We moved in with six boxes, two suitcases, and a mattress my sister gave us.
Trixie slept in the bedroom.
I slept on a narrow sofa in the living room.
The first night, rain tapped against the roof.
Trixie came out holding her blanket.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Too noisy?”
She nodded.
I lifted the blanket.
“Come here.”
She climbed beside me and rested her head against my shoulder.
“Do you like our new house?” she asked.
I looked around the tiny room.
“I think I will.”
“I like the tomatoes.”
“They’re not ours.”
“We can look at them.”
That became our life.
I worked mornings at the dental office and took evening shifts at a bakery three nights a week.
Trixie stayed with my sister when I worked late.
Money was always tight, but I learned how to stretch it.
I bought groceries with coupons.
I patched my shoes instead of replacing them.
I learned which bills could wait three days and which ones could not.
Still, the rent was paid first.
So, on the first of every month, I wrote Mr. Alvarez a check, walked across the yard, and slid it under his back door. That was our whole system.
He never gave me a receipt, and I never asked for one.
Mr. Alvarez kept to himself.
He spent most mornings watering his plants. Sometimes, he fixed things around the property before I even knew they were broken.
Once, he repaired the loose step outside my door.
“You could have told me,” he said.
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“A broken step becomes a broken ankle.”
Another time, he left a bag of oranges outside our door.
Trixie carried it inside.
“Did the orange fairy come?”
“Apparently.”
I suspected Mr. Alvarez, but when I thanked him, he only shrugged.
“Tree made too many.”
The first time I noticed something was wrong was in November, about three months in.
I was doing the thing you do when you’re broke, where you refresh your bank app as if it’s going to reward you for paying attention, when I realized the balance hadn’t moved.
The $800 was still sitting there.
My stomach flipped because my first thought wasn’t “free money.”
It was: “He lost the check, and now I look like a woman who doesn’t pay her rent.”
So I knocked on his back door.
He opened it after a long pause.
“Mr. Alvarez, I think you might have misplaced my check. I can write you another one. It’s no problem. Just tear up the old one if you find it.”
He looked at me for a second too long.
“It’s handled,” he said.
Then he shut the door.
Not rudely. Just… finished.
