This place no longer seems like a home, no matter how hard I’ve tried to fill the gaps left here from Mom being gone.
I don’t have long to wallow though because after washing and drying the breakfast dishes, there’s a knock on the front door.
I don’t stomp my feet and refuse to open it like a want to. I plaster a fake-as-hell smile on my face and turn the knob.
There’s a certain kind of person that works, lives, and visits our type of neighborhood. The well-dressed man standing on the porch with a smile more genuine than mine doesn’t fit into any of those people.
He doesn’t look smarmy, the kind of guy you have to watch your purse around.
He doesn’t look like he’s either overworked or drugged out.
He’s handsome, his honey blond hair catching the light of the morning sun as his blue eyes swim with a misplaced familiarity.
Not being able to shove him in one of the boxes all people around here fit into makes me even more nervous.
“Tinley Holland?” he asks, his hand out for me to shake.
I pull my sweater tighter around me, locking my hands under my arms. “Yes?”
“I’m Brooks Morgan.” He drops his hand, his smile never faltering like he never expected me to take it in the first place. “I’m here to get measurements.”
“Oh, okay. Umm.” I dart a look over my shoulder. “Can you give me just a moment?”
How am I still in my pajamas?
“Oh. I’m not going to come inside. I’m here to measure the yard.”
“The yard?” I hope this poor guy doesn’t think that this is the right neighborhood to build a pool or something.
“Yep.” He smiles again.
“For like a pool?”
He chuckles, the sound in most any other situation would calm me, but I don’t think there’s anything that could ease the stress in my shoulders right now.
“I’m going to bulldoze the house.” There isn’t a hint of malicious intent in his blue gaze, but it doesn’t stop his statement from slamming into me.
“Wh-What?”
“There are rumors about this neighborhood being the next spot in Houston likely for gentrification. I’m trying to get in on the front end of that. I’ve been snapping up houses all around here.” He looks back to the street where his car, a black BMW of all things, is parked on the street. “Do you think that will be safe out here if I go around back?”
“Depends on who sees it,” I mutter.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Holland.”
He steps off the porch, looking out over the small yard, and I know he doesn’t see it like I do. Suddenly all those thoughts about this not being home change.
Where his feet are planted on the cracked driveway is where Alex learned to dribble a basketball. I blame those cracks for his continued inability to do it well and thank baseball for being his outlet.
The flower beds are overgrown now, but Mom spent so many hours nurturing them, so we had a little bit of color in our otherwise dark and cloudy world.
The back porch holds the secrets of so many conversations I had with Mom after Dad died, after I didn’t get asked on a second date because the man wasn’t interested in a woman with a child, and after the doctors delivered the blow that they would stop her treatments.
This is home, and according to the brief text from Cooper that I got last night, I only have thirty more days here.
Tears burn my eyes, and I do my best to wipe them away. Mr. Morgan nods to me once before walking back to his car. Minutes is all it takes to evaluate what will be left after he strips the lot of everything.
He wasn’t here long enough, but how can he know that Mom hand-painted the mailbox or that I found the massive tree in the front yard so much smaller many years ago, tossed in a ditch a couple blocks from my work. I almost take a step further on the porch intent on flagging him down to ask him if he knows it produces the best lemons. To inform him that the wood shutters on the windows were the last thing my dad painted on the house before we moved to Dallas. How can he tear the place down when the counter in the hall bathroom is where I found out I was pregnant or the curb he’s pulling away from is where my heart was shattered? How can he wipe away so much? Did they not tell him that the very room my mother took her last breath in was the room her mother did the same?
My hands tremble with the urge to call Ignacio and beg him to fix it.
Leaving was one thing. Moving somewhere else would be hard, but the place would still hold all of those memories.