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Then the dogs barrel into the room and leap onto the bed with smiling faces and wagging tails. Gus tries to lick Callum's face, Goliath starts to circle around like he’s settling in for a long nap, and Dave hops over our legs several times before trying to dig a hole in the blanket. It’s terribly crowded and definitely not relaxing, so Petra tells them, “Come on. Get off, you guys,” and points to the floor where Dave and Goliath reluctantly retreat to their beds. Gus flops down between them on the carpet with a grunt. If this keeps up, maybe he needs a bed in here too.
When our laughter subsides, I take a deep breath and say, “I don’t want to depress you, but you may as well know what makes me… ah, makes me the way I am.”
“Only if you want to share,” Callum assures me. “I won’t lie though… your reaction to old macaroni boxes caught us both off guard, to say the least.”
Nodding, I begin, “My mom taught me how to make that when I was about six years old. It was my favorite food back then, though I eventually lost the taste for it. I remember standing on a stool so I could reach the counter. She would boil the noodles for me and then let me stir the rest of the ingredients together. I was always amazed at how powdery orange stuff andslimy noodles turned into food. I felt like a big kid when I made it because she’d tell me what a great job I was doing and all that shit little kids eat up.”
“I’m sure she was sincere and proud of you, Weston,” Petra says. “Where is your mom now?”
I clear my throat. This is hard. “I’ll get there.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“No worries. Anyway, I bugged her all the time to let me make it, and it was something I loved to eat. Real comfort food. Sometimes she’d toss in extra ingredients like extra cheese or bacon, or whatever, and that was even more fun to stir up. Sometimes when we’d visit my grandparents, she’d have me whip up a batch—that’s how she’d say it—to take over there to add to their dinner. My granddad always got a kick out of it when I showed up looking all proud of myself and carrying a casserole dish full of that stuff.” I look at Callum and try for a smile. “See, you’re not the only famous chef in the fam… ah… house.” He gives me a kind smile, and I get lost for a moment in those expressive hazel eyes of his.
“When I was nine, my grandmother started having small strokes. She could still function pretty well—only her speech became compromised, but gradually she began having mobility issues. My granddad was still working then. He had to be up in Chicago on a day she had a doctor’s appointment and needed a ride to get to it. So my parents agreed to take her. I was supposed to go straight from school to my next-door neighbor’s house to play until they could get home. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad worked nearby. He wasn’t sure my mom could handle her mother on her own, so he took the afternoon off to help.
“I don’t have all of the facts, but what I remember being told was they were… ah… heading home when an ice storm hit. It had been a regular winter day one minute and then black ice thenext. My dad’s car was crossing a bridge when a semi went out of control… and hit them, knocking them clean off the bridge and onto the interstate below. It was a pretty horrific accident that involved several vehicles from what I understand.”
“Oh, Weston!” Petra gasps and grabs my arm.
Callum takes my hand on the other side. It seems strange, but I feel their caring energy pouring into me with their touch. It helps me get through the rest of the story.
“I had to stay with the neighbors until Granddad could get home. The ice storm lasted all through that night, and the major roads were impassable. The poor guy had to be positively ruined. He’d lost his wife, daughter, and son-in-law all in one fell swoop. I was so distraught, they had to call my pediatrician who prescribed a mild sedative, but no one could drive out to get it, so I just sobbed all night long. I can’t even begin to tell you how awful it was. I was terrified and flattened by grief.
“When Granddad finally made it home, he quit work on the spot. He had this house and he’d saved up for what he called a rainy day, so he knew we’d be okay. He became my mother, father, and best friend until the day he died.”
“When was that?” Callum asks.
“A few months before you moved in. It was awful. He was a such good man, and I never once doubted his love for me, even when he was chewing me out for being a dumb fuck.” I smile sadly at the memory of his gravelly voice. “He encouraged me to get great grades and always do my best so I could get an excellent college education. Fortunately, I had scholarships and insurance money that took care of tuition, even though the accident settlement should have been better than that. I’d have preferred to go to some cheap Podunk school if it meant I could have had my family intact, but that’s the way life goes sometimes.
“He always told me he was happy enough, and he was proud of me. He never complained about being lonely, but when I wasa senior in college, he got Goliath to keep him company.” I smile at the memory, “He had some pretty funny stories about raising a puppy at his age.” I look fondly over at the dog who’s snoring and twitching his legs, probably dreaming about playing fetch.
“Granddad’s heart started giving him trouble when I was in grad school. I offered to quit and come home to take care of him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said he’d move into an assisted living facility, so I came back during Christmas break, and we looked at places. All of the nice ones were full, and the ones with vacancies were gross. He refused to give up Goliath to go live in any of them. So I arranged for caregivers to come in regularly to help take care of him. Those people are really expensive, so his life savings were dwindling pretty quickly. I worked as many hours as I could while I was in school to take some of the monetary pressure off, and I encouraged him to sell this house or at least take out a mortgage on it. He wouldn’t think of it because he said this was all he had to leave to me and didn’t want to saddle me with debt. I’m pretty sure he didn’t think he was going to last very long with that ticker of his. He actually did better than he expected, I believe.
