HOME:
by CHELSEA PETERS PARKINSON
Home: a white Spanish duplex, low and squat, with trim flowering vines curving over the wide arched porch. Shared front gate, garage and backyard split in two. All sitting at the base of a low sloping hill, pocked with houses—more developed than green.
We lived beside two single girls, friends in their late twenties, for the second of our two years there. The first weekend after they moved in the four of us had drinks in our half of the backyard and they were cool and funny and sweet and loud. We gave them a housewarming gift of flowers from the grocery store in a green water glass from our kitchen. I ended up feeling embarrassed about this; by the time I handed them the flowers as they rose to leave it was in a bit of a rush, and awkward for everyone: “Oh, these are actually for you—housewarming.” I always seemed to do too much. But they received them excitedly, promising to bring back the water glass, though they never did.
We’d hear them in the mornings and at night. They had real jobs that they went to most days, jobs in marketing and finance, which felt surprising, since they seemed too young to us in every other way to have such grown-up professions—more grown-up professions than either Joey’s or mine. At eight-thirty or so on weekday mornings they’d greet one another, in their living room or kitchen that shared walls with our living room and kitchen, with a “Hiiiiiii,” or a “Mornnniiiingggg.” Always joyful, always sweet. Apparently never feeling any shame over letting their voices go so high as to ring like bells through the drywall, disclosing no attempt at deepening them so as not to sound shrill, as I often found myself doing to my own voice, especially on the phone, or when speaking to men.
We came to know them through the daily rhythms of their interactions with one another. Always laughter to start the day and animated, almost aggressive storytelling—“And then I said, who the fuck do you think you are?!”—presumably over wine, to end it. So much self-assurance, so much glee; if I were to be fully honest: so much love. In the beginning, it seemed that when either of them left for the day before the other, they’d yell “Love you!” from the doorway as they exited. But eventually, once I could better distinguish their voices one from the other, I realized it was just one of them, Lily, who did this: made sure that each time they parted, her friend knew that she loved her. The other, Tamsin, always answered, “Love you too!”, but she never initiated.
They had friends over almost every evening. Not always a party, though those were frequent, but most nights at least one person or a few, for dinner or a movie or a game of poker. On the poker nights they’d smoke inside and the smell would come through the shared air vents. We didn’t say anything, didn’t want to waste a precious complaint on something like that. We did eventually start texting them about the noise, when things went really late: two, three in the morning. Their responses were always all in lowercase (“so sry! we’ll wind things down right now. xx goodnight”). I didn’t switch my own responses to match theirs in our chat, but I did realize a few weeks later that I’d started using lowercase in all my other texts.
The girls’ shimmering social life reminded Joey and me that we should have friends over more often. I wanted very badly to seem cool to the girls—aspirational. There’s this cool older couple living next door. God, I hope I’m like them in ten years (I imagined them misjudging our ages by roughly this amount; really, I was only five years older than they were, Joey only seven: during that first meeting we’d asked and learned their ages, but they hadn’t asked ours back).
It took a few weeks, but we finally arranged a last-minute party for a Friday night, giving out more invitations than we normally would, in hopes that we’d get a decent turnout. In the end, though, the only people who could come were Joey’s friend Marshall, and our couple friends Sandra and Cole. Hardly a party.
Our attempt at simulated fun was pitifully, predictably tame: over before it was even fully dark out. And it left me wondering whether we actually liked our friends. As I lay in bed afterwards, I thought of the girls laughing riotously through the walls, and realized I’d not laughed once during the whole party, not genuinely. Really, the night had been peppered with moments that made me want to scream, and kick everybody out. Cole and his way of saying, whenever one of us knew something he didn’t about one of the topics he’d brought up, “Well, yeah, obviously, but.” And Sandra: “Can I give you some unsolicited advice?” over my shoulder, as I sauteed garlic in a non-stick pan, preparing the meal we were all about to eat. And Marshall, so quiet it would have almost been rude, if it weren’t for the fact that he did, at least, laugh silently at everything everyone else said. I wasn’t that upset by any of this, though, really: I liked having, at this time in my life, what I considered to be good reasons for judging and even disliking certain people; even the ones I was linked to, and supposed to like.
