Autumn

Chapter 5: Bonfire

     For the first time in a long time, my house actually felt as empty as it looked. I stood in the front door, staring down the long hallway. The hallway walls were painted a smokey gray with pale blue Venetian patterns.As part of the renovations that I made to the house after my mother died, I'd taken down the original Venetian wall paper that covered nearly all the walls. The wallpaper had started fading and peeling, so I stripped the walls and  painted them over in a way that still stayed true to the original design.

    To my immediate left there was the arch way leading to the kitchen and opposite that on my right, was the arch way leading to the dining room.

  I walk into the kitchen, that is entirely done in grays and blacks, to set down the bags of groceries on the counter top near the sink. The kitchen is large with an island at the center of the room and a breakfast bar with a black marble counter top opposite it. The stools that sat next to the breakfast bar are black to match. After depositing the groceries, I step out of the kitchen and back into my hallway, making my way toward the winding mahogany staircase.

    The sitting room, where the television is, is opposite the stairs. There is a total of 6 rooms on the upper floor and the first room, the master bedroom is mine. It had been my mother's room originally. 

  Standing in the room now, brought back memories of my childhood. It was difficult for me to get use to the place when we first moved in here. I was younger then, about 5 or 6 and I often came to sleep with her in the middle of the night. In the few months before she passed, I'd slept in here with her too because she hadn't want to be alone. Knowing that you're dying and not being able to do anything about it, intensified every emotion for her; loneliness included.

      It was the largest of all the rooms with a four poster bed in the center. The sheets, duvet and comforter were pale blue to match the walls that had been painted the same way as the walls in the hallway downstairs. I placed my iPhone on the mahogany bedside table. The phone was another gift from my father on my 18th birthday; it came in the mail a week after the car arrived. The iPod that sat on the table beside it however, that I had bought myself. If there was anything I cared for, it was music.

   I took the iPod and its dock downstairs with me and into the kitchen where I set it down on the breakfast bar. Scrolling through the songs, I finally settled on Bon Jovi's "Its My Life" and started my cooking.

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   It was around 8:30 when I heard the doorbell. I shouted over the music, for whoever it was to come in, and scurried over to the iPod to turn it off.

   Jayce came into the kitchen with a case of beer. He was in blue jeans and a old Mardi Gras t-shirt that had four girls in costumes that barely covered anything, on the front of it.

   "Caleb and Tommy left it up to me to buy the beer, " he says.

   "You can put those in the fridge. I have a six pack chilling already in there, " I say and he moves over to the fridge across the room.

  "Does Vanessa drink beer? 'Cause I have a few cans of coke in there if she doesn't."

   "I don't know man," Jayce replies with his head in the refrigerator, no doubt looking for a chilled beer and the dip for the chips I have sitting on the counter. When  he emerges, he continues. "And I don't care to know. Frankly, I don't like her."

   I look at him a bit curious. "You've met her?"I hadn't had the pleasure of meeting Tommy's newest girlfriend. I'd only heard of her.

  "Yup," Jayce replies. He's at the drawer beside me now, looking for the bottle opener. "A piece of work, she is and real sleazy too. I mean, I don't know what Tommy sees in her.