Hope Idiotic | Part 43
Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.
A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE CHUCK DIED. I had quit Tigris and put my dusty PhD to good use as an adjunct professor at Nevada State University where I taught uninterested twenty-somethings the finer points of Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The schedule allowed me to work on my novel, and the pay was enough that any freelancing I did was out of choice, rather than need. My nights were void of death-metal concerts, replaced by bath time with my boys.
Lou hadn’t been back to Vegas since packing up Chuck’s stuff. When he moved into his own apartment, he hired movers to bring his furniture and boxes of kitchen supplies and wooden hangers and everything else to Chicago. I managed the movers since Lou had no intention of flying out there to facilitate it himself. Most of his stuff arrived scratched, beaten up or broken. It bothered him, but not enough to press the movers to pay for it. He was just happy to have his stuff again. Plus, he had no desire to put any more thought into the house than he had to. The only interest Lou had with the house was paying the landscapers and pool guy to keep it from looking abandoned. Since he could afford to keep paying Grams the monthly mortgage and the quarterly property taxes, he saw no reason to fill the place with renters. But pressure from his father convinced him otherwise, and during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, Lou returned to the scene of the crime.
Natalie and I were more than happy to have him stay with us.
“How’s Lexi doing out there?” I asked as we drank beers on the back patio of my downtown Vegas house.
“She’s good. I mean, she’s… I don’t know. She’s grieving. She doesn’t go out much, and when I do, I don’t think to invite her. I think I make her sad. I’m a constant reminder of what she no longer has. So, yeah, she’s not doing so well. She tells me that she’s reading the Bible a lot, often in bed before she goes to sleep. She says it makes her feel closer to him. We each grieve in our own way, I suppose.”
“You want me to come with you tomorrow and help ready the house for rent?”
“No thanks. It won’t take me long. Just going to walk through and make a note of what needs cleaning, updating, whatever else. Then I’ll hire someone to do it all. I’m done with that place.”
“Why don’t you just sell it?”
“I’d lose money on it. Owning property is a good tax deduction.”
“How libertarian of you.”
✶
HE OPENED THE FRONT DOOR TO HIS HOUSE. The chirp of the alarm system didn’t sound—still broken from Chuck ripping the wires out of the wall. There was no furniture, no pictures on the wall, nothing. All that remained were marks in the carpet from where the furniture was and holes in the wall from where the pictures of a good life once hung. Lou walked through the rooms making notes of what needed to be done: new carpeting upstairs and down, fresh paint throughout, some patching in the drywall from where the movers had seemingly slammed furniture against. The house was vacant and strange to Lou, but it still felt familiar. It still felt like home.
Lou had moved into that house at a pivotal point in his life; he then was coming into his own with an exciting job and was surrounded by so many good friends. His future was bright, and he had built that house into a welcoming fortress of solitude. And when he left, he had handed it over to Chuck to enable him to build a home for himself, a place where he could be safe. And as Lou walked into his bedroom, the weight of everything—the sadness and joy and hope and lies and death and truth and poverty and wealth and fear and mistakes and adventure and boredom—the weight of the last three years—caused him to fall to his knees in a heap of tears. And he screamed. He screamed out to Chuck and to Michelle and to her parents and to his own parents, and he screamed at himself and cursed himself for all that he had done wrong including ever thinking that things would just work out if the intentions were pure and true. And he screamed at the walls of the house and the movers who broke them and he screamed at his voice, which was beginning to sound hoarse from all of the screaming. And he screamed at God because he was out of things to scream at. And he lay down in the middle of his bedroom floor, right where his bed had been, and he cried himself to sleep.
