Breakfast With Charming Read online

  "Excuse me, sir. I'm here to see the house, I am sorry about your problems with paint. Maybe try Home-Depot? I should return another day; you seem quite busy now." She nervously played with her fingers and used her purse as a shield covering her whole torso. She avoided eye contact and stumbled through her words like a little kid.

  "I'm sorry ma'am, the place is not for sell yet. There are still some details to correct. May I ask you how did you find this place? It isn't supposed to be on Craigslist yet."

  Seriously, if this thing is already on the listings, the next weeks are going to be mortal. On one of my first projects the very same thing happened to me, I had already uploaded some of the images of the house to my computer and I was just checking how the add would look when I accidentally clicked "publish". Rule of life: it doesn't matter if it is two in the morning, somebody is going to be surfing the internet for houses and people are going to visit your place listed as for sell as soon as they know about it, even if they are not intending to buy anything.

  "Not at all, I came to visit a house on rent at the end of the street and I saw the 'for sell' post sign lying on the grass. I just thought I could be the lucky girl to get the first tour through the house.” I could see how she gained confidence little by little, her purse rocked to her side and her words came out fluently.

  "Well we don't have tours yet, and I'm sorry about the yelling, it was just me being hangry. Things haven't gone the way I expected lately."

  "For me neither, yet I am not going through life yelling at people. You should really think about how the client is going to feel if you show them that kind of attitude sir". Her confidence was now skyscraper high, she got herself an attitude and her hands which once were fidgeting with the bracelet she wore, were now in her hips, just the same position my mom adopted whenever I did something wrong as a kid. Who is this girl and who does she think she is? I could feel my anger rising from the bottom of my stomach travelling all the way unto my arm and suddenly I wasn’t in control of my body, my fist extended towards the nearest wall and ended up creating a whole in it. Now my neck, arms and knuckles ached, and I had to fix one more thing of the house.

  "Very well, I'm out of here. You should really analyse your violence patterns."

  Is she a psychoanalyser of something like that? I really hate it when people act like that. Haven't they heard about empathy? It was really her who made this disaster. Why is it so easy for this girl to get under my skin?

  "Hey, hey, hey...what's going on here? Why is that girl so mad...is she your ex or something like that?" David said as he approached the entry, the girl was angrily walking away and I could see in each of her footsteps a force I couldn’t even imagine she had.

  "Not at all, I don't think someone would like to have her as a girlfriend. She just came here and started talking about my violence problems and my customer service and then I hit the wall and she left." No one ever pushed my buttons so easily; I usually was a calmed kind of guy and it is really weird for me to get angry. Was it only because of hunger than all of this developed? What had really happened?

  "Okay, why don't you relax a bit and I'll fix the wall and help you with the paint later. Just go get something to eat or take a walk or something." David had never seen me angry before and it is probable the whole in the wall freaked him out because I am not this type of person.

  "You're right, I should eat something. I'll come back in an hour or so." I took my keys and drove to the nearest restaurant; a good hamburger can always transform my mood.

  ∞∞∞

  The parking lot was about to explode with cars, and I knew that it was going to be hard to get the table I like. When I got to the restaurant the place was crowded and there was only one seat left over the bar.

  "I would like to have a cheeseburger and a lemon soda, please." I said to the old waiter who has always worked there.

  "Look who is here, are you following or something?" Little queen of the world was sitting on stool next to mine, I was supposed to get a break from the horrible day, and she appears. Murphy was right when he said things could always get worse.

  "I am not. I only want to eat in peace", why are the pretty girls always so difficult to deal with? It is as if having a symmetrical face somehow gave them the opportunity to treat everyone else as slaves.

  "Maybe you should have found another place to be sited, just so you know I have a boyfriend so don't even try to hit on me."

  "Miss, the place is crowded, and I am not going to move. Please feel safe, I won't even try to talk to you. Talk to the poor guy who stands you enough to be your boyfriend", my meal arrived, and I started thinking about all the progress I had done on the house today. The day hadn't really been so bad.

  ∞∞∞

  I went back to work and saw the wall I had previously pierced once again whole. David started prepping the floor for painting and everything was covered by plastic and painter's tape, I took my paint roller and started my therapeutic painting session. Mango smoothie was a great decision, painting the foyer area and the living room accent wall with that colour automatically filled the house with energy and light. When we had finished it was already late, but we had so much energy we decided to go on to the second floor to start planning the changes that we would have to make.

  "What if we frame the doors, I feel they look cheap right now. We could paint them a dark chestnut colour, frame them and it will really upgrade the room", said David while shutting his eyes as he always did while inspecting new possibilities.

  "That is a good idea, we would also need to replace the door knobs and the closet area needs to be expanded, it is all very crowded", I was trying to figure out how much would it cost expanding the closet area without making the room look smaller. "You know what we could also do in the master bedroom, if we want to expand the closet we could build a wall right here", I said as I walk to the area that I described, "the closet instantly turns into a walk in closet and if we take down this wall and put here panoramic glass walls we would sell the house with a terrace, there would be better lightning and we would have a great view of Ontario landscape at dawn".

  "That is genius, I will call the folding doors guy and hopefully he'll come to take measures tomorrow. So just to go over everything...we are going to buy wood for the door framing, we still have a lot of white paint left so we could use it to dilute the chestnut paint and have the master bedroom painted on a warm palette, we'll have to buy the paint for the doors, the doorknobs, wood for the closet and we are done with this place."

  "That sounds about right, we'll be done in maybe a month and the rest will be just staging the place for visitors and hopefully selling the place when summer ends", my phone started ringing and I remembered why I should have left when we finished painting.

  I was supposed to have dinner with Alice and Mark today, it was something we had been doing almost five years now and I still occasionally forgot about it.

  It is terrible to lose the life as you know it in the blink of an eye. Humans can evolve and it is one of our biggest strengths, but I felt I couldn't. Me and Janeth, we had plans. We knew where we were going to get married and where the honeymoon was going to be and