The Villa My Father Gave Away

“Say something, Leah,” Mindy said, because it was her nature to fill a silence, and she had never in her life known when to leave one alone. “Or are you going to stand there in that uniform like you’re inspecting us?”

I looked down at the service khakis I had not changed out of since Norfolk, at the silver oak leaf on my collar that eighteen years of work had bought me.

I looked at my sister.

“Enjoy the evening, Dad,” I said.

He smiled. It was the same smile he wore when I was nine years old and won first place in the county spelling bee and he took my ribbon off the refrigerator and hung it in Mindy’s bedroom, because she had cried about losing and Rex Osgood could not stand to see one of his girls cry. He thought I had finally learned. He thought, after thirty-eight years, I had finally been trained.

I turned for the door. I put out my hand, palm up, and I said, “I’ll take my key back.”

He was so pleased with himself that he put it in my hand. He did not ask why. He did not think of it again. A man who believes he has won does not examine what he has handed over.

I walked down my own front steps, past the dumpster, past Perry’s chair sitting by the curb in the long gold light, and I did not look back at the house. I got into my truck. I started it. I drove to the bottom of the drive, where the gravel meets the county road, and I pulled over under the oak where Perry and I used to park and watch the water, and I made one phone call.

Jodi runs Lakeshore Property Care out of a brick office on Main Street, and for four years she has watched over the villa through every ice storm and every deployment.

“Jodi,” I said when she picked up. “It’s Leah. Start the paperwork we talked about. All of it. And call Sheriff Sid, because I think I am going to need him a week from tomorrow.”

“It’s today?” she said.

“It’s today.”

“I’ll have it ready by morning,” she said. “Do you want to sleep at the lake cabin? The one on the east cove has the water on.”

I told her yes. I have never been so grateful to hear a woman say fewer words than she could have.

I should tell you why Jodi already had a folder.

At Easter, six months before, my father had stood in my kitchen with a plate of ham and said, out of nowhere, that the villa was awfully big for one person. He said Mindy and Terry could use the room. I laughed it off and went to bed with a small cold feeling I could not name. The next Monday I drove to Jodi’s office and had her write me a letter naming her my authorized agent for the property, in my absence, for every purpose that mattered. Maintenance. Access. Permission to enter. And the power to say, on my behalf and in writing, who could be in my house and who could not.

I did not cry that night. I wrote a list.