Morgan got out of mine. I heard the bed squeak and then my door bumped as she shut it, and I immediately felt guilty as well as angry. There was no reason for her to waste away, alone. And there was no reason for my brother to believe that his latest business idea would work, since his previous plans never had. The one before this had been a rideshare company that was also a dating service: your driver would take you to your destination after also picking up the man/woman with whom you were most compatible. Max blamed the failure of that venture on the smaller number of single people in our area and the unusual fact that most of them seemed unwilling to turn over a large amount of personal information.
“How am I supposed to match them if they won’t tell me shit?” he had raged. “Of course I need to know their social security numbers and favorite sex positions!”
The business plan that my brother had introduced today also seemed destined for failure, because I couldn’t imagine thatmany tourists would have been interested in having a near-death experience (he wanted to call his company “You Might Make It”). I just didn’t believe that vacationers would readily sign up to be left in the woods at night with no gear and no phone to call for help, or to be tied up and thrown off the side of a boat. Not to mention, if something went wrong and they didn’t actually make it…
But luckily, my brother’s plans never progressed too far out of what he called “market research” and, more importantly, funding requests. Today, we hadn’t gotten into actual amounts because we’d been sidetracked by the picture of his alleged girlfriend giving head to the beer bottle. We all had to listen to his presentations, every single one, because the money he requested belonged to our family. It came from ourfamilybusiness.
I worked steadily on my group project, which was actually only mine, and I got it to a point where it would have been ok to hand it in. Then I sent a message to the other three people to tell them that it was done and I gave them one last chance to look it over before I submitted it. I didn’t care if they never opened my texts but at least no one could complain to our professor that I’d cut them out.
I reluctantly checked my own messages—enough time had passed that things were slowly settling down about the video, but I was still wary of my phone. There was a text, though, that didn’t relate to that at all. I went quietly down the stairs, avoiding the ones that I knew would creak, and I closed the front door carefully behind myself. No one heard me until I started thecar and by that point, it was too late because I was already on the road to Shane’s house.
“I have to move. Can you help out with new apartments?” he had just asked and yes, I could. I drove quickly over to see him.
His place looked a lot the same, except worse. We’d had a little thaw and the snow had melted and exposed the mud, sticks, and dead leaves that had been nicely hidden beneath it. Then it had gotten cold again and everything had refrozen so it was locked into an ugly mess. Since I’d been here before, one of the shutters had fallen off the front of his house. It had stabbed into the ground and now it was frozen in that position, too.
At least his roommates didn’t appear to be home, because the street wasn’t littered with their cars and the driveway held only his truck. He was loading something into the bed of that and looking through his sunglasses into the sky when I pulled in behind him.
“Hello, Molly. I think it’s going to snow,” he said when I got out.
“Very likely. Is there anything in those boxes that you don’t want frozen or wet?”
“It’s everything that I own, so yeah, most of it.” He looked mad enough to swear but, having spent some time with him, I knew that he wouldn’t.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why did you pack up all your stuff?”
“Because we’re getting evicted,” he told me. His deep voice had gotten even lower and it rumbled with what I guessed was anger. I had heard my dad’s shake when he screamed at us.
“Why are you getting evicted?” I wondered and followed him into the house as he answered. He explained that one of his roommates, the short, mouthy one, had stopped paying rent a few months before. The guy had managed to hide that from the rest of them, until Shane had reached out directly to the landlord about some leaking pipes and she had said he had a lot of nerve requesting repairs when they weren’t even paying what they owed.
“I’m going to have to give her the balance due because my other roommates are broke and if this goes into collections, it will affect my credit. She’s proceeding with the eviction regardless of whether she gets the money because of all the lease violations they’ve incurred. I’m fairly new in this house but they’ve been here long enough to really make her mad,” he stated. “Very, very mad.”
I was listening to him but I was also looking around, pretty much in horror. We were in the living room but it looked less like a place for human habitation and more like a place for rats to hang out—they would have been comfortable in the piles of trash, for sure.
“Shane,” I said. “This is a pit.”
“I know. I told you that.”
I hadn’t fully understood. Since our trip to Woodsmen stadium, he had come into the restaurant again and had anothercarbohydrate-free burger (with extra tomatoes) and fries with no salt. He had also texted a few times, saying hello from different cities (Omaha, Fort Wayne, Madison) and sending a lot of pictures.
“I like to take them,” he had explained. “I have to keep getting phones with more storage because I like to look back at them a lot, too.”
I hadn’t thought that we’d progressed to a point where we would ask each other for help with moving, but I was game to pick up a few boxes for him and I did have trunk space available to help get him to the next place. Where was that going to be?
“I’ll go to a hotel for tonight,” he answered that question. We had entered his room, which was as neat as his office in Woodsmen Stadium, but on the way we had passed the bathroom off the hall and that was abhorrently wretched. I cleaned the public bathrooms at our restaurant so I felt like I had the background to accurately judge. “I texted because you’d mentioned that you kept a list of available rentals, good ones.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I could have sent it to you.”
“I was going to ask you to do that but then you said that you were coming over.”
“Oh. I wanted to get out of my house anyway.” I had been right: we weren’t the kind of friends you would call for a move, and I had jumped the gun. “Do you have the money to put down on a new place if you pay the arrears due to your landlord? Are you already on some kind of renter blacklist because she’s throwing you out?”
“An eviction wouldn’t show up so soon.” But he was shaking his head. “Heck, I don’t know. Maybe it will. I have savings from the last few years but I hate to spend money on this. I don’t want to sign a lease today and make another mistake about my housing and I probably wouldn’t be able to move right in anyway.”
“I like your idea of going to a hotel,” I said. “There’s a nice long-term place close to the airport. I can help you carry most of this stuff except they probably won’t want your bed in their room.” It was huge, much bigger than the twin bed I’d slept in since childhood.
“This is…” He hesitated, shaking his head again. “It’s a cluster. I’m supposed to be on the road right now to make it to Ohio by tonight.”
“I have time to help since I’m not working today.” We were always closed on Sunday nights, because the original Walter had liked to spend time with his wife and kids. Our current family unit had no desire to spend time with each other but the restaurant remained closed out of tradition. “I can help you move. Maybe you’ll need to rent a storage place? We had to do that three years ago when the restaurant flooded. We put all the furniture we’d salvaged into a unit…I bet I still have the number of the woman who managed it. She was great.”
