Page 6 of The Disputed Legacy
I didn’t wait to swing my legs over the side of the bed, hurrying toward him. Maybe he’d had another bad dream and couldn’t get to the bathroom. He hadn’t wet his bed since he was a toddler, but I wasn’t going to dismiss his claims.
He didn’t crawl into my open arms that I held out for him. Standing back, he pinched the front of his pajama shirt and winced. “It’s all weteverywhere. The walls, the bed, the floor. Me!”
“What…?” I shook my head, confused and waking up to the roar of my heart pounding so fast. I stood and reached out to him to inventory the situation. He couldn’t have had an accident that would reach the walls.
“The ceiling’s got a big hole in it, Mom. Come see!”
I went. And I saw. He was right. We were starting off this morning with a gaping hole in the ceiling to his small bedroom. The carpet was soaked through. His bed was soggy. Splashes had reached the walls, just like my sweet seven-year-old had claimed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I murmured to myself.
“No. No joke, Mom. Look at it!” He beckoned for me to follow him further into his room. At the first sounds of his bare feet sluicing in the ply of the carpet, I panicked and held him back.
“No. Don’t. Stay here.” No sooner than I’d warned him, a kitchen chair dropped from the hole. Water still poured over the edge of the opening, clearly the source of the flood.
I heaved a heavy sigh, willing my mind to stop racing and my heart to slow down. It wasjusta flood. Water damage.
Oscar is safe.
He’s here.
Wet, but he was right here with me and unharmed. That was all that mattered. One more look at him in those dripping-wet pajamas gave me the proof that whatever else was wrong, it couldn’t be that bad. It was survivable.
Scared that the electricity could be a safety hazard with all this water, I tugged Oscar out into the hall with me. I’d snagged my purse and exited our apartment to get a hold of the landlord, but it seemed I would be spared having to go to him. The neighboring apartment seemed to be affected as well. The older woman was in the hallway with her husband, both of them looking wet and pissed.
“You too?” the woman asked, shaking her head.
“The ceiling just crashed down,” the husband exclaimed while keeping his arm around his wife.
The tenant across the hall stepped out at the commotion, tugging his robe on. “I thought I heard a big thud.”
“I already called the landlord’s after-hours,” my neighbor said as we all commiserated over our problem and waited outside. Throughout our wait in the hallway, we heard more thuds of the ceilings dropping in from both apartments as more water moved from the floor above us.
Within ten minutes, the landlord arrived to stare slack-jawed at the mess. Then he cursed up a storm, livid at the damage. Throughout those early hours of the morning, we learned that the tenant above us had forgotten to shut off their water. The poor old man had been suffering from dementia for so long and it seemed that he’d flooded his floor one too many times and it gave way.
I wasn’t shocked. This building couldn’t have been up to code to begin with and the landlord did the bare minimum to make it livable.
That was why instead of getting Oscar up for school and doing laundry before going in to waitress at Tiny’s, I spent the day trying to clear out the soggy mess and manage the cleanup efforts. So many things were ruined, items like the TV and my internet router that had gotten wet and fried. When the emergency cleanup team came, they found more issues that the landlord had neglected to handle.
While we weren’t kicked out of our apartment for good, it would be a horrid mess to manage living there while cleanups and repairs would resume. For the first week of repairs, we’d need to cooperate with the contractors who’d make it right again.
After calling the school to explain why Oscar was absent—and then getting crap from the secretary who scolded me forletting my son be absent within the first two weeks of school starting—I headed to Tiny’s to tell the manager that I’d need the day off. Maybe two or three.
My life had been shaken upside down with that flooding incident, and it felt like salt rubbed in the wound. I couldn’t afford to take days off. Nor could I make arrangements for childcare while I’d inevitably need to work overtime to pay for what the landlord refused to cover. Insurance would clear the costs of the apartment walls and floors, but I could already tell that he wasn’t going to budge and pay for any of my personal belongings that were ruined. And he knew he could get away with it. I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer to sue him, and he was aware of my financial situation too.
On the third night after the flood, I sat at the kitchen table and tried not to grimace at scooping canned spaghetti into a bowl.
This wasn’t a hearty meal to ensure Oscar could grow properly.
This wasn’t an appetizing dinner to make me want to eat with this nonexistent appetite, gone because of the stress.
I’m so sick of living paycheck to paycheck.
A deep sigh escaped me as I stood at the counter and reached over to slide the spaghetti into the microwave. But then I recalled that it wasn’t there. We’d had to throw it away because more water hit it with the kitchen being adjacent to Oscar’s room.
Fine. Cold it is, then.
I spun to rest my butt against the edge of the counter and shoveled the over-processed junk into my mouth just to have some sustenance to keep going.
