“Hey.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Contreras, but I feel like you are taking advantage of us. I would like to discuss a sale again.”
“Lorna,” he said, and sighed wearily, like she called him all the time to talk about a sale. “Why are you so stuck on that idea?”
“I’m not stuck.” Wow, her head was killing her. “I want to buy this property from you.”
“Yeah, I know. Look, I already told you—it’s going to cost too much. I can only sell that heap of bricks to deep pockets. You a millionaire?”
“That’s none of your business. I’ve done the math and I—”
“The upkeep alone is going to kill you. Why do you think I’m going up on rent? I’m not making a dime off that property. I got problems with the foundation, the plumbing will have to be redone, there may even be some wood rot.”
“And the roof needs to be replaced,” Lorna added.
“My point exactly. You’re not ready for this.”
“Mr. Contreras, you can’t possibly know what I am ready for.”
Mr. Contreras clucked his tongue. “Feisty, aren’t you?”
Lorna’s hand curled into a fist. “Not feisty so much as I’m full of rage.”
Mr. Contreras chuckled. “Now, no need to get upset. It’s just a house. Look, tell you what. If we can come to terms, I’ll sell it to you. But I’m not going to drag this out. You want it, you’ve got a month to come up with a plan for purchase. In three months, I’m getting more rent or I’m selling. Who knows—I might do both.”
Lorna bit her bottom lip. She was ready... but a month was quick. She didn’t have the down payment together just yet.
Her silence caused him to chuckle again. “I thought you said you were ready, sweetheart.”
Shewasready. Emotionally. Maybe not quite financially. “You have a deal, Mr. Contreras. And I am not your sweetheart.”
Mr. Contreras snorted.
“You think I can’t do it,” she said.
“Babe, I know you can’t.”
“A month from tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t call mebabe.”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart.”
Lorna hung up on him. She stood a moment, her breath coming in furious bursts like she was a huffing and puffing cartoon character. That had been happening a lot lately. She walked into her bedroom, went to the small dresser, and took out the file labeledMom.
This time, she took the papers to her kitchen table and spread everything out. She picked up a white legal envelope and took out the two pages inside. The first one was a typed letter, instructions from Tyrone, her estate attorney. The second page was a handwritten note from her mother. Her handwriting was shaky in the end but still elegant.
You will find the list with my trustee, Peggy. I asked Tyrone to leave it in her capable hands because I feared you would burn it, eat it, or wrap it around a rock and throw it at your sister.
“Probably would have,” Lorna muttered. The shame for the last months of her mother’s life was gutting. It was impossible to feel any lower than she did about that. She’d been so angry with useless Kristen. She’d come from a very bad day at work, expecting to find Kristen there making sure her mother had taken her meds and was getting enough to drink and eating what she could, only to find Kristen had taken the little bit of cash her mother had for groceries and left her alone in the apartment for hours with no food.
When Lorna expressed her disappointment in Kristen, her mother defended Kristen by arguing that she was in the grip of an illness as bad as her own. That argument caused Lorna to reach her limit more than once. “You coddle her, Mom. You let her get away withso much.”
Her mother argued that she’d tried everything she could think of to help Kristen. “What do you want me to do? I tried for years to force her into sobriety, because nothing is harder than watching my once-bright daughter with everything going for her waste away in addiction. It wasn’t until I started attending Al-Anon that I realized trying to force her is the wrong approach. She has tocome to the conclusion she needs help on her own, Lolo, and until then, all we can do is love her.”
What her mother never seemed to remember was that Lorna had suffered Kristen’s addiction, too, right alongside her. And when she tried to press home all the wrongs Kristen had inflicted on them (the loss of friends, family, and confidence, to name a few), her mother argued it was up to Lorna to right those wrongs now, and Lorna—
Well. Lorna had lost her mind, that was what.
And now, after so much time had passed, Lorna had to consider that maybe her mother was right. Maybe it was time to address the wrongs she’d blamed on Kristen. To own up to them, to get the monkey off her back, so to speak. To stop living in the past.
