Page 99 of Dad Next Door

“This bathroom is amazing.”

He glanced around. “Yeah, it is.” He let out a little laugh. “It’s crazy to think that six months ago, I didn’t even have a bathtub.”

“You didn’t have a bathtub?”

He shook his head and guided me out of the shower with a gentle hand on my back, the heated tiles warming my feet. “The bathroom in the unit I rented wasn’t big enough for a tub, so I only had a shower stall.”

“How long did you live there?”

“About eighteen months. Before that, I was in an apartment with a full bathroom but no stove.”

“How did you cook without a stove?”

“A toaster oven, a microwave, a slow cooker, and an air fryer.” He pulled a new toothbrush out of one of the many cabinets around the room. “That was a penthouse compared to what it was like in the city.”

“When you lived in New York?” I shifted the towel from my shoulders to my waist and tied it closed.

He handed me the open toothbrush. “The first year wasn’t bad. I shared a two-bedroom with three roommates. It wasn’t the greatest, but we had a kitchen and a bathroom.”

My brain got stuck on him saying four people shared a two-bedroom apartment. “Were you guys, like, two couples?”

He chuckled and handed me the toothpaste. “Nope. Just random roommates I found on Craigslist. By the time I left, I was living with six randoms in a three-bedroom hovel with no kitchen and no bathroom.”

“How the hell is that legal—or possible?”

“It’s legal because no one enforces the laws, and it’s possible because we had no other choice. There was a shared bathroom and kitchen for the floor, but a single toilet, shower, stove, and microwave split twelve ways wasn’t fun.”

“Where did you all sleep?”

“The three main tenants, the ones who paid the big bucks, got the bedrooms.” He made air quotes with one hand. “Which was just the bigger half of the rooms they split in two. I loved having to walk through someone else’s room just to get to mine, and the no doors or windows thing was just icing on the cake.”

I stared at him in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. “So all those exposé videos I’ve seen about single rooms being rented out for thousands of dollars a month and turning closets and crawlspaces into illegal bedrooms to cram as many renters into a space as possible aren’t a new thing? They were an issue back then too?”

He nodded but couldn’t answer because he was still brushing his teeth.

Grateful to have something else to think about, I focused on brushing my teeth too.

“That’s what happens when you turn basic human needs into a commodity. I know it’s hypocritical of me to say that, considering I build housing for people to sell at a profit, and I own this monstrosity, but I can’t get behind the idea that anyone in a country as rich as ours should be denied the right to a home just because they can’t pay whatever arbitrary number some suits pulled out of their ass and decided was the value.”

“You sound like me back in the day.”

He grinned and handed me a tub of some sort of cream. “Yeah? You were a rebel?”

“What’s this?” I took the cream.

“Skincare.” He smirked. “You might have a baby face now, but that’ll help you keep it forever.”

“I wasn’t a rebel, not really. My parents call me a socialist, and my brother says I’m a communist, but I’m more of an anti-capitalist.” I wiggled the cream at him. “How am I supposed to use this?”

He snickered. “I always make people define the word if they try to use communist, socialist, or Marxist in an argument. Any of the ‘ist’ words. Most of the time they have no idea what they’re complaining about and are just throwing buzzwords around. And you put that on your face.” He pointed to the tub I was still holding.

I rolled my eyes at him in the most exaggerated way possible. “I got that much. But that’s it? I just put it on, and I’ll look thirty forever?”

He handed me a bottle from the little organizer on his counter. “You’ll have to add this if you want to freeze time at thirty.”

“Retinol?” I read the label. “Do you use this every day?”

“Just at night. I know everyone has their own methods and products they swear by, but I like to keep it simple. Cleanse, moisturize, and sunscreen in the mornings, then cleanse, retinol, and moisturize at night. Anything beyond that seems excessive to me.”

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