The new housing I had acquired was my grandma Leona’s house. The one with the Beauty Shop in the basement.

Dad’s friend Clair had a son who had been renting it, but he had just bought his own home and moved out. And Dad told me I could move in. The price was right – an amount best described as “symbolic” – and I just had to be OK with a bunch of women being in my basement once a week.

Of course I took it.

I had spent a lot of my childhood there, but I had never really appreciated how strange the place was.

Grandma bought the house on a handshake deal, in the late 1940s. The basement was unfinished, so her brothers came and helped frame it out and put in her shop. They were not professional, and it showed.

As the family changed the house did too. Walls knocked out here, a room added there, a giant deck tacked on the back. It was a mishmash of decades. The living room screamed 70s, the kitchen swore it was 60s, the office clung to the 50s, and the basement was stuck in the 40s. Nothing matched. At all. Think orange doors. Teal wallpaper. Green shag carpet—mercifully banished before my time, though its memory haunted the space.

There was a rotary phone in the basement—a pink rotary phone, no less—still clinging to the wall like a relic from the sixties (clashing with the orange 1940s tint light), complete with faded flower stickers. It was the phone my dad used to call my mom a thousand times when they were dating, the phone I used to call Time and Temperature when I was a kid, like it was the Oracle of Delphi. The thing had history.

One day, an internet repair technician showed up to figure out why my ancient house and ancient phone lines were refusing to cooperate with the modern magic of the internet. This technician turned out to be a large, burly, perpetually irritated lesbian with a hammer holstered like a sidearm—someone who, judging by what followed, harbored a deep, personal vendetta against adorable vintage telecommunication devices.

She confirmed that my modem was not performing the standard pings, pongs, beeps, boops, or whatever other dolphin noises modems are supposed to make. So, she went hunting for the cause.

She marched downstairs—where my mom happened to be working on a couple of ladies’ updos—and without hesitation, delivered righteous, unrestrained judgment.

She took one look at the pink rotary phone and apparently decided it had personally wronged her in a past life.

WHACK!
WHACK!
WHAAAAAACK!

The phone was obliterated.

Shattered plastic, tangled wires, a mangled corpse dangling on the wall.

My mother and I just stood there, mute with shock. Even the ladies under the hair dryers went stone silent, which I am convinced had never happened before in the recorded history of that basement.

And then, after all that, after the murder of a perfectly innocent rotary phone?

She thought the phone, that was wired into the wall, was causing the problem. Turns out it was just a bad modem.

The phone died for nothing.

A senseless, pastel crime.

It was not the first death I had encountered.

As you may have guessed, Grandma Leona was no longer with us. And Norma had passed away a few months prior to that.

Death had been busy in our family. Dementia, accidents, illness—no neat narrative, just attrition. By the time I moved into Grandma Leona’s house, many of the adults who had shaped my life were gone. What they left behind was history. And wallpaper. So much wallpaper.

The house had a lot of ghosts. Some literal. Some emotional. Some wired directly into the walls.

But the house was also mine. For now. Which felt revolutionary.

So, I did what I could do to make the place livable.

Much to my dad’s chagrin, I painted every upstairs room a different color.

I made curtains. Orange curtains. Actual curtains—measured, hemmed, and hung – perhaps not as perfect as they could have been but they were my accomplishment.

I had an idea of something I wanted on my living room wall – a grid of nine square black frames, with a picture of a flower in each. So, I ordered the frames on Amazon, and then went hunting through my things to find my camera. It took a little bit of digging, but I finally found it. The battery was dead, of course, I hadn’t used it since I was on my mission.

The realization of that struck me as odd – I used to take pictures all the time, and then for years… nothing.

I went out and took a couple dozen pictures, ended up with nine I liked and printed and put up on the wall – it turned out exactly as I had pictured it.

Then I put away my camera without taking another shot.

Imaginary therapist – want to take a swing at that?

When I had returned to work at RC Willey, I had been gone for almost exactly a year, and not much had changed, except most of the office staff. The turnover was still ridiculous.

I put in a time off request almost immediately. The family was talking about going to Disneyland over Memorial Day weekend. I thought if I put in my request far enough in advance, I might be able to get it. I got the paper slip back, with a hand written note from Barbara, the matronly manager of our office, which read: “Not just no, hell no.”

And I remembered why I hated the job.

So, when a position opened up in the flooring department I jumped at it. It was a secretary job, in the back. It was a pay cut, with fewer hours. But it was a transfer to a different manager, a set Monday to Friday schedule, and NO WORKED HOLIDAYS. It also came with the perk of not being verbally abused by customers every day.

It was an amazing upgrade.

I started buying furniture with my glorious employee discount, like a couch set and a fantastic foam top Queen size mattress at cost plus 10 percent. And it was a floor model, which meant it was already deeply discounted, and broken in. An AMAZING deal.

And then, nine times out of ten, I slept on the sofa.

I bought a kitchen table and chairs, and a coffee table and a desk…I was just filling that place up. Making it homey.

The best purchase, to that end, was another cat, to keep Albert the mad drooler company. He was a fluffy orange sweetheart I named Bingley. Yes, from Pride and Prejudice.

And while I was filling my life back up with stuff, along came the Marie Kondo craze – the organizing and decluttering phenomenon.

I gave decluttering a go. But really all I ended up doing was throwing everything that was tied to my still raw emotions. They should have a disclaimer on that show: many things will not spark joy immediately after a death, divorce, or extricating yourself from a cult.

I chucked all of my year books, photo albums, and the small pile of things I had kept sentimentally.

I do have regret.

But at least I kept a lot of the pictures.

During the purge I finally threw away the grocery bags full of Magic Underwear I had stopped wearing. For some reason I hadn’t gotten rid of them immediately, just stuck them in the back of a closet. But they definitely did not spark joy. They belonged in the trash.

While I was getting rid of the old, and bringing in the new, I also made new friends.

One of my new work friends wanted to go see Waitress—the movie with Keri Russell. I didn’t know anything about it, but I went along with her. I just wanted popcorn, a dark room, and to take my mind off my troubles for 90 minutes.

The movie is a painfully intimate portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive marriage.

Fantastic.

I sat there very still, watching the main character smile carefully, speak softly, and calculate exits in her head while managing a man’s moods like live grenades. It was unsettling in the specific way recognition always is. I told myself I was fine. I told myself I was being dramatic. I told myself I should probably stop gripping the armrest like it was load-bearing.

When the movie ended, my friend excused herself to the restroom and I followed the crowd out into the brightness of the mall, emotionally tenderized.

And that’s when I saw him.

A tall, thin man with dark hair in an Air Force uniform. He noticed me and started walking straight toward me.

My heart dropped to my toes.

For one awful second, I was sure it was TJ.

I didn’t know if I should fight, fly, or freeze. My body choose freeze.

But it wasn’t him.

It was Harlen.

That sweet, innocent boy I had absolutely tortured in high school.

He had also joined the Air Force. And was wearing the same uniform TJ had worn. And unfortunately looked an awful lot like him from a distance. He was at the mall with his wife and their young child—his whole, intact life moving calmly around him like evidence. He smiled. He looked genuinely happy to see me.

We talked for a minute. Maybe two. Nothing heavy. Nothing loaded. Just polite, warm small talk between two people who once knew each other in a completely different version of reality.

Then he walked away. My friend came back and we headed out.

I decided then, instead of harboring fear or hate I chose nothing. I “nothing-ing” TJ. The pain in my past deserved none of my time, energy or focus.

And life moved forward.

I followed.