Moving In

As mentioned, for a fun exercise I try to write according to The Sun Magazine's Readers Write monthly topics. The topic in this month's edition is Moving In.   Here goes:

Finally in Florida, far from the snow and chilling wind of central Pennsylvania. She had dreamed of this home, complete with the palm trees which seemed to bow before her. And now she owned it. Her only child had married young, thankfully, allowing her the freedom to move south. The house was perfect, except that it was a dull grey colour. Grey is a colour for a Pennsylvanian house, not for a house facing the sunrises of the Atlantic. Pink, she decided. Pink stucco. It was 1963 and pink stucco was all the rage.

She called the painters while her husband was at work. He didn't seem to understand just how very close the house was to fulfilling her dreams, simply a coat or two of pink paint. The "just-one-more-thing-until-it's-perfect" argument had worked for the cobblestone walkway, the sodded yard, the chandelier, but he put his foot down at pink walls. "Pink walls, he had said, PINK?" his face turning that very shade. She had only nodded and turned on her heel.

That evening, she stood at the door peering through the glass, waiting for his reaction. When he stepped out of the drab brown sedan, dressed in a tidy grey suit with matching hat, she knew she had made a mistake. He stumbled and swayed, like when he was drunk. And he stuttered, another of his "symptoms." "Wha, wha, what is this, this, this mess, these....walls. And who, who is going to to pay?" His hands lifted up to the heavens. "Grace! Get out here Grace!" he screamed, his face passing from pink to bright red. She opened the door with false confidence. Can't show regret. Then he'd get the upper hand in this house and we can't have that now, can we? "Yes dear?" she answered sweetly, "what is it my dear?" Infuriating woman! A growl of rage poured from his mouth, his only answer. Then tottering, he tumbled to the dark asphalt, his hat spinning off his balding head. She turned to go into the house. What will our new neighbours think of his antics? What exaggeration! All this over paint colour!, she thought while she scanned the neighbours' windows see if any happened to be watching.

Then she heard a slight murmur. She turned to her husband and knelt beside him. "Howard? Hap, dear?" No response. That's when she ran inside her pink stuccoed dream home to call 911.

A stroke they told her. Too much stress, they said, with the move, the house, your ridiculous desires she imagined them saying. The paint barely dry and she was driving the sedan north to Pennsylvania. Packed full with all she could salvage: photo albums, dishes, clothes, tablecloths, a house plant, but had to leave the new furniture, the shiny kitchen appliances, the ocean. North to her daughter's house. A temporary arrangement. "As soon as Hap gets better," she promised her daughter, her namesake Grace. "OK Mom, as long as needs be. The boys can share a room and you can have the back bedroom," knowing that her mother really meant "as soon as he dies."
Her eldest grandson, ten years old, tore off his posters of Mickey Mantle and retaped them onto his younger brother's walls. It was HER room now. Hap couldn't climb the stairs, so he slept in the living room behind a sheet.
Ten years later Hap died. She didn't leave as promised but stayed in the room. She couldn't imagine moving back to Florida now, at fifty years old and alone. Plus without a house payment, she could spend his pension as she wished. It would last for years. Good thing too, because she, my great-grandmother, is still alive at ninety-six years of age. And she's still living in the back bedroom. 

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