This was what I was thinking as I drove home from the Bobbie’s Garden Shoppe, my now full-time job. I found out that morning that I was now full-time since Sabrina had her twins a week ago. She’d called Bobbie the night before and told Bobbie that her maternity leave was indefinite.
“Thank God, the bitch could moan,” Bobbie had said this morning when she gave me the news and asked me to go from part-time to full-time. “Saves me from firing her ass, ‘cause, when she wasn’t moanin’, she was jackin’ around even before she was luggin’ them twins around. Yeesh, two babies in that belly of hers, looked like seven.”
Bobbie was not wrong about that, any of it.
But I was too busy thanking God for the full-time job. Tim’s life insurance policy had been used up on my Mustang, Kate’s car and taking a whack off the mortgage because of the down payment I put on the house. It had also gone out the door with the move. I had his pension, which helped, but not much.
I’d put the money I made on selling Tim and my house into savings for the girls’ college. Tim’d had to pay off student loans forever and he wanted the girls to have their college paid for. We’d been saving but we didn’t have near enough for the two of them. I thought Tim would have wanted that, the house we’d bought together, fixed up together and lived in together as a family being sold and the money paying for the girls’ future. Using that money from our house was like him and me giving it to them and I liked that idea and figured Tim would too.
Even with a low mortgage and no car payments, I still had a teenager driving and insurance was a bitch. Utilities, groceries for three people and we were living in a small town but it was part-farmers, part-blue collar and part-affluent. The affluent part meant all the kids tried to keep up with the Joneses with designer gear, jeans, purses, shoes, the right makeup, the important accessories like MP3 players and cell phones. Hell, Keira’s cell phone bill, considering she texted seventeen thousand times a day, nearly broke the monthly bank even though I told her time and again not to do it.
Bobbie paid pretty well considering, and she had full benefits for full-time, which was more important. Her garden center was enormous, the biggest in three counties and everyone went there. She sold it all, lawn furniture, craft and hobby stuff, pet supplies, not just plants. But I worked the plants, I was good at it, always was and spring was coming. Even with the snow, it was getting close to gardening season and things, always steady, were definitely picking up for Bobbie.
I turned on my street, deep in my inspection of the roads which, I noted with some relief, had been mostly cleared. The spring snow was wet and sloshy, not icy, thank God. Kate would get home okay.
I took in a relieved breath and it caught in my throat when I saw the shiny, black, new model Ford pickup in Joe Callahan’s driveway.
“Shit,” I whispered on my exhale.
I drove passed it, turned into my drive and parked under the awning that came out from my two car garage. The previous owners had torn down the one car garage and put in a two car one with a double awning at the front. This worked since the garage door opener didn’t work and I didn’t have the money to replace it and I further didn’t enjoy cleaning snow off my car.
The previous owners had also built an extension all along the back of the house. This meant we had an extra bedroom with full master bath and an open plan study that ran off the living room/dining room area. Most of the other houses on the block had extensions too. And two car garages or the garages had added awnings. They also had built on back decks (our place did too, again along the back of the house) or above ground pools or playsets. You name it, it was there. It was a family neighborhood, established, middle-middle income folks or old-timers who’d been there for ages and stayed there because their mortgage was paid off. Families just starting out or couples who liked where they lived so, when they needed more room, they just built on. Yards were huge, there was plenty of room and anything they did, they did it house proud so it only upped the standard for the entire neighborhood.
The only house that had no add-on, except a back deck, was Joe Callahan’s. It was still a two bedroom crackerbox, kitchen, dining room/living room and two bedrooms with a full bath.
I’d been lucky to find a place on that street.
Lucky, except for Joe Callahan.
I went into the house, dumped my purse and headed back out.
I needed to shovel. Part of living in that neighborhood was taking care of it. You shoveled. Joe Callahan’s neighbors on his other side, Jeremy and Melinda, cleared Joe’s front sidewalk part of the time, the other part I did it. It wouldn’t do for anyone to let down the ‘hood and since Joe wasn’t there, someone had to do it.
No way I’d do it that day, though. No way in hell. He could shovel his own damned walk.