Three Is Company

The Master of the House

The stain on the kitchen floor seemed to be the only thing that mattered. Despite the process of the moving, the payment of the hired help, and the organizing that had to be done in order to fill the two story house with their meager apartment furniture, John decided that he had to first verify that he hadn't made a gigantic mistake. This could all be a deception, somehow, someway. The realtor could have faked the purchase, perhaps replicated the neighborhood. John might have imagined the sale, he may very well be wandering through a house that he only hallucinated to be his own. The stain would tell him definitively whether or not this was the same rotted old frame that he had grown up in. Of course he lent a hand, as any gentleman would do, taking up one of the cardboard boxes and trying not to inhale any of the disintegrated packing peanuts as he balanced it dangerously close to his nose. It was a heavy box, probably not belonging in the kitchen, though John strode past the mess of the move with his newfound treasures, wandering through the tangled maze of door frames and furniture in order to set the load carefully upon the linoleum countertops. He squatted down, moving aside some of the old chairs in order to get a better vantage point towards the crack in the tiles, the one which had been filled at one point with a thick mixture of watercolors. As a child John had liked to sabotage his sister's art projects, and so it had been a swamp green sludge that had trailed down the leg of the tables and cumulated into the crack upon the floor. It was never discovered, not until Mrs. Watson had shoved her socked foot under the table one breakfast and recoiled with a shriek. By then the damage had been done. The color of the wood irreplaceable. The stain permanent. That must have been in the late fifties, some nineteen years from where the family now stood in their century. John used the flashlight of his phone and dove underneath the oak, pushing it towards the familiar crack to find the only permanent memory of his childhood. The only thing that could not have been washed away, that could not have been replaced or replicated. And indeed, the stain was there.
"It's here!" John exclaimed, emerging from the table so ferociously that the back of his blonde head smacked against the overhanging edge. A series of curses followed his exclamation, which only made his wife mutter her disagreements, shoving her fingers into the ears of the child strapped to her chest in a harness.
"Mary, she's not even a year. She doesn't even know my name, much less any of the words you Catholics deem unholy." John protested, emerging more confidently the second time around.
"It's the habit, John. The habit." Mary reminded him, releasing her fingers only to pet the spindly blonde hairs across Rosie's mostly bald head. John didn't want to be the one to say the baby was ugly, though she still hadn't grown out of the gremlin phase. The hairless cat impersonator, with a single tooth emerging from her purple gums, joints that moved in all directions, and a heaving look of disapproval stamped across her devoid face. Deep down John was wholly suspicious, as their child looked more likely to crab walk backwards across the carpet than recite the beginning of the ABC's.
"You've found it then? The precious stain?" Mary presumed, moving towards the kitchen table to see for herself.
"I have." John agreed with a grin. "The table's new, as I expected, but the stain is forever unchanged. That was my mother's whole argument."
"Guess she never expected that very permanence to be the selling feature." Mary chuckled, moving towards the light switch and pressing it on and off a couple of times, as if expecting the bulb to blow or the wires to short circuit.
"Don't do that." John insisted. "The house works, alright? The inspections came back."
"I understand the house works. I just doubt that it, you know..."
"Works?" John presumed with a sigh. Mary crossed her arms awkwardly across the strapped baby, as if she felt that she needed to defend herself even at the expense of their sleeping child.
"I just mean that I don't trust the inspectors. Carpenters, electricians, they all want to get paid. And if they claim the wiring works, even if it doesn't, they get a guaranteed call in a couple of months. That is, if it doesn't burn down the house in the process."
"It won't break. It's got that Watson tenacity." John insisted.
"Living in a house doesn't make it a direct relative."
"Maybe the second time around will change that." John suggested, giving Mary a luminous smile before trotting through the living room for the rest of the boxes. It was silly to hire a moving crew only to lift yourself, though John found that the work was done a bit more responsibly if he was at the other end of the fragile boxes. The men tread more carefully, knowing that their tips were threatened should they make a mistake. John wanted to be sure all of the family china made it in one piece, not to mention the family electronics. Their prized possession was their television set, a luxury bought with the fleeting funds of John's last job. To see that thing ruined, smashed within its wooden dresser, would be to see all hope of peace and quiet splintered at their feet. As John toiled away with the boxes Mary gingerly explored, fleeting this way and that across the stairs and waving Rosie's chunky little arms to feign enthusiasm. For most of the time the child would sleep, though when she finally woke she called the attention of the whole crew with her shrieks. Occasionally Mary would go upstairs with the baby, trying to calm her down in the half constructed shell of her crib, legless and without a proper blanket. It was during one of these times that John said goodbye to the company, having done three consecutive checks throughout the large metal truck to ensure they had not forgotten a stray button or a grain of their grinded sea salt. For some reason he felt a strong emotional attachment to anything which had made the three hour trip, even the bundles of dust that had collected in the corners of the metal container. With tip in hand the movers made their way back down the driveway, slowly revealing more and more of the neighborhood as their obnoxious yellow color began to fade out of the foreground. John stood on the curb, the cement barrier that separated the road and the yard in place of a proper sidewalk. He beckoned for the truck, trying to help it back up with smashing into the neighbor's parked cars, and eventually gave it a cheerful wave goodbye as the engine sputtered into a more aggressive speed. John appreciated the thing more and more as it vanished, in fact he got so emotional as the truck faded into the size of a pinprick, eventually turning right towards the main highway, that he had to avert his view. Instead John chose to focus on the houses, those which must all be reoccupied since the time he had first lived here. All of the neighbors across the street ought to be dead, as they were one foot in the grave when he was a child. Now John expected to see a fresh wave of suburbia, young parents who had swarmed into the town for the school systems and the vegetarian restaurants. The little development wasn't nearly as big as the rest of them, not entirely the suburban wonderland one might imagine. Thankfully the houses all looked different, from the inside and out. The rooves had different angles, the houses had different outcroppings, different awnings. Some had garages, some had front porches, and each was shingled or painted in a distinctly unique way in contrast to its neighbors. Perhaps the neighborhood had coordinated the uniqueness, trying to hide the fact that they lived in a development full of middle class mothers. Perhaps the people were ashamed of the idea of suburbia, so much that they wanted to hide from it. John turned slowly, admiring the houses and the yards that had changed drastically since he was a child. It had been nine years since he had lived in that house, nine years since he strapped his belongings in a large canvas bag on the top of his car and vanished to the other side of the country for college. Nine years did a lot to the neighborhood. Likewise it did a lot to John himself. The Watson house had stayed fairly consistent to the test of time, which was neither a relief nor a downfall. The house was just as he remembered it being. The paint was just as peeled, the shutters just as rickety. There had never been a warm and inviting feeling to the Watson house, nothing that would compel a visitor to stop in uninvited. The windows were dark, the grass long, the flowerbeds overridden with weeds and invasive plants. What stood before him was the shell of his parent's vision. The old remains of what deteriorated under the wheels of their chairs. Of course they wouldn't be tending to the yard any time soon, not when it was discovered they were unable to brush their teeth. Not a moment too soon. The house needed new life, and in fact John could hear that new life even from the front yard. That screaming cry of a child who felt neglected, even when it was coddled in its mother's arms.