Page 10 of Forget That Guy
“He might be a bad person,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to deal with this anymore. Maybe it’s a good thing.”
And really, maybe it was.
As I drove through town to my house fifteen minutes later, I thought about everything that’d happened. Thought about what my future looked like for me.
At least I had some money coming off of the loans that I owed…
I arrived at my house and went inside, taking it all in.
The house had been released to me only recently.
I’d been forced to rent a short-term rental in town to have somewhere to sleep.
Which fucking sucked even more, because now I was having to pay for it on my credit card that was already leaning toward maxed out.
I needed a job.
Pronto.
I stepped over the creaky board in the middle of the living room and took a look around.
The place looked even more sad than usual.
I hadn’t lived here in years.
Dad had let it go downhill even more than it had been when I’d lived here.
At one point, it’d been a pretty grand place.
Mom had helped Dad pay for the three-story monstrosity before she’d left.
About four years after she’d disappeared from our lives, a fire had broken out in the barn, and it’d spread to the house. The whole left side of the house was uninhabitable, so we’d moved to the parts of the house that were.
Only, the failing structure on the one side had affected the structure on the other.
The house was on its last legs, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it all fell down one day.
I eyed the couch that Dad had to buy used after the fire.
Everything inside the house was used.
Dishes. Towels. Furniture.
I spread out the towel that had always rested on the couch arm.
That was where Dad had liked to eat his food every night when he got done working. Or, in the later years, it was where he’d made his permanent home.
The cancer hadn’t been kind to Dad.
Prostate cancer was usually survivable for a long time.
Dad’s form had been that kind at first. The “good” kind. But something had changed, and that “good” had gone to ‘bad’ in the blink of an eye.
It’d spread to his bones and organs, and once it was there…
And wouldn’t it just figure that, after surviving cancer for years, Dad died of a home invasion?
And for what? A measly few bucks?
