Getting Settled in Our New Home
WE DROVE into the driveway and right up to the door of our new home. Finding the key was very easy, given the careful instructions we had received. True to Moira’s word, the place was immaculately clean. The floors shined, the walls had been repainted, and the windows had been washed until they sparkled. We walked through the place to see what else had changed in our absence.
Upon entering the bedroom, we were both pleased to find a queen-size bed set up and ready to be made up—that is, once we bought sheets. Thing number two on the list of afternoon necessities, after grocery shopping. I was glad that we had brought two pillows with us from home so that at least we wouldn’t have to buy them immediately.
We unloaded the car, putting things into the appropriate rooms. When we had been packing the car in New York it felt like we were bringing way too much stuff, but once we got it unloaded and into the apartment, it looked like we hadn’t brought anything. Everywhere we looked we didn’t see what few things we’d brought, but we did see things that we needed.
In the bathroom, for example, we needed towels and a bath mat. There was a single roll of toilet paper, but we knew that that wouldn’t last forever. Grabbing a pad and pen, I started to make a list as we walked through the house:
Sheets
Blanket
Bedside Reading Lights
Nightlights
Towels
Wash cloth
Bath mat
Bar Soap
Toothpaste
Shampoo
Toilet Paper
Paper Towels
Plates
Cups
Silverware
Bowls
Food
Our list-making was interrupted by a knock on the door. We hadn’t even closed the door, so the knock was mostly an attention-getting move. We were already headed that way, so it only took us a few steps to get to the door. We found a middle-aged Latino woman who greeted us.
“Hola. La señora said to expect you this morning. Welcome to California. Did you have a good trip?”
“Yes, quite good, actually. Long, though.”
“Sí. I’ve never made the trip, but I’ve heard others tell of the many days it takes. In my home country you can drive from one coast to the other and back again in the same day.”
“Where are you from?” I asked, hoping that it was okay to ask such a question. I figured that since she had introduced the subject I was probably safe.
“Panama.”
We chitchatted for a minute, but then she got down to business. “We got everything set up as la señora requested. We moved a bed out here and got everything cleaned. My son painted the walls several weeks ago so that it could air out before you got here. La señora will be home late tonight, but she wanted me to check in with you and see that you had arrived okay before I left for the day.”
“What type of work does she do?” Bill asked, since neither of us knew anything about our new landlady.
“She is some movie studio hotshot. I don’t really know where or what exactly she does. She doesn’t tell, and I certainly don’t ask. Her deal with me is that I work when she’s not here and I’m gone when she is here. That’s what she wants, and it works for me.”
Bill did have one thing we needed. “Can you tell us where we can find two things: a grocery store, and a place to buy some household things like sheets, towels, pillows, things like that?”
She gave us the names of three different grocery stores in the immediate area along with directions to each. She drew up a simple map and put three big X’s on the map to indicate where each store was located. For the household things she sent us to Target. The GPS would get us there and hopefully back again.
Our first visitor, having fulfilled her obligation, took her leave. We turned back to our list, made a few more notations, but quickly realized that we didn’t need a list so much as we needed to walk up and down the aisles of a store and grab everything that we saw that we’d need. After conferring, we decided that now was as good a time as any, so we got back into the car. Now that was cruel, to get back in the car after spending a week in the vehicle getting here. We decided to tackle the most distant thing first, so I programmed the address for the Target store into the GPS.
Surprising both of us, we found the store without getting lost once or having the little device tell us that it was “recalculating.” I really did hate hearing the damned thing tell us that. It took two carts, but we got everything on our list, including some of the food things we needed since this Target store had grocery items as well. We knew that we’d need more things tomorrow, once we got settled in, but we had everything we’d need for today. Of course, in addition to the things we needed, we also picked up a few little treats that we wanted. I mean, really, Starburst candies were a necessity of life, in my opinion. And microwave popcorn surely qualified.
We had two Target gift cards that my mom had given us before we left home. That covered about half of our purchases, but it still left a hefty balance. I do believe that we surprised the clerk when we paid for the rest of our purchases with cash. I don’t know if she’d ever seen that much cash all in one place at one time. Another thing that was high on our To Do list was to find a bank and get ourselves financially established, get a checking account, get some money deposited, get an ATM card and hopefully at least a debit card that could serve as a credit card and allow us to not carry so much cash around with us.
