What They Really Took
The cab turned onto my street and I felt the familiar loosening in my chest that always came with being almost home. Three weeks was too long. Miami had been beautiful and relentless and too loud, and all I had wanted for the last four days was my own bed and my own coffee machine and the particular quiet of a house that belonged entirely to me.
The driver pulled to the curb and I reached for my suitcase before I noticed. My car wasn’t there. I always left my little blue sedan parked beside the porch.
It had been there since I moved in four years ago, had accumulated a small constellation of dents and one cracked side mirror that I kept meaning to replace. The driveway was empty. I looked at the gate post where my brass name plate had been drilled in the year I moved in, the one my father helped me hang on a cold November afternoon with a level and a six-pack of beer.
There were two small holes in the wood where the screws had been. My father had been dead for three years. He was the kind of man who left behind things that lasted.
The plate was gone. I walked up the path. The porch paint was different.
Mine was a soft gray that I had chosen from forty swatches on a Sunday afternoon. This was beige, a bright, aggressive beige that had nothing to do with me. The curtains in the front window were new too, frilly and yellow-flowered, the kind my mother had been trying to put in my house since the week I moved in.
I put my key in the lock. It didn’t turn. I tried again.
I jiggled the handle. Nothing. They had changed the locks.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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