My Family Tried to Evict Me from the Craftsman House My Grandparents Left Me
Grandfather Thomas did not look at me when he said the doctor had given him three months. His hand, usually steady enough to repair pocket watch gears, trembled as he set down his tea mug.
He focused instead on the silver-plated kettle cooling on the wooden table between our wicker chairs.
“Your father has already asked for the key to my desk,” he said, his voice dry.
I adjusted the manila folder on my lap, making sure the edges of my personal tax spreadsheets aligned perfectly with the heavy cardboard border. “The desk is yours, Grandfather. He has no right to it.”
He leaned forward, the smell of beeswax on his flannel shirt rising in the dry Riverside heat. “They will come after you, Emily, so you must protect yourself.”
The tea in my cup had gone cold, but I did not drink it.
“I want you to have this house, but Charles and Helen will not see it that way,” he said, referencing my parents by their first names for the first time in my memory. “You need to find a lawyer of your own, someone who does not answer to your father.”
I looked at the peeling green paint on the porch railing, calculating the cost of a gallon of exterior primer. “A lawyer for what?”
“To build a wall before I am gone,” he said.
Two weeks after the funeral, the kitchen of the craftsman house felt too quiet. I stood by the vintage stove, waiting for the silver-plated kettle to whistle while my mother, Helen, smoothed her floral skirt down over her knees at the breakfast table.
“Six bedrooms is a lot of space for a single girl of twenty-six,” she said, her voice carrying a sweet, thin edge.
“I like the quiet,” I said, double-checking that the back door deadbolt was turned to the vertical position.
“The utility bills alone will be over four hundred dollars a month,” she said, her fingers tracing the grain of the oak table. “It seems a shame to let such a prime Riverside property sit empty when it could be working for the whole family.”
