2019-07-28 - Home Is the Place Where

Love 1966 Mustang rolls up the long drive into the edge of the heavily forested parcel of land, tires crunching over loose gravel. Her phone is held in a little upright cradle secured to the dash, a call currently engaged with a contact: Leilani. It’s on speaker, and the woman on the other end of the line is talking, accent distinctly Hawaiian. She sounds like she’s on a beach somewhere.

The half-acre clearing around the house is fully stocked with raised beds and pathways between them, subtle piping crossing each bed to water twice a day on simple timers. Twelve tomato plants are loaded to drooping in their bright blue cages, roma tomato, and a purple-red Russian variety ready to be picked. Shiny dwarf eggplant, rich in hue, drag low in another bed, mixed in with blue kale and at least two beds of various chilis and hot peppers.

Love sits in the curve of the drive, staring at her childhood home through the rolled-down window. This isn’t how she remembers it. The house wasn’t blue, and there was maybe a single pot on the porch with a sad geranium or something, back when she was living here.

“So… high functioning crazy then.” Love says.

“I’m not into weird shit, Lolo.” Love sometimes lies.

“Stop.” Love takes her foot off the brake and turns the engine off.


“Okay, that was one time.” Love pulls her keys, hand resting on her thigh for a long moment, just staring at the house.

“Please stop bringing it up.” Enough of that.

There’s a lengthy silence from Love, in which she stares at the house, nails lightly drumming the steering wheel. Instead of addressing Vegas, she says, “I just pulled up to Silas’ place and it’s… not what I remember, and definitely not what I expected. I’ll send you a pic, babe, I gotta go deal with this.”

“Aloha, babe. I’ll see about coming out for the holidays. I miss your face.”

To the dialtone, Love says, “Yeah, you are.”

Armed with a baggie of keys the lawyer handed over in a padded envelope of mysterious papers and sundry items, Love approaches the little Craftsman, finding the steps and porch in good repair. Everything looks relatively freshly painted. There's evidence of window boxes about to go in with summer flowers, stacked to one side but not hung or filled. Pots of wilted, dead and dry flowers stacked out of reach of the rain that would have kept them alive, set off to one side like they were ready to be put in the boxes. A pair of gardening gloves, a small trowel, and a bag of potting soil, opened but not used, rest nearby. She finds the key labeled front door with a small piece of tape, and uses it to gain entry. There are five deadbolts which all take the same key. She clunks through them, the mechanisms fairly new.

"Okay, Silas. That's not weird at all."

The door swings open to a huge pile of mail under the slot, and Love nudges it away with her toe.

Inside, there’s a hint of a musty, slightly sweet smell to the air, a little dusty, like the basement stacks of a very old library.

Love leaves the door wide open behind her, because she’s seen this movie. She slides her phone into her back pocket, turns her keys in her hand, and threads them one between each finger in a fist, an improvised weapon. You know, just in case.

The hall is empty of anything apparently unusual. As is the den. She moves through that to push open the double pocket doors to reveal the office, and that's where it gets a little... odd. Every available surface is stacked with books and papers in various file folders, hundreds of them, along with teetering piles of at least a year's worth of old newspapers, some piles reaching from the floor to waist high or higher.

One single room so far in a house relatively clean. It looks like an episode of Hoarders in here. It smells a little sickly sweet, too. Love really doesn't want to investigate further, but she does.

Someone has to check the house.

Love approaches the desk, around a few squat piles of newspapers bundled by month, from the looks of it one for every day, along with a healthy stack of tabloids. Classy. She takes her phone out to snap a few pics. The after on this one is going to be epic.

She can just see the edge of a laptop buried under a foot and a half of precariously piled papers, and reaches for that when a pop-creak distracts her.

She turns at a creaking, house-settling sound, and hip-checks a low stack of papers on the desk. Already unstable, the top file, labeled FIREFLY FOREST A-FRAMES spills off the top, a coffee ring staining the folder and the corner of a post-it note on atop. When it smacks to the floor with several other fat folders, the contents fan out with a slap, and the note precariously tacked pops off and skips under the desk. Gonna be a while till she finds that.

Which may be unfortunate, considering the hasty scrawl across it is double underlined, though all it says is:

𝒮𝒶𝓁𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑒𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒽.

"Maybe this room last," Love decides, when another pile of papers, unsettled by the first, goes tumbling off the back of the desk. It's going to take ages to tidy up.

"I need a drink."

She stands there with her phone in one hand, her keys in the other.

A while later, after she's checked all the rooms, the attic, and back garden, Love leans against the kitchen, after hastily shutting a fridge that's in dire need of being cleaned out.

"I need all the drinks."