He died when I was twenty-four. I was at a training course in Georgia. I got the call on a Tuesday and flew home on a Wednesday and stood at his grave on a Friday in my dress uniform, and I didn’t cry until everyone had gone back to the cars.
A year later, a lawyer called me. He said there was paperwork to sign. My grandfather had set up a trust years earlier. When I turned twenty-five, the house passed out of the trust and into my name.
Just mine.
Not my father’s. Not my sister’s. Mine.
My family knew I “had the house.” That’s how they said it. Kate has Grandpa’s house. Like I was borrowing it. Like it was a sweater I was keeping warm until somebody more important needed it.
They never asked how it worked. They never asked to see anything. And I never pushed it, because pushing things in my family never ended well.
For six years, it was my home. When I was stationed at Fort Carson, I lived there. When I deployed, I locked it up and asked a neighbor to watch it, and I came home to it.
This time, before I left, my mother had called me.
“Why don’t you let your father and me keep an eye on the place while you’re gone?” she’d said. “It’s silly to have it sitting empty. We’ll check on it. Water the plants. Get the mail.”
My parents lived forty minutes away, in a rented townhouse they’d been in since my father retired. It seemed like a nice offer. It seemed like the kind of thing a normal mother would do.
I gave her a key.
I gave her the code to the garage.
