Stosha's Stories

118 Ridgeway - By Stosha D.

This place has real character.  The last family who owned it lived here seventeen years.  Built it themselves.  They had help, of course, from John’s friends.  He owned his own business before it went under.  Heating and Air, his Dad’s business before him, so he had lots of friends in contracting. 

            The kids were young then, John and Janice’s.  Their old house was in a bad neighborhood and getting smaller everyday.  They jumped at the chance to sell it long before this place was done.  They had to live apart for a summer while it was being finished. Janice took the girls with her to her parents and John moved back into his childhood bedroom.  They used to steal a quick breakfast at a diner in the new neighborhood on Saturday mornings. It was pretty much the only time alone they had that summer.  They didn’t like the food all that much.  Something just not right about it, John would say.   But it was cheap.   They went almost every Saturday until they moved.  And they always stayed for an extra cup of coffee.

            The entry of the house is a split level, just like Janice wanted.  This was their paradise. Spent their whole savings putting it up.  Twenty five thousand, which Janice always reminded the girls was a lot back then.  Back before the balance in their checking account gave Janice nightmares.  But it was their dream home, Janice would say, a place to spend the next one hundred and eighteen years together.   

 When the stairs weren’t in yet John would let the girls climb the ladder to get upstairs.  They loved it but it made Janice cringe.  The drywall wasn’t up yet, just the support beams.  Anna and Leah loved running between the walls pretending to be ghosts.  Often on summer afternoons the steady hammering was accompanied by high soft “woooooooooooo”s echoing through the top level. 

            When the walls were up they had picnics on the kitchen floor.  Janice, Leah, and Anna visited almost everyday to see John and check the progress.  The half wall between the kitchen and the dining room was a crowd favorite. At least once during lunch Leah would get up and bounce out of the kitchen, circling slowly on tippy toes through the living room, and wait behind the half wall until the perfect time to jump out.  “Boo!”  She would collapse in a fit of giggles until Janice yelled at her for getting saw dust in her curls.  Anna soon joined in the fun and stood behind the wall, putting on hand-puppet shows for the lunchers. They were short enough to play then, before they shot way up.  Janice tracked their growth right there in that doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. 

            The backyard is one of the biggest on this street.  There was a huge old tree back there that had to be cut down.  Anna cried about it.  Janice and John called it a hippie phase.  “Tree-hugger,” John would joke.  She wouldn’t even kill a spider.  As always, Anna grew out of this phase overnight.  She marked the occasion by waking the whole family with a shrill scream when a daddy-longlegs scurried across her foot in the dark bathroom.  The stump was still there for years and the girls used to jump off of it.  That’s how Leah broke her arm.  Anna dared her to do a trick, a spin mid-air.  She made the three-sixty but fell hard.  After the tears stopped she proudly showed off the hot pink cast she got from “flying.” 

Eventually, they dug out the stump and put in a pool.  They enlisted the help of the whole family one Father’s Day.  It ended up being the coldest summer day on record in the town of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania.  But they all stood out there anyway in their heavy coats, snowflakes sticking to their eyelashes, holding up the sides of the pool.  It came back down just four years later when the upkeep got to be too expensive. 

            There was another tree in the front yard.  A sapling really, right there in the middle.  One of the workers almost ran it over with a bulldozer until Janice ran out, arms waving frantically.  It was their tree and she protected it.  She wanted it to grow with the girls, she told them.  And it did.  Eventually it surpassed them and the house itself.  John complained about the leaves in the yard every fall and he threatened more than once to cut it down.  But he never did.  After all, it was their tree. 

            This place has three bedrooms.  The girls each got their own.  A luxury John and Janice had known nothing about growing up.  They each had big closets that they never could quite fill.  John and Janice even let them pick out the carpeting for their rooms.  Janice would tell you that was the only thing they regretted about the house.  When they were teenagers Anna and Leah hated their baby blue and baby pink choices almost as much as they hated each other. The blue carpet in Anna’s room had at least ten burn holes from when she took up a secret smoking habit in middle school.