Sandra and Cole. If we had more friends, I’d probably never invite them to anything. They were the kind of people who brought bad feelings with them wherever they went, probably unintentionally, but consistently, like a compulsion, a muscle reflex, something they couldn’t help. They’d pay you a compliment that would have seemed kind from someone else, but in their mouths, for no clear reason, came across as mean. Or they’d do something like bring to your attention the roof rats that scoured your shared neighbourhood, and though you’d never noticed any rats before, once they’d mentioned them, you started seeing the rodents everywhere: scurrying along power lines and over your own garage roof; ruining cumulative hours of your life spent looking at them, hearing them, thinking you might have seen or heard them. It’s hard not to associate a thing like that with the people who’d brought it to your attention—like the rats were their fault, summoned into being, or at least into your consciousness, by their unhelpful, unwanted words.
A few nights after our failed attempt at a fun gathering I laid on my side in bed, phone on which I’d been scrolling poised against the pillow a bit away from my face, listening to the sounds of the girls next door as they came home with a loud group of friends. They’d done this on the night of our “party,” too, just as it was ending.
Curious, and maybe a bit nosy, wanting to attach a visual to the sounds now blooming on the other side of the wall, I took my phone up from where it lay and rolled onto my back and went to see if I could find the girls’ Instagram pages. It took a bit of doing—I knew their names, but their handles were not their real names, but rather clever plays on them. But eventually I found Tamsin, then, from tagged photos on her profile, Lily. Quickly and unthinkingly, I hit “Follow” right away on one and then the other’s profiles, then immediately felt embarrassed, realizing how odd it was to follow them—maybe at all but especially at this hour. What if they were sitting on the couch with their friends looking at their phones, right this minute, and saw a notification pop up: hi, just fyi, your weird older neighbour just followed you on here, btw.
I shoved that thought down and away; I’d found what my curiosity needed in order to be satiated. They’d each posted stories within the past hour: they and their girlfriends, all skinny, all dressed in cool dark outfits made up of individually ugly items that I’d never have thought to compile, but the end result of which was somehow sexy and effortless. All draped over one another on the couch, in a living room that was a mirror image of ours, only less carefully organized and curated, and more beautiful for it: full of people, instead of intentionally selected furniture and objects. I replayed the stories over a few times, studying the faces, the outfits, until embarrassment took over fully, and I darkened my phone. Tamsin followed me back the next morning, kindly started liking my posts every once in a while; Lily never did.
Things with Tamsin felt generally smooth, casual. I admired her in a way that made me realize in a panicked way my age, how different the ways of my own, notoriously lost, nervous generation were from this newer, more confident one. To me, that generation as embodied by this girl was one of an almost preternatural calm. They—she—had a Zen, slightly reserved smile, and a warm, measured voice; moved slowly and not too loudly and without any self-consciousness at all. With Tamsin, I could find practically no fault.
Lily, once I’d distinguished the sounds of her voice and movements, her actions and their detritus, from Tamsin’s, I found opportunities for judgment much more easily. Like the necessary other side of a singular coin, she seemed to represent the darker, more selfish, expression of their age group, though the confident assurance of their own actions that seemed to me their defining feature remained a constant—perhaps that was this generation’s metal, its alloy.
Sitting in the living room at the front of the house, where I hunched over the dining table that doubled as my work desk, and glancing out the window, I’d hear Lily walking up toward the house before I’d see her, her jingling keys and booming voice announcing her arrival long before she appeared on our shared walkway. More often than not she’d be laughing unnecessarily loudly into her phone—she was always talking on the phone—interrupting some thought I was having, some focused work I was in the middle of, and I’d have a sudden, tense urge to want to just shut her up. Awful. Other, rarer times, I’d see her without hearing her, walking up looking a bit sad, a bit lost, and I’d miss her noise; would want to hug her. The guiltful return of tenderness. The apparent truth that, as we age, everyone younger becomes like a child: someone to resent, someone to protect.
