The Apartment Complex

The day I turned 22 was the worst day of my life.

I was graduating from college that day. I worked my ass off to get out of that university in four years. Unfortunately my advisor was a twat, and she didn't tell me that there is no future and having a double major in a dead language and in history. The morning I graduated, I received a letter from where I was supposed to do my internship saying that due to budget cuts they can no longer afford to have me. That meant no grad school, that meant no future.

I was pissed.

To top that off, my parents didn't make it to my graduation. No phone calls, no texts, no responses to the messages I sent. I was crushed.

So I went through graduation, I was handed my $60, 000 piece of paper, and I was immediately going through the backlog of jobs in my mind that I could try to get on with after the internship scrubbed me out. I got back to my apartment, which it all been packed away so that I could at home for a couple of weeks before striking out on my own, and there was a cop there waiting for me.

He was nervous, and my brain went into overdrive wondering if this was the reason that Mom and Dad didn't get a hold of me, that something had happened. That's what he told me the absolute worst news; my mom and dad and uncle had been involved in a horrible accident at my parents's house. the fire marshal was still trying to figure out what was going on but it seems like all three of them had died in a house fire overnight.

I was shattered.

The next few days were an absolute blur. Lawyers, police, and reporters all wanted to talk to me about what happened. The fire marshal concluded it was an accident, something to do with the electrical system shorting out. The insurance company handed me a check, mom and dad's friends offered sympathy, casseroles, and money to help with the funeral arrangements. None of it helped the spot I was in. It was dark, and I was alone.

My dad was an only child, my mom just had her brother who died in the house with them. My uncle didn't have any kids and was single, which was weird because he was a good-looking guy. All four of my grandparents had died a few years previous. I was out of family, and one of my friends offered sympathies they were already off on their own starting new lives after college.

A week after the funerals things really hit hard. I was trying to pull it together and I was doing okay, but I was worried the saying near all of this was going to have a bad impact on me. That's when my uncle's lawyer called. It seems that with me being his only family he, along with my parents, and left everything to me.

Everything my parents had burned up in the fire, but there was plenty of money tied up in retirement accounts. My uncle on the other hand, owned an apartment building in Cherry Hill. Suddenly, I owned an apartment building in Cherry Hill. Sixteen units that we're all bringing in 700 a month, and the taxes on the place was only $3, 000 a year. my uncle always kept the place kept up nice, and with that kind of income rolling in that was pretty easy to do.

I packed up what little I had left into my uncle's Denali, and the next morning, I was taking the 12-hour drive to Cherry Hill to start a new life it had nothing to do with ancient Greek or anything I studied for for the last 4 years of my life.