“Each time I came home for a school break, I could see that he’d faded away a little more. When I was a kid, I thought he was a huge bear of a man. He’d always had a broad chest and big strong arms, but now he seemed to be shrinking. What he needed was a heart transplant, but at his age, he wasn’t given a lot of hope for that. He’d probably been having trouble long before he admitted it to me.
“As soon as I was done with my Ph.D., I moved back in here to take care of him so we could cut back on the caregivers a bit, and it frankly shocked me to see how feeble he was by then. I set up counseling calls with the few clients I had and tried to do what I could.” I make a disparaging sound as I continue, “Ihada long-distance relationship with my girlfriend because that wasthe best I could do right then. But she was less than enthusiastic about the lack of attention I had to give her and promptly started to cheat on me. So we ended our two-year romance in the blink of an eye. Good riddance, I guess. My life had become a real country song at that point.”
I feel Petra and Callum stroking my arms, and it gives me the strength to go on. I notice too that Gus has silently crept back onto the bed and is now lying with his head in Callum’s lap looking up at him with pure doggie adoration.
“Granddad used to ask me all the time to fix that ‘orange crap’ that tasted so good. It was about all that tempted his appetite in his last weeks. So I always made sure there was plenty of it on hand, and we ate so much of it I thought I would turn orange.” I try to wring out a small laugh, but it’s not at all funny. “One night he… ah… took a couple of small bites then apologized and said he couldn’t finish and wanted to go to sleep.” I have to pause and clear my throat before going on because it’s closing up on me. “In retrospect, I wonder if he ate it all the time to try to make me feel useful or good about something. He was completely bedridden at that point, and he could barely speak. His voice sounded like sandpaper.”
I have to steel my emotions to get through telling the rest of this, and my voice comes out pretty shaky. “I told him goodnight and took his dish away. The caregiver helped him get ready to go to sleep and then took off for home. Later that night I heard Goliath… ah… howling. He was making a noise I’d never heard come out of him, and I knew instantly that it was over. Granddad was now gone too, and I had no one left to love except his dog. It occurred to me then that getting Goliath was probably Granddad’s plan to have someone to keep me company and make me get out of bed in the morning. He knew how sick he was even back when he got the puppy.” I try my hardest not to chokeup, but it’s impossible. Callum and Petra silently support me by surrounding me in a tight hug.
It takes me a while to compose myself so I can continue.
“All that was left to do then was bury the man who was everything to me, but I honestly can’t even remember the funeral—only that it was another dreadful one I had to endure. After that, I spent a lot of time donating and tossing out his stuff and then fixing up this place. At first, I expected to sell the house and move into something cheaper, but each time I came into this room it made me feel closer to him, and it somehow relaxed me, so eventually I decided to move in here permanently and make it my own. It’s mostly all new furniture, so it’s not as if the room is some weird shrine to him or anything, but I did keep photos and a few souvenirs. The king-size bed frame was his, but I replaced the old mattress and springs. He hadn’t even slept in it in a long time because we’d rented a hospital bed for him, but I wanted to start fresh.
“I took stock around the house and realized it had fallen into some pretty bad disrepair. Most of all, it needed a new roof, but also the air conditioner and the furnace were old and unreliable. I had to face the fact that in order to replace these, I needed to take out a mortgage. That was a sad day for me to get a loan against the house that Grandad had tried so hard to keep debt-free.” Shaking my head, I continue, “It was the only way at that point.
“I decided to adopt Dave so poor Goliath wouldn’t be so lonely. It was a hard adjustment for him, but Dave is so pushy, it gave Goliath a new lease on life just to try to stay ahead of the little squirt.” We all smile at the dogs. “I can’t deny that I spent a lot of time moping around and feeling sorry for myself, and I’d ignored my business too much. Finally, one day I realized if I didn’t do something in a hurry, I was going to be flat broke, and I’d default on the mortgage. I also faced up to the fact that I wasextremely lonely, even with the dogs. So I listed the house on the roommate-finding app. And that brings us up to meeting the two of you. I’m so glad the app brought us all together. I feel more whole now than I have in years. Thank you.” I look down for a moment and ask, “Do either of you believe in fate?”
“I’m not sure,” Callum answers. “Certainly there are times when circumstances seem controlled by it. But… life just happens, and sometimes you get lucky. What about you, Petra?”
“No. I don’t like to think that what happens to me is outside of my control by some predetermined fate. I agree, though, that sometimes we all just get lucky. And I feel extremely fortunate to be living here with the two of you, with Gus and his new buddies.”
“Well,” I tell them, “I think I’m the luckiest. My business was in the toilet, my personal life was a trainwreck, and I was going broke. Then these two amazing people showed up, and everything turned around. It’s like the two of you waved a magic wand over me.”
