“My God! What is it? Is this your house?”
“This is our house!” Mike said, quite proud of himself.
A rambler with wooden siding of a sordid yellow gray-brown color made me depressed.
The entire area in front of the house was covered with gray asphalt. There was not one plant or bush or tree. My eyes filled with tears. Do not panic, I said to myself. Maybe it will be better inside. He took me in his arms and carried me over the threshold.
“Welcome home!”
Oh, my God! How could anyone live here? The inside was even more depressing than the outside. A small kitchen, combined with a small living room. The same yellow-gray-brown tones, with a predominance of dark brown. The windows were decorated with ugly yellow curtains. A phone, looking like it was saved since the Soviet collectivization, was sitting on a table littered with papers and phone books. Nightmare!
Mike definitely had another opinion. His eyes were glowing with happiness. Looking at him, I thought, everything has its advantages. It feels like this place has never been touched by a woman’s hand. Well, we’ll see, I reassured myself.
Waking up in the morning, I immediately began the battle for my new life. My husband thought his life was fixed and comfortable, that I would just fit in smoothly and without any issues. I did not want to fit in. Besides the kitchen, combined with a living room, the house had two small bedrooms and a huge garage. One of the bedrooms, where his father used to live, and which Mike hadn’t entered for two years, was swamped with old things, covered with dust. He was horrified when I started to take those things out.
“Don’t touch it! It’s my father’s chair. He sat in it.”
“This is my father’s notebook, he wrote in it.”
“This is my father’s suit.”
“And when did he put it on last time?” I asked.
“Three years ago,” he replied.
Mike’s father died two years ago, having grated on his nerves before. For some reason he didn’t love his eldest son, whom he chose to live with after retirement, so he kept arguing with him, all the time living together. Before his death, he got seriously sick and their relationship became even more complicated. But, despite this, Mike spoke of his father with warmth and sadness.
“Okay, will you ever wear that suit?”
“No. It’s too big.”
“Then why is it here?”
“Just don’t touch!”
I became depressed. I was feeling like that for three days, and getting prepared to go back home to Ukraine, I suddenly found a way of influencing my second half. An accident helped me. By lucky chance I came across a pretty immodest photo of my husband and another woman. The picture left not a single chance for any illusion about the nature of their relationship. It didn’t affect me, I knew it was past. My husband was not a monk, and I was glad.
After thinking for a while, I decided to use it to start cleaning our house, minds, and souls of garbage from previous lives, and begin to build the foundation of a new life together, as they say, with a clean slate. I put this picture on Mike’s bedside table. In the morning the photo was not there. Neither could I find it anywhere inside the house.
“You know, dear,” I began to speak up my prepared speech. “It’s good I found this picture now. If I found it a year later, I would never believe that it was done before we got together.”
“What picture?” Mike blushed.
“Well, the one I put it on your bedside table, and now it’s not there.”
“I haven’t seen any picture,” he continued to lie.
“Oh, okay, but I still think you should give me chance to clean up our house, so you didn’t have to lie like now. I promise I’m not going to throw away anything. I will simply hide things in boxes and put them where you say. I understand that you cherish the memory of your father, but for last two years you’ve never entered this room and never used any of these things. And something tells me you will not use them ever. Let’s clean all of that nicely, and then make a study of this room.”
“Good,” my husband said, with sadness in his voice. “But do everything yourself. I can’t.”
“Okay,” I was glad, finally getting the permission to act, though I tried to hide my joy.
The next morning I began my fight with old things, dust, and the feeling that no one had been living here for years.
I was putting things in boxes, mopping the floor, washing the windows, putting up the wallpaper.
And what’s this? I thought, cleaning dust from the shelf of a built-in cabinet, when suddenly something heavy fell on my head.
“Oh!” I rubbed the injured forehead and looked at the floor in search of what it could be. It was a dirty, shabby envelope, stuffed with something.
“It hurts!” Again I rubbed my forehead. “What could that be, so heavy? Did he put stones there or what? Probably more photos.” I was talking to myself. No one else to talk to while cleaning the house. But there were no pictures. It was money. One, two, three, four, forty-nine, fifty. Fifty C-notes. Exactly five thousand!
I could not believe it! Five thousand dollars fell on my head!
If it had happened to someone else, I would have never believed it. My eyes filled with tears, recollecting that night five years ago, when under the influence of my friend’s convictions, just for fun I wrote on a piece of paper: “I want five thousand dollars to fall on my head!”
“It can’t be happening,” I kept saying to myself, “just impossible.”
“It’s good you found this, honey.” Mike was glad for my discovery. “This was money I saved while working on the road construction in Kenai, and totally forgot about it for a while now. So, since you have found it, we will spend it on your training. You wanted to work as a hairdresser here, am I right? Tomorrow I’ll sign you up in school.”