Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 111400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Nothing seemed fair.
Eight
Cole
I hadn’t slept well, and I was dragging when Moretti picked Mariah and me up the next afternoon at one o’clock. We piled into his car—Mariah liked his SUV better than mine because it was a Mercedes, which she insisted was superior to my trusty old Dodge Durango. You only had to push a button to start it, it smelled new, and it had a sunroof.
“It’s freezing cold,” I told her irritably. “We can’t even open it.”
“The hell we can’t,” said Moretti, turning up the heat and opening the sunroof. “It’s not even snowing today.”
Mariah laughed. “Yay! Dad, can we get a new car with our new house?”
“No. Now buckle your seatbelt back there.”
“Jeez, you’re cranky today,” Mariah muttered. She was aggravated with me because I’d said no to inviting Cheyenne to the movies with us tonight. My reasons—it was a tradition just the two of us shared, I wanted some father-daughter time, Cheyenne probably had plans anyway—were not to her satisfaction, and she’d marched up to her room after the argument and hidden out in there until it was time to go.
My mother had annoyed me too this morning, dropping all kinds of hints about Cheyenne, wanting to know how things had gone last night, remarking again and again on how beautifully she’d grown up, what a sweet daughter she was, how much Mariah loved her. Finally, I’d gotten tired of it and locked myself in my room just like Mariah had. I didn’t need anyone to tell me how amazing Cheyenne was. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed she was beautiful and sweet and great to Mariah—and beyond that, I knew she had a dirty mind and she sometimes imagined doing filthy things with me—it was that I couldn’t do anything about it.
And that was driving me fucking insane.
Our first appointment was at the house nearest to my mom’s, a stout brick colonial with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a den off the back, and a kitchen that looked like it had last been remodeled while Reagan was in the White House. It was okay, but I didn’t get a feeling when I walked through it that told me I’d live there.
We shook hands with the agent, a woman named Florence Billingsly with a towering beehive hairdo whom I recognized as a town council member and Bellamy Creek Historical Society volunteer. She asked after my mother and made sure to emphasize how close we’d be to her house if we lived here. “Why, you wouldn’t even have to call her to borrow a cup of sugar,” Mrs. Billingsly said with a laugh. “You could just walk right over.”
I shuddered.
“So what did you think?” Moretti asked as we drove away.
“I don’t know,” I said, craning my neck to look at the Dempseys’ house as we drove past it. Was Cheyenne home? Was she thinking about me? “Some of those kitchen appliances are older than we are.”
“They could easily be replaced,” he said reasonably. “The bones of that house are good.” As a builder, Moretti was used to looking beneath a house’s cosmetic appearance to the foundational structure.
“The deck in the back looked a little warped, didn’t it?”
“Another easy fix,” Moretti replied. “We can replace those boards. Or better yet, tear the whole thing off and build a new one in a weekend.”
“It’s really close to my mom’s.”
Moretti laughed. “I can’t help you there.”
The next one was only a few blocks off the lake, almost walking distance and definitely biking distance to the public beach. Mariah liked one of the bedrooms, which was painted a pale blue with an underwater mural scrolling across three walls. “A mermaid room,” she gushed. “And it has its own bathroom right there! I wouldn’t even have to go down the hall.”
The kitchen was definitely an improvement over the previous one, but the house was slightly newer construction—about fifteen years old compared to fifty—and Moretti wasn’t as confident in its bones. The central stairway seemed to tilt slightly to one side, and when we checked out the back of the house, he said the gutters had obviously been dumping water right next to the foundation for years, the yard wasn’t graded properly, and I was definitely looking at replacing the roof soon. “They went cheap on those shingles,” he said, shaking his head. “You might get another couple years out of them, but that’s it.”
On our way out, we stopped in the kitchen to say goodbye to the agent, who was doing a crossword puzzle at the table. He wore a cardigan sweater and bow tie, and his name was Moe Kravitz. He was an old-timer, retired from the Post Office, and he’d taken up real estate after his wife died a few years back. Confidentially, he whispered behind one hand, he thought this one was overpriced.