Is Anybody Home?

I stood on the sidewalk for a full two minutes, alternately checking my phone on and off to see if he'd responded yet. I had nothing. Not one response from him and I wasn't particularly fancying going up and knocking on his door.

Every single year that I spent going to Phineas College I lived in this very house so the house itself is quite familiar to me. I can remember all of the creaks and all of the quirks of it. I know my way around all the twists and turns, just as surely as I do my old apartment.

What I don't know is him.

Lucas Powell is a bit of a mystery to me. He was an old friend of my fathers who my father never truly approved of but had, I suspect, a begrudging respect for. Lucas had been kind when he let me stay in his spare room and decent enough while I'd been here but we had, for the most part, been alike to two ships in the night.

You see around the back of the house there is a stairway that leads up to the attic door and during my stay here I'd gone in and out through that. In that room, in my room, I had a little hotplate and a mini fridge and that and the restaurants and cafeterias on campus had been the primary way that I'd fed myself. I shared a bathroom with him on the top floor, but with him being retired and fond of travelling and me being a shut-in who was concentrating on school, our schedules synced up so perfectly that I didn't have to ever really worry about running into him.

I think I could literally count all of the times I'd spoken to him on all my fingers and toes, our relationship had always been that perfect kind of distant.

And that made a bit of sense. Mr. Powell might not have stayed in the country but I’d always gotten the impression he was the sort who still had country sensibilities. From my understanding he'd moved to the city and taken on some kind of physical job after higher education, some kind of construction I think, and then had parlayed that into a higher and higher position so that his salary kept on growing.

And he was smart enough to live frugal and to invest wisely I guess, because he retired younger than any old farmer ever could, not that farmers really retire they usually just kind of stop one day. But he bought this house and had a nice enough little nest egg that he managed to fulfill his true passion of traveling the world in his spare time.

Or that was the narrative I wrote about him in my head at least.

Because I based all of that around the objects in his home, the pictures and the statues and the art from all across the world. All of it carefully cultivated and all of it from everywhere such that there was no mistaking that he'd been all over the globe.

But he didn't tell me anything to confirm my suspicions. For all I know he could have bought it all from an auction somewhere or got it from the internet. I had no idea, because beyond a half-hearted 'hey, how's it going' I'd never had a full conversation with him.

And I hardly thought that counted.

So I stand now, out on the sidewalk, waiting for some indication that he's home. I don't walk up and ring the bell or knock on the door because in spite of the fact that I'd lived here the whole time I'd been in college he was still a stranger to me. And I don't know what to do or what I expect. I don't know how in the hell this version of my life is going to get any stranger but knowing my luck it absolutely will.

Mr. Powell clearly thought I was a weird kid the first time around. What was he going to think of me now?

I shuffled my weight from side to side, pulling out my phone once more and checking it. We had read receipts on the phone so clearly he'd gotten my message but why hadn't he responded. Why hadn't he even tried to respond and delete something. Why couldn't I just be fucking normal and buck up and do something for once and why did my broken brain have to pump all of the worst case scenarios into my head.

And why... Why for the love of god... Why did that woman have to fucking do this to me?

I wanted a second chance and I got it, but god this was not what I was expecting.

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