Loading all of our loot into the car, we reprogrammed the GPS and easily got back home. Our afternoon was taken up with putting things away, washing and drying our new sheets and then making our bed, getting the bathroom set up, and putting the food away in the kitchen. We took a break and had a quick sandwich for a late lunch, of course realizing in the process that we needed several more things from the grocery store.
When I had a moment between tasks around the house, I called my mom and told her that we had arrived and made our first supply run to Target. We had talked every day during our journey out here, but she was most relieved to hear that we had made it to our new home and were starting to get settled. She asked us to take pictures of everything and send them to her as soon as possible. When I was done talking with her, she asked to talk to Bill, which was typical—she was treating him very much like another son, which was very sweet. I wasn’t jealous. Bill had had such a rough life and such a nonfunctioning mom himself that if mine could fill in in some way, I certainly wasn’t going to stand in the way of that happening.
“Do you want to try to go to one of the grocery stores nearby this afternoon and pick up a few more things, or would you rather wait and do that tomorrow?” Bill asked me.
I had sat on the sofa to call my mom, and he had joined me when he talked with her. It did feel good, and while we both were heavily inclined to stay put, we decided to do this one additional task and get it out of the way. Using the directions our first visitor had left us—I really should have asked her for her name!—we easily found the first store. Bill wanted to see all three before we picked one so we drove by the other two as well. They all looked pretty similar in size to me, so we tossed a mental coin and picked the one whose name we had never seen or heard of before.
Another store, another full cart, but a lot of it was nonperishable stuff that we needed but hadn’t bought, like dishwasher detergent, dish soap for the kitchen sink, the paper towels that we forgot at Target. We got some fresh fruit and vegetables and a bunch of frozen things to hold us until we could talk and figure out if either of us could cook and what we wanted to try to do about food.
By the time we got back home from that run and got everything put away, we were both dragging. We had covered an entire continent over the last week—I guess we had earned the right to be tired.
I made us some iced tea, which I put in our new, fancy ninety-nine-cent plastic cups (we bought four of them, living life on the wild side). With our tea in hand, we took a walk out to look at the pool and to check out the grounds of the house while there was still some light left to see by. We had been so overwhelmed the first time that we really had missed a lot.
It turned out that the house sat on a very sizable lot and was for the most part sheltered from the neighboring houses—at least our little house was. I couldn’t speak for the views from the upstairs of the big house. At the pool, it was almost as if we were the only two people on Earth. We were in a city with millions and millions of people, and yet it was so quiet and peaceful here. I loved it! My mind was a million miles away in deep thought when I felt Bill nudge me with his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, smiling at me. “Kiss me.”
So I did. Hey, I’m not stupid. When a gorgeous man asks me to kiss him, I can assure you that I see no reason to object. We stood looking at the large swimming pool, the stone patio that surrounded it, and the view of the Pacific Ocean off in the distance. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was a good day.
Our first night in our new home we heated up one of our frozen options and sat down to eat it by the side of the pool. It was amazing to me that our landlady had this magnificent pool and she didn’t use it. I could easily see us spending hours, either in the pool or beside it at one of the tables or on one of the chairs that she had set up.
We were both exhausted. The accumulation of the travel, the monotony, the excitement, not to mention the bad mattresses we had experienced in our last two motel stops on the drive out here, all contributed to an overwhelming sense of fatigue. We both were beat. So we decided, why fight it? Just give in and go to bed, although I did sort of feel like my mother, going to bed at nine o’clock at night. I could handle this once or twice, but I certainly did not want to make a habit of going to bed at this hour.
Taking advantage of our beautiful bathroom, we both showered some of the road weariness off before climbing into our new bed under our new sheets.
“Oh, this is nice,” Bill said as he lay down on the mattress for the first time. I had just come out of the shower and was toweling myself off. The sight of my boyfriend sprawled out on the bed looking all relaxed and gorgeous was one of the wonders of the world.
“Yes, I have to agree,” I said.
“How can you tell?” he asked me. “You’re not even in bed yet.”
“I can see my gorgeous man quite nicely from right here, thank you very much. And yes, he is mighty fine.” I jumped on the bed, leaned over, and gave him a kiss. Bill reached his hands behind my head and gently pulled me down for a repeat. When that kiss ended, he looked up at me and smiled one of his killer smiles.
I simply said, “I am the luckiest man in the world.”
“Not true. That would be me, because I found you.”
“Sounds like a draw to me,” I conceded.
The light was turned off, and we were both sound asleep in less than a minute.