Page 11 of Keep You Close

He let out a deep sigh.

“Yeah, about that,” he started.

“You rented out my place without asking me?”

“I called,” he told me. He didn’t sound accusing, but it felt that way regardless. “Several times. Your place got broken into. Someone must have been watching it, noticed it was empty, and decided to come in. Stole your TV, stereo, and I don’t know what else. Nixon, Rush, and I got together to try to figure out what we were going to do about it.”

It was there in the silence.

Since we couldn’t get in touch with you.

“But then Scotti,” he went on, meaning our sister, “told us she put some fliers up to rent the place out.”

“And you didn’t think to tell her to take them down?” I asked, shaking my head.

“The place was sitting empty fifty-odd weeks a year,” King said. “It’s not just about it being empty and prime for burglaries. It’s the other shit. Not knowing if the heat is coming on to keep the pipes from freezing, to suck the water out of the basement after a heavy rain, it’s… all the shit that comes with homeownership, Atlas.

“And we’re all busier now than we used to be, so we can’t just drop over all the time like we used to. This made the most sense.

“Though,” he said, turning to AJ, “I really should have mentioned to you that the house didn’t belong to me,” he said.

“I probably should have suspected something was up,” AJ said, finally placing the frying pan down. “The rent is unreasonably cheap. For a house. With a fenced yard.”

“It wasn’t about the money,” Kingston assured her. “I really just wanted someone here to keep an eye on things.”

To be fair, he was right.

I’d been a careless homeowner.

I didn’t even know the basement took water.

Maybe a part of me wanted to blame them for this, for making me get this house in the first place. But at the end of the day, I had made the decision myself. I could have rented a storage unit, and told King and the others to just shove all my shit I sent to their places in there.

But I’d bought the house.

Because maybe over the years, my family’s lectures about having a “home base” and a “place to land” had started to sink in, whether I wanted to admit that or not.

I did like knowing that when I came into Navesink Bank, I didn’t have to sleep on someone’s couch. Especially these days, when everyone was reproducing, and sleeping on the couch was dangerous.

I’d woken up covered in makeup with nail polish three times and smattered with stickers twice. And once… in permanent marker. The guilty party had told me that they’d drawn “cherries” on my face. But, damn if they didn’t look like balls. A bunch of balls.

My nieces and nephews might have been cute as fuck, but no one wanted to spend their first waking moments using cold cream to remove makeup, or plucking stickers off of their brows and lashes, and they damn sure didn’t want to have to try to remove permanent marker balls before they even had their coffee.

So, yeah, I did like having my own place to crash at, sleeping off my jet lag in peace, then grabbing a massive coffee before heading over to see everyone.

He was also right about me being irresponsible about it. Leaving the work to him and my brothers and sisters-in-law. I couldn’t blame them for trying to find an easy solution.

“I get that,” I told Kingston. “A little heads-up would have been nice,” I added.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to text or email to you and hope you eventually saw it,” King said. “But I should have tried harder to get in touch with you.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant for it to be hanging there in the air between us, or if I was just projecting my own worries.

And the phone rings both ways.

He wouldn’t be wrong if he said that, either.

I’d been even more out of touch than usual over the past year or two. Especially as the money started to roll in from one of my channels, allowing me more freedom to set off in any direction I wanted.

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