Again, if I’m being honest: I preferred it overall when Lily was being annoying, instead of lovable. Like it was easier to understand how I felt about her if she remained within the mould she most frequently occupied: that of, as Joey and I both agreed, a bit of a difficult neighbour. She made all our lives a little harder than they needed to be, it seemed to me—even Tamsin’s. It felt like almost every time Joey and I wanted to use our shared washer and dryer that sat in a shed on the border of our two small backyards, we’d find clothes from a long-completed cycle, sitting soggy in the drum, and they’d always turn out to be Lily’s. Uncomfortable texts into the group thread, trying to sound chill through our annoyance; her responses always appropriately apologetic, along the lines of: “those are mine, so sry!!! back in a few hours and can flip.” Tamsin, who sometimes worked from home, like we did, would often come and flip them for her, for us; if she wasn’t around, we simply had to wait. Joey thought we should just flip Lily’s things for her, but I was insistent —if we started doing that, she’d never stop leaving them in the washer. But this, too, was futile: though we never flipped her things for her, nor did she ever stop leaving them in there. Around the time they moved in, that old washer started needing frequent servicing, and though I didn’t really have a logical reason for doing so, just a general poor association with her in regards to the washer, I found myself blaming Lily for it—as if this ancient machine that our landlords refused to replace breaking down was somehow the fault of her wet clothes sitting in it for too long.
The houses on our low part of the hill had bars on the windows, but also enough worth that they all seemed to have—and in the case of rentals like ours, seemed to come with, whether the tenants wanted them or not, worked into the rent—a gardener-handyman, or one of each, working on the yards and houses constantly, making them trim and clean. Some collective insistence, on the part of the homeowners on this increasingly desirable hill’s base, on beauty, on improvement.
Our duplex came with Enrique, who, along with a small team, tended to most of the houses on our block. Popping from one to the other, waving to us as we sat on our porch. He was always smiling, always jolly when he came by to fiddle with the thermostat or fix the washer, even when the latter was for the third time in the four months since the girls had moved in.
Joey and I fostered puppies for a local rescue while we lived in the duplex, and Enrique loved to come in and hold them for a minute in the middle of his workday. He’d had a chihuahua who’d died just before we moved in, of whom he spoke tenderly as he stroked the puppies’ backs. The dogs always loved Enrique, waddling up to him when he whistled and licking his moustache when he scooped them up. He called them babies. “No baby?” he’d say, when he came by at a time when we were between fosters and no pup came running to meet him, and I’d feel bad for disappointing him. Him, I loved; unequivocally and without a need to find any faults at all.
Maybe because he seemed so happy whenever I saw him—tumbling down the hill on his short legs from one house to the next, a sunny kerchief around his neck, pausing to check for babies—I imagined, who knows why, that his life was easy, pleasant. That he was well paid by our landlords; worked just our one block, in just our one small corner of this vast city, puttering around and directing his crews of gardeners and carpenters and fixing a few, more technical things, here and there, himself. That he went home after a hard but satisfying day of work, and had a nice time with a sweet family.
Then one day on my way to meet a lady about some reasonably-priced patio chairs from a Facebook marketplace listing, I glimpsed him as I drove through a distant neighbourhood on the other side of town, and it felt like I’d barged in on someone using the bathroom. He looked sweaty and weary as he loaded heavy planks of old wood into the back of his truck, outside of a big, expensive-looking house. I slowed the car down as I passed, to make sure it was him, then looked away as I confirmed that it was and as he started to raise his head in my direction, frowning, tired. I was never sure if he saw me as I drove by. I hope he didn’t.
The landlords of our duplex were two rich brothers who seemed to be constantly on vacation (like with the girls, soon after meeting them I’d found and followed them on Instagram, too—and then, when I realized they never really posted much, found and followed their wives, who posted nearly every day). They lived in architecture award-winning homes in Pasadena and the Hollywood Hills. They were kind enough, wanted to seem like real people, but they raised our rent the maximum amount they were legally allowed to when we re-signed our lease for that second year, and sent us pointed texts when the rent was even one day late. Not the types to pay their handyman particularly well.
