For Closure
Saturday morning, as Clayton and I were putting on our faces in front of the bathroom mirror (do you think we just roll out of bed looking like this?), Bryson started barking. He only barks when people are at the door, so Clayton went downstairs to see who could possibly be knocking on our door at 9am on a Saturday. After a muffled conversation that I couldn’t understand through the closed bedroom door, Clayton comes back upstairs with a stack of papers. I’ll give you a hint: there was not a giant cardboard check and multicolored confetti hidden in that stack of papers.
It looks like the owners of the townhouse we’re renting casually stopped paying their mortgage seven months ago. And, surprise! The bank didn’t like that very much. And now they’re suing the owners and, if we’re reading the scary stack of papers correctly, suing us by extension. But, there’s a very good chance that we are not reading these papers correctly as neither one of us has very much experience dealing with anything lawyer-related. Except that one time I served on a jury and spent two full days pretending to pay attention to what the lawyers were saying while I was actually comtemplating which downtown coffee shop I would go to on our lunch breaks and whether I should go with a plain skim latte or live dangerously with a caramel macchiato.
Everyone seems to think that we shouldn’t have any real liabilty; after all, it doesn’t say “Unknown Tenants” or “Defendant” on our drivers’ licenses. We still can’t help but feel like we just walked down an aisle at the grocery and ran right into the manager, just before we discover that someone else had gone through and knocked everything off the shelves. Like Mr. Manager would ever believe we had nothing to do with the brand new ketchup and mustard slip-n-slide smeared right between his big manager shoes. So, now we’re stuck getting brooms and mops shoved into our hands and we don’t even know what aisle we’re in and, in the meantime, we have 15 minutes before the store closes and they’ll lock us in for the night.
That’s not a good feeling. The part I’m dreading most is having to leave this townhouse that I absolutely love. It’s the first place that has actually felt like our home, mine and Clayton’s, and the chances of finding something similar in our budget are very slim. So, tonight we’re opening the blinds and stealing glances across the lake at the fountain’s light that dances against the rippling water. Tomorrow I will see what favors I can sweet talk out of one of our clients who owns his own law firm. I’m hoping the process will allow us to stay here through the end of our lease, but, just in case, I think we’ll keep the blinds open from now on.