put my arms around her, and she squeezes her arms around my shoulders. Then I walk up the side stairs and onto the porch.
The gray paint on the porch deck is peeling underneath the rocking chairs. A glass, still half-full of sweet iced tea, sits on the table between the two rockers. It has to be sweet tea, because that’s all he ever drank. The tea has mold growing on the top. Dad must have left it when they went out.
I approach the side door and reach out to open it.
No luck. It’s locked. Of course. The keys are probably at the morgue, and I’m not going there, not with Jasmine. Maybe another day. In the meantime, I need to check the front and back doors and maybe the windows. Worse case, I can push one of the window-unit air conditioners in through the window and climb over it.
“Let me put you down. I gotta check the front door.”
I slide Jasmine to her feet, then walk to the front door. She hurries along beside me.
It’s locked. Damn it. I check under the mat and along the top of the door frame, but no luck.
“I’ll check the back,” Nicole says. She knows the way as well as I do—when we were in school, Nicole spent as much time in our home as she did in her own. In the meantime, I start checking for unlocked windows. Even if the windows aren't locked, they'll still be difficult to open. Many layers of paint combined with the heat of summer tend to seal windows shut.
“Do you know where Mom and Dad have been keeping the key?” I ask Jasmine.
She shakes her head. I look over toward the garage. I haven’t been in there in a long time, and I don’t want to go in now. Some of my happiest memories of my childhood are in that garage. I want to go in there, but not right now. Instead I want to wait. I want to go slow, take my time, peel it back like a band-aid. It seems that if there’s any place Dad might have left a house key, it would be on a hook in there.
“Stay here,” I say.
I walk toward the two-car garage. It’s detached from the rest of the house, a white building with a shallow angled roof and no windows. Dad always keeps the Austin Healey parked in here, and the van stays in the driveway.
Rather, he kept it in there.
I shuffle toward the garage. My feet weigh a hundred pounds.
Nicole comes back around the corner. “I found the key,” she says. “It was under the loose brick in the back stairs.”
I close my eyes. There’s no way I can express the relief that floods through me. I follow Nicole back up the stair onto the porch. Jasmine is leaning against the front door, turning the knob. Nicole says, “Hey, honey, let me unlock it.”
We enter the house.
The living room looks the same as always. The wide plank flooring has needed refinishing since before I’ve been alive. A mix of antique and thrift-store furniture surrounds a broad coffee table. The curtains are drawn back and light streams into the house. It