Her bad girl phase nearly destroyed the place.  Carvings of boys’ names on the window sill.  A dent across the hall right next to the thermostat where she threw the phone at Janice.  And pen marks on the door knob where Leah had to pop the lock when Anna tried to kill herself.  The music was blaring, an empty bottle of Tylenol.  The blue room was eerily quiet while Anna was in the hospital. But Janice found Leah asleep in there more than once when she went to wake her for school. 

Other than John, Leah spent the least amount of time in the house.  When she wasn’t at school she was at ballet practice.  It got pretty serious for awhile and she was devastated when they couldn’t afford her expensive Pointe shoes anymore.  She ran away to a friend’s house and didn’t come back for four days.  John and Janice kept their distance.  She would come back around eventually, and she did.  She got some money from her dance school and kept taking lessons.  After that she spent even less time at home than she had before.

The master bedroom has its own bath.  John and Janice called the room their sanctuary.  That is until the girls became teenagers and took over the bathroom because it had a bigger mirror.  It was the one place they could steal precious few moments to themselves.  When they first finished the house John and Janice moved in before they even had furniture.  The girls stayed at their grandparents and the young couple spent the entire first night making love on the floor of the room they would share.  There was lots of love shared between these walls.  Lots of fighting too.  Late at night after the girls were in bed they would yell quietly.  Collection calls, wounded pride, there was lots to argue about.  But mostly, they just missed each other. 

John had the first of three heart attacks in that bathroom, on the toilet.  He fell off and got stuck between the commode and the glass doors of the shower.  Janice found him with his bare bottom facing the door.  Once they were sure he was okay it was their favorite story to tell.  “Just imagine it!” they would laugh out-loud and touch hands.  “Yea, I guess I was straining too hard!” John would howl. 

John worked from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every day and Janice was busy twenty four seven.  The girls, the business, the bills.  Janice was always crunching numbers.  Finding time for the family and finding ways to make the mortgage payment.  During their free time, they both worked on the house.  Even on Sundays, the one day they didn’t work, John and Janice would be busy.  Planting flowers, touching up paint, finishing a project in the garage.  It always needed something more. 

Even though they were all busy, they still met in the kitchen almost every night for dinner.  Never sat in the dining room because it was an office for the business.  Janice knew that it was pretty special that they still managed to eat together as a family, even if it was at 10:00pm.  The kitchen counters were packed with food and unopened envelopes.   During the summers and winters the business phone would interrupt and John would be back on the road for a service call.  All four of them had its distinctive and irritating buzz implanted in their memories.  They heard it ring in their sleep.  It was a fun trick to play on Christmas morning, though.  John would get a service call, and while he was gone Santa Claus would come and bring presents for Anna and Leah.  The first years at the house there were tons of presents, the last few years just one or two.  But John and Janice made sure there was always something. 

John really did work a lot.  Janice too.  She never took a paycheck from the business and more than once John didn’t take one either.  During the slow seasons, John felt lucky to break even.  During the busy seasons, he was never around. 

He wanted them to live in a nice neighborhood and the girls to go to a good school.  But it got harder and harder through the years.  No one really complained though.  There was mutual understanding.  Some things don’t need to be said.  Still, it had killed Janice when Anna’s first sentence was “Daddy go work.”  He promised to work less every year, but as the girls got older the budget got tighter.  It just never really worked out the way they planned. 

They never could afford a vacation.  They hadn’t been in over ten years when they moved out.  Still they had the house they loved and that meant a lot.  They met almost every night in the summer on the back porch. They’d light citrus candles to keep away the mosquitoes, drink Coronas with the neighbors, and talk sometimes until 2:00 a.m. 

The back porch attaches to the basement.  It was everyone’s room really.  That is once John finished it, which was about four years after the rest of the house was finished.  Janice took extra care in decorating down here.  She filled the built in bookshelves with pictures and accessorized the mantle to perfection.  There’s a wet bar and liquor cabinet that had to be emptied out once the girls were in high school. 