They never told us in advance about the various, unnecessary—in our minds—improvements they were always making to the duplex, our home. Enrique would simply appear unexpectedly on the front porch painting the trim a new, trendy but sickly colour we’d never have chosen; or in the backyard, chopping down a huge flowering vine that we loved—no explanation given, just that the landlords had some unknown reason for wanting it gone. After this event with the vine, Tamsin had come upon me in the backyard, waiting for the dryer to finish its last two minutes with my clothes and looking sadly at the place where the vine with its huge violet blooms had been. When I told her—a bit pathetically, I later realized—what had happened, she’d looked at me with calm, smiling concern—or was it pity? She’d then gone over to the spot where they’d chopped the plant and pointed out that though they’d cut the vine, the root remained. “See? It’ll grow back bigger and better than ever,” she’d said, in her glowing, assured way. I believed her, and it did—within a few months the violets were back, and better than ever. I never forgot that.
I was reminded again and again, through the wise and simply free ways of these girls, of how my own means of operating in the world simply did not serve me well. Living mirrored lives under a shared roof, they responded to the irritations of tenant living with a smoothness I’d never even considered—one which, in my darker moments, I worried I was too old to be able to fully assume myself, now that it had finally been modeled for me.
Lily I eventually learned to love when she revealed herself to be an advocate for all of us living in the house, against the landlords and their various laxities. Joey or I would mention some broken thing the landlords hadn’t addressed despite numerous requests and she’d stare a little blankly at us and say, “Really? Call them again! That’s really inconsiderate of them.” A few times I overheard her doing just that—calling and seeming to demand action—for something going on on their side. And once, I even heard her end the conversation by adding a complaint of ours: “Oh, and you know the neighbours are still waiting on you about that mold in the closet, right?” Just like that. Her loudness, her ferocity, her carelessness, all seemed to make her fearless against a force like a landlord. She treated them like her equals, and in time, whenever there was an issue affecting both units, we learned that all we had to do was bring it up in casual conversation with Lily, and she’d be on the phone with them, getting it sorted.By the time we’d lived beside them for nearly a year, there were only one or two things I felt the need to contact the landlords about myself.
I’d started noticing the rats when Sandra and Cole had first mentioned them at our party—summoned them, more like. Though they assured us that the rats had always been around, were well-known in the area, I swear I’d never seen a single one before they’d brought them up that night. Now, I seemed to see them almost every day: sprinting across the rooflines starting in the early evening, a piece of fruit or garbage in their mouths; squirrels on first half-glance—then you’d notice their tails.
Eventually, I noticed they were no longer simply running over the roof and across the power lines, but had started getting much too comfortable in the yard and even on the front porch—invited, in my mind, to the latter by Sandra and Cole, after they’d come over for a porch cocktail one evening when we were feeling lonely and friendless once again.
Lily’s manner in mind, I texted the brothers one afternoon, asking if something could be done. I expected literally no response, or something along the lines of, Rats are just a part of city life, sorry. Nothing we can really do about that. So, when Enrique arrived just a couple of hours later, sweaty, seeming to have rushed, I felt surprised, and then terribly bad, imagining them insisting he see to this immediately, adding more to what I was sure was a heavy plate of work.
I wondered where Enrique had had to hurry from, what distant part of the city, his day extended well past five o’clock—and for a task like this. I began to regret getting pushier with the landlords; realized it just meant they would be pushier with Enrique, and might sap our friendly relationship with him of all its goodwill. He and I stood on the porch together and I explained about the rats and how they’d been encroaching further and further into our lives but how it really wasn’t that big of a deal and I was sorry about him having to come like this and he didn’t smile like he usually did as his eyes followed my finger to all the rat-less places I pointed to. I felt sure he was thinking, Yes, cities have rats, lady. Welcome to Los Angeles, but what he said when he finally spoke was, “Ok, ok. No problem, no problem. I’ll go to Home Depot, set some traps today, come back and check them next week.” Then, looking at me sideways and suddenly—finally—grinning, said, “Any baby?” Oh, the goodness of others. And my faithlessness in this.
