Nobody

When my family and I asked my elderly widowed father to come live with us we decided it was probably best to buy a house with a separate in-law apartment for him to live in. It would give him his privacy, we thought.
     He lived there for a while, but then moved into the main house with us, so I'll never see that money back.
     Selling our old house to buy this current one was a headache, though. This all happened when the housing bubble burst, you see. We were so desperate to sell that we eventually began holding open houses ourselves to try to drum up some business.
     "Why didn't you just stay where you were at?" I can hear you asking.
     Well, the reason is we started the process just before the housing bubble burst, and were tens of thousands into the process when the economy fell apart.
     On one such open house, my wife and I had to leave, so we were going to scrap it for that day.
     "Don't bother," my father told us. "I'll take care of it."
     "You'll take care of it?"
     My wife and I were both skeptical, but he was s grown man, after all. In fact, he was the age of SEVERAL grown men. In the end, we decided to take him up on his offer.
     When we came back several hours later, he was laying in his bed watching a baseball game on TV.
     "How did it go?" I asked him, carefully putting one toe in the water to test the temperature.
     "Fine," he said.
     "How many people showed up?" my wife asked him.
     "Who?"
     "The people."
     "What about the people?"
     "How many showed up?"
     "To what?"
     "To our open house."
     "Oh, that," he said. "Nobody."
     "Nobody?" we both yelped.
     "Nobody."
     "Nobody?" I asked again, looking for some clarification.
     "Nobody," he assured me.
     I turned to my wife.
     "Nobody," I told her.
     We were both disappointed.
     We left my father to his baseball game.
     "I'm hungry," he threw out to the universe as we left, knowing someone would bring him something delicious to eat, that someone being my wife.
     When she went to the kitchen to fix him a five-star snack for working so hard for us, she found a note on the counter and showed it to me.
     "To whom it may concern," it said, "I would talk to your realtor, if I were you. When we came to view your house, we found the front door open and him sound asleep on your bed."
 
 

Raising My Father

RaisingMyFather.BlogSpot.com

JimDuchene.BlogSpot.com  American Chimpanzee

@JimDuchene