All their holiday celebrations were down here: Christmas, birthdays, Easter.  They hid Easter baskets for the girls until they moved out.  Once they hid them in garbage bags next to the trash in the garage.  Eventually they told them where they were when Anna and Leah were still basketless at noon.  One of their favorite memories.   And it was down here next to the fire place that John gave Janice the only other piece of jewelry he gave her after her wedding band.  It was Valentine’s Day and they had long since given up exchanging gifts for the sake of their wallets.  But that year John gave Janice a tennis bracelet with the tiniest little diamonds.  When he asked the girls to wrap the box they opened it and gasped.  They were young then, elementary school, but still they understood.  Janice cried when she opened it, and they did too. 

It really is a special place.  Even the colors are distinct.  Grey brick and teal doors.  The new owner kept the teal that John and Janice picked out.  Originally they were painted pink.  Yes, pink doors.  The neighbors across the street had grey and pink too.  But after the news broke that the guy who lived there was arrested on racketeering charges John painted the doors that very next day.  It is quite pretty, almost picture perfect from here.  You can really make a life within those walls.

They were lucky to live at 118 Ridgeway.  That was what Janice always said.  It was in the numbers, things were meant to be for them.  John grew up at 100 Aber and she at 99 Lewis.  And nine and nine was eighteen, add that with one hundred and you get 118.  Her second favorite numerological sign was that Anna graduated in 2001 and Leah in 2003.  John and Janice had met in a club called 2002, and that, she told them, was no coincidence.  They all rolled their eyes at Janice’s far-fetched comparisons.  Anna and Leah mostly.  They always felt smarter than their parents, but never said anything.  Neither of them wanted to tell Janice that 118 Ridgeway was a stretch at best.  The numbers just didn’t add up.  But they couldn’t because they loved it there so much. They grew up there.  Deep down they wanted to believe it. 

This place was theirs and there wasn’t an inch in it that wasn’t marked by them.  Eventually Anna settled down, moved out, got married.  But the extra space never really made up for her absence.  Leah left too, that’s what kids do.  The mortgage was almost paid off by then but they refinanced it to help her pay for college.  It should have gotten easier with the girls gone, but it didn’t.  Overdue bills kept piling up, and although they’d never admit it, when it came time to choose between paying their taxes or Leah’s tuition, there was never a question of what the choice would be.  Sooner or later they knew that the IRS would come knocking.  And of course it did.  And when that happened, there wasn’t a place in the house they could hide. 

You used to be able to still see them all in the house.  But they’re gone now.  The notches marking their height have been refinished.  You can’t tell anymore that little Leah is now the tallest.  The cracked ceramic tile downstairs where Anna dropped a plate has been replaced.  The pink carpeting is gone, the blue too.  The dark smoke stains on the wall were erased when the new owner painted.  Gone are all the stains, nicks, dents, and holes of the life they built here.  They even cut down the tree out front because the branches were threatening the power line.  It is all gone.  They are gone. 

No, John and Janice haven’t really been back at all; although truth be told Janice still drives by every once in awhile just to look.  She never could forgive John after they lost the house.  Their home, their dreams.  Everything they had worked for their entire lives together.  Gone.  Seventeen years of no money, no time, no relationship.  They met at the diner one last time for breakfast to sign the papers. The food seemed worse than usual but they still cleared their plates.  This time they skipped coffee.

The girls came back only twice.  Once was after the foreclosure to try to bid at the auction.  They lost.  A lot of buyers were willing to pay top dollar for the humble home and then update it.  It really is in a good neighborhood.  

The last time was when they came to collect their things from the attic.  After it was all empty they stood in Leah’s old closet, hand-in-hand.  Through her tears Anna let out one last “wooooooooooooo.”  But the walls had been up for a long time and there was no more echo.  The ghosts were gone.  

            They had known all along it wouldn’t last.  John, Janice, Anna, and Leah.  It was clear when it came to the four of them, the numbers never did add up.