Yes baby! A min-pin puppy that we’d just started fostering the day before. I took Enrique in to see, and he held the squirmy, serious little thing for a long while, cooing at him. When he handed him back to me he said, “Keep him. Okay? This one is a good one. Keep him.” He’d never said this about any of the many others before. I wondered if the puppy reminded him of that dog he’d had who had died—I couldn’t remember her name. But all I did was laugh along to his suggestion and say, without much conviction, that we’d think about it.
Enrique laid traps that caught three rats within a matter of days. When he came back to empty them he sprayed some smelly deterrent all around the perimeter of the property, then came back once a month or so to do the same again, and we didn’t see any more rats for the rest of the year. It was around Christmas when he came to spray the deterrent for the third time, and before he left I told him I bet the issue was fixed, and he didn’t have to come and spray anymore, and then gave him a tray of chocolates wrapped in foil I’d picked up that morning at CVS. I was thinking of the way my dad would give any plumber or electrician an envelope of cash if they came by at this time of year, around the holidays; thinking it was my and Joey’s turn to step into this very adult type of behaviour, too: adults tip their handymen at Christmas.
When Enrique took the chocolates it was with a smile that was more forced, less genuine than usual, and I was left embarrassed. I realized as soon as I’d handed them over that it ought to have been money—which I felt we didn’t have enough of to give more than ten dollars, which would have seemed so pathetic, so disappointing, as the thing one opened an envelope to find. As I closed the door behind him I felt awkward, despairing: it ought to have been money, or nothing at all.
The next time I saw Lily after the issue with the rats had been addressed so quickly and so thoroughly I gave her mint from the little garden Joey kept out back, a big bunch of it, stems in water in a second of our green glasses. Another item from our cupboards gone forever, I knew, but I didn’t mind so much this time. When I handed over the mint, such a small offering, she shrieked happily, like I’d heard her do so many times through the walls, and I decided, firmly, okay, yes—I love her. She’s loud, and often inconsiderate, but she’s also this, and on top of that, she makes my life tangibly better. I can love her.
Like a happier version of how Sandra and Cole seemed to have cast a spell by mentioning the rats, after Enrique expressed such enthusiasm for the min-pin puppy, Joey and I started to fall in love with him. Our fostering had long been a placeholder for the real thing, something Joey, in particular, badly wanted. He’d grown up with dogs, and, realizing suddenly that he was aging, that he was older now than his parents were when he was ten years old and his sister eight and they were all living in the suburbs with a Labrador, he suddenly began to feel more noticeably behind, more eternally incomplete, without this one marker of stability and meaning that was relatively attainable for us.
We’d been adamant that we wouldn’t let ourselves fail and adopt any of our fosters—at least not while we were still renting; if we were ever to move from the duplex and into another rental, we knew many landlords and property managers wouldn’t even look at your application if you had a pet. But the certainty that could only come with home ownership was a distant, if not increasingly impossible, dream. One I was coming to accept might never be ours: I didn’t know anyone who owned their own house.
For all their faults, the brothers were at least fine with pets in the duplex, and we’d decided we were ready to sign another year-long lease with them, the time for which was approaching by the time we’d taken in Pip. Maybe this was as secure as we’d ever feel, in as much of a home as we’d ever have. Lots of people we knew were starting to plan to simply rent forever—such were the circumstances of our generation’s place in the world, in the economy, in the continuum. Maybe this was it; maybe we were home.
After an evening of cuddling Pip’s tiny, squirmy body until he fell asleep between us on the couch, we asked one another our usual, teasing question of how we could possibly give him up. It was something we said jokingly all the time, about all the puppies we fostered, knowing we would, in fact, give them up, but this time Joey looked at me, then back down at the puppy, and said, “No, really.” Looking closely at him, I saw that he was teary, and that was it.
