Chapter 3- Turning to the new
{Click here for Ch. 2, and here for Ch.1}
Kelly gasped in delight, and pressed the ‘Play’ button again.
“Hi Edward, it’s Jennifer, from River Bluff townhouses, and we just wanted to let you know that your application has been approved for your end unit, and it looks like your financing has also been approved. Please call me back at your earliest convenience.”
Kelly knew the phone number by memory, having dialed it so many times in the past few months. They could move! A new home, and almost a real home, too! She fell on the sofa, ignoring how the scratchy material rubbed on her bare legs. As she lay her head back she thought, once again and with near obsessive detail, of the wonderful townhouse that her and Edward had found, and how they could hardly imagine living in it. The kitchen was tucked cozily into a corner with two windows; windows!! In the kitchen! And they didn’t look out over an ugly alleyway either but the heavy stand of trees behind the complex. Her and Edward could both work in this wonderful kitchen with room to spare, and it had a dishwasher! A dishwasher! And there was laundry! No more trips to the Laundromat on Sunday mornings, pockets heavy with quarters; lugging hampers with soiled clothes and bottles of detergent and bleach, books to read or the Sunday paper. They could lie in bed in the new sunny bedroom, nibbling on Edwards’ cherry-pistachio biscotti and sipping a macchiato; no one would have to comb hair or even brush teeth, and they could simply haul the paper up the stairs from the front step. The house had a front door; their own entry. No more listening to the neighbors across the hall stumble up the stairs in the middle of the night, drunk again, loud and coarse, fumbling with keys. Their new bedroom had a nice big closet too, and the house had two bathrooms!
But the best part of all; the new house had central air conditioning.
A drop of sweat rolled down Kelly’s temple, and she sat up, lifting her heavy hair off her neck. Going in search of a binder for it, she saw, possibly for the millionth time, how dreary and old their current place really looked. In the hot, bright white of high summer, the sun poured through the windows, the heat filled the rooms and the air was stifling. In past summers, they could only afford to turn on the tiny window unit in their bedroom just before going to bed, and usually Edward woke up long before dawn to turn it off again. But that was when pennies were tight.
