Nights Like This One { a joel miller fanfiction }

I.

"Something old and new, memories for you and me." 

— Paul McCartney, Junk

______________________

February 3, 2003

Lily couldn't remember this house ever feeling so empty.

Not in the seven years she'd been coming to visit, not even after her father died.

Not that her father's presence ever made her feel full... in any sense of the word.

But that was the thing, the house wasn't empty, not in any physical sense. It was cluttered— trinkets crowded and stacked into each corner, adorning every shelf, piles of books littered the coffee table, the overflowing shelf at the back corner of the living room (mostly Bibles of every translation- the only literature her mother ever chose to read), her mom had taken up collecting tea cups in her old age— those occupied most of the space along the shelves in the kitchen. But even still, the place felt vacant— void of anything warm or alive.

It even smelled wrong, musty, and slightly damp, like the walls were sagging with water damage even though they looked just fine to her.

She exhaled sharply, her ribs rattling like the cage behind them was as empty as the house felt. She carefully sat down on her mother's ratty armchair— the brown fabric was frayed and tearing off the arms, revealing the splintered wood beneath.

This place was a dump, but it was also hers.

Her mother had left it to her in her will, mortgage already paid off, ongoing renovations already entirely paid for even though they were barely underway.

It was three times the size of the apartment she paid three-thousand dollars to rent in the heart of San Francisco's Financial District.

It had a backyard, a porch, a fucking garage.

All of that was unheard of back home, especially on her meager SF Weekly salary.

But did she really want to live in Texas? In her deceased mother's home?

She told herself that she was still on the fence about that decision, even though she was here, even though she'd already handed in her resignation at her job that she had worked painstakingly to get after graduating from Berkeley.

Her manager had told her she could have her job back if she decided to move back to the Bay.

She thought that maybe he'd only said that because her mom was dead.

It had been a shock, in the way that it was sudden, heart attack, but not entirely surprising. Her parents had her late, her mother was forty-five when she'd been born, her dad fifty-two.

She had always found it odd, in a heart-wrenching type of way, that her parents had waited that long to have a child that it seemed they didn't really want.

That thought alone made a swirling bout of guilt slosh away in her gut. She shouldn't be thinking those things, not when her mom had died, alone, in this house that she now owned, less than a month ago.

The funeral and the calls and obtaining the death certificate and the property titles and everything else you're forced to think about when your parent dies had taken up the entirety of her physical and emotional life for the past month. She hadn't even cried yet, didn't know if she even would, which surely pointed to something being horrifically and disgustingly wrong with her. Did she possess any empathy? Any emotion? Was she perhaps a secret psychopath or something equally as cruel?