Enrique was so happy when we told him, the next time he came by to fix something in the house. “Baby, baby, baby, bebé, bebé, bebé,” he’d say, sing-song, as he stood cradling Pip on the porch or even sitting on our couch, swinging him side to side, “You have a mama now! You have a papa!” Something about him saying, sage-like, that Pip was a good one, and telling me we should keep him, had burrowed into my mind, tested something in me that I hadn’t realized needed testing; reminded me that waiting to do things like have a dog was just another way of delaying life, hoping it would become better, more pleasant, more full, without actually making it so. With the addition of Pip, our life grew, as the presence of a puppy demanded, louder, messier, less serious, more happy—all things I’d long been fearful of accepting into my life. Luckily I’d been observing and learning to appreciate all of these things for nearly a year by then.
I could have gone on forever that way: Joey and I renting our half of the house, the girls renting theirs; all of us happy to see one another when we crossed paths out front or out back. Tamsin and Lily cooing over Pip, pulling sad faces in response to our sad faces when we showed them how his floppy little puppy ears had popped up one day, suddenly, one after the other, making him look more grown up; Enrique coming by to play with Pip nearly every day, and as a result, never letting a single thing in our home go unfixed. I felt rewarded: for adapting to changes the thought of which had previously stressed me; for choosing to allow more complications, but with them more love, into our lives.
The letter slipped into our mailbox on a rare cloudy morning, just a week before we were due to renew our lease. Our postal worker usually came in the late afternoon, so when I heard something pass through the slit in the mailbox’s metal top, thunk to its wooden bottom, I looked up from my spot by the front window at the sound and saw the back of one of the brothers: our landlord, skipping back down our front steps in white linen pants and leather slides, turning and gliding out of sight.
•
Home: a beige little cube in a bungalow court. Creaky gate always locked. Cracked concrete walkway spidering off to eight identical doors. No green, no hill—not even the base of one. Cacti the only plants permitted in the tiny pebbled yards. The weekend we moved in, Sandra and Cole brought us a cheap prickly pear curled into purple cellophane from the grocery store; it fit right in. That night, we saw rats on the roof.
Property managers for landlords. No gardener, no pets allowed. Enrique, the last time I ever saw him, waved his hands—no, no—when I asked if he might want to take Pip; when I held the sleepy puppy out to him like a woman on the Titanic, trying to pass her baby off to the ship’s shell-shocked captain for saving. “No, no more dogs for me,” he said. “I cannot take the sadness, when they die.” Pip back to the rescue to be adopted by someone else. The look on Joey’s face after turning from him for the last time; as we walked away from his staring little eyes, his alert ears. The tiniest attempt at a howl following us to the car, asking us where we were going. Why.
The new place was small; we were unpacked within a few days. We’d had a yard sale before leaving the duplex, sold many of our larger pieces of furniture, which had no place where we were going. Lily had actually bought our big, three-seater couch, which was sweet, and a little awkward; she joked that we could come visit it anytime, which I guess was also sweet, in a way, if not a bit of an odd thing to say. I didn’t know where the girls would be moving to after the sale.
I missed, vaguely, subconsciously, at first, and then in a more acute way, the girls’ exuberant but comforting presence. Their sounds. Like when you’re used to sleeping next to someone, and then they’re not there, and your sleeping body knows it—feels restless.
Our new neighbours were kind, courteous, quiet. One older lady brought us a casserole on our second night, not saying a word, just nodding and smiling as she handed it over before tottering away. I returned her clean dish as soon as we’d finished with it a day later, washing it in the new sink with our old dish scrubber between unloading boxes. Returned from her cube home to ours after dropping it off feeling curiously empty. I could hear crickets outside, all around.
By our first Monday night in the new place, we were able to relax a bit. Drink beers in the small, hot kitchen and debate our first non-pizza and non-casserole meal in our new home. I was sitting at the tiny table we’d had to buy in order to have one that would fit, Joey standing right next to me—too close, for my liking, in this heat, in my current mood—but the fridge door opened right up against the table, and there was nowhere else he could stand as he looked blankly at the meek offerings inside.
