Page 15 of Gulfside Girls
As was their family dynamic. Ali handled it all, including the fielding of offers for Dad’s house.
“I’ve got three offers on the table. Two cash and one financed, but the financed offer sweetened the deal by adding ten grand over asking.”
“Oh, yeah, go with that one,” Blair said.
“I agree,” Faye chimed in as well.
Three to zip. Sell to the highest bidder.
There was no hurry, but there was also no hold-up. Bruce Kelly, the working man, had paid his mortgage years ago. He’d lived frugally. He’d saved.
He’d died with three hundred thousand dollars after all was liquidated to split among his three girls.
“We’re heiresses!” Faye joked.
“Sure, yeah, well, we need to be smart. You need to be smart.” Ali pointed to Blair, who tended to buy the first thing thatstruck her fancy. As evidenced by the mirror workout thing she’d bought that was in her Cinci apartment collecting dust.
“Oh, come on, just one dumb thing.”
Cinci could be expensive. At least this money would put Ali’s mind at ease about her baby sister. She’d be able to pay rent for a few months! Maybe even a whole year. But while it was great, a windfall for sure, it wasn’t quit your job money. Which, of course, she’d done, regardless of Bruce Kelly’s last will and testament.
Faye threatened to buy a Harley, but in truth, she was just as frugal as Dad. Her weakness was plants. She’d buy every annual at the Toledo Flower Market Sale and then some.
What was Ali’s weakness? Not having a dream? Not having any idea how to splurge? She’d been so careful. All this time. She hadn’t cultivated the muscle required to kick up her heels.
But thanks to Dad, she did have some time—not a lot of time, but some. She didn’t have to replace her income from Frogtown immediately.
But she would have to find a place to live. Soon.
In the meantime, she had two weeks to clear out fifty years at Densmore. So that was her focus. Cleaning out the old family home.
She could do that. She was organized, methodical, and knew every contractor in Toledo. She knew exactly how to move, ship, dispose of, and repair stuff if needed.
Instead of overthinking her career, her marriage, and her midlife malaise, she handled things at the house.
One room at a time.
Bruce Kelly was neat and tidy and non-sentimental, which made going room by room mostly painless.
The death of their father had Ali thinking about their mother, Joetta Kelly. She was young, so very young, when she became a mother, and too young to die.
Bruce hadn’t let his girls indulge in maudlin emotions. That they were motherless wasn’t his fault. He expected them to all get on with it.
But now, as she worked through the grief of his death, she couldn’t quite get on with her mother’s death even though it had been a lifetime.
Ali was nine years old when she was drafted into service as the person who took care of food, pigtails, and Christmas gifts for the Kelly Sisters. Faye was seven and said she remembered their mom in bits. Blair was a toddler when it happened, so the memories weren’t really memories. They were stories that Faye and Ali told Blair about having a mom.
Were they together now, Bruce and Joetta? She didn’t know if that sounded like a happy ending or not. What she remembered of her mother and father together was fraught. They argued, they screamed.
Well, maybe they had that happily ever after somewhere, if not here.
Remembering the brief time she shared this Earth with both parents was connected to shouting from Bruce and tears from her pretty little mother.
As Ali pressed on and packed the house, she didn’t find one article of clothing or memento of her mother. Her father had excised it all after the car accident that claimed their mother.
Once, when she asked to visit their mother’s burial site, Bruce explained she’d been cremated, and the ashes were at the lake. He’d taken his wife to the lake once or twice, and she’d liked it. “She liked being on a beach.” He had said, offering a tiny morsel of memory to a daughter starving for more details.
By the time Ali made her way to cleaning out Bruce’s workshop in the garage, the house was pretty well buttoned up. The garage workshop was the last of the things to sort through.