We’d been squabbling practically nonstop. The stress of the non-renewal letter, of finding the new place, of moving. I had to hold my tongue against what he was doing now: trailing off again into a story about his workday, when we were supposed to be deciding on what to eat. Something had happened with some co-worker of his—just one more thing on top of all the rest. He had a bad canker sore on the inside of his mouth or on his tongue, something that always happened to him in times of stress, and which was making him lisp, every “s” more of a “sh”: “I think Thteve will probably quit, which thuckths.” It was boring and sad and funny all at once, and I wasn’t even listening, not really.
I took up my phone and opened Instagram. I was missing the girls more acutely, now that it was just the two of us, and I wanted to see if they’d posted anything, any hint of where they’d moved to. I don’t know what I wanted to see—just some indication that I’d be able to keep up with their lives, wherever those lives were happening now. I went to Tamsin’s page first, and recognized right away that her most recent photo was still one from months ago. I clicked over to Lily’s page, then, and there it was: a new photo, first up on her grid, which one part of my brain seemed to process faster than some others, because before what I was looking at had fully registered, my heart started to stab at me, as I clicked to open it up.
It was a photo of Lily and Tamsin, beaming, arms around each other, in front of the house—our house, the duplex. The for-sale sign that had loomed outside for our final two months there topped now with a placard declaring it “Sold”. And the caption under the photo reading: when instead of waiting for a man u buy a duplex with your bff so the two of u can live next to each other 4ever. All capped off with an emoji of a face so happy it was crying.
I put my phone down. There had been signs, which I guess I’d ignored, or taken for less than what they were: the girls had had a weekly cleaning lady, for one. Their handbags and shoes were always so nice. They’d been evasive when we’d asked, during that very first visit in the yard, what area of the city they’d each grown up in, what schools they’d gone to.
My head hurt. I opened my mouth, ready to share what I’d seen, when I looked up again at Joey, who was still staring blankly into the fridge, his story finished, now.
In the harsh light from the bright little fridge bulb, I realized his face looked older, much older, than I pictured it in my head: there were lines under the lines; a settling expression of despair that I hadn’t noticed, or had been trying not to see.
I didn’t say what I wanted to.
“What are you thinking for dinner, then? I’m good with whatever.”
He touched the spot on his tongue that had the canker sore and winced, then sighed uncharacteristically. “I’m not sure (thure).”
He looked so tired. A set of wrinkles fanned out like ripples at the hinge of his softening jaw. We were still moving forward together, I supposed, from one phase of life to the next. But this no longer felt anything like the lovely something that idea seemed to imply. We were getting older, and that wasn’t such a friendly thing anymore. Great leaps ahead in time were starting to lead to worse circumstances, instead of better, for the first of what I feared might be many—or even endless—times.
A sudden scuttle of claws scattered across the roof and we both looked up, then back down again.
“I’m not sure (thure),” he said again, gazing into the fridge. “Right now everything just (jutht) looks (lookth) painful.”
We were in the bungalow court for three years.
We left when the rent increases finally extended beyond our reach, for an apartment even further east, getting close to the outskirts of the city, now.
By the time we moved out, almost no one who was there when we’d first moved in still remained: the young family who had a third baby on the way when we’d arrived, a baby we’d watched grow then disappear when her family packed up and left without a word; Mrs K, who’d brought us the casserole when we’d first arrived, gone to live with her daughter. Kindly, quiet neighbours we never really knew, all gone, replaced by singles and couples in their twenties and thirties, ages we’d left and were leaving behind.
And then we were gone, too. No one ever remained for good. No one was granted the confidence to truly call this place home.
Except the rats—the rats remained.
The rats were there from the start.
Chelsea Peters Parkinson is a writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory, currently living in Los Angeles. Her short fiction and poetry have recently appeared, or are forthcoming in, The Adroit Journal, The Fiddlehead, This Magazine, PRISM International, The Dalhousie Review, and CV2. Her short story, “Mudlark,” a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction, recently appeared in Biblioasis’ Best Canadian Fiction 2025 anthology, and her short story, “Home:,” was recently selected as a finalist for The Adroit Journal’s Editor’s Prize in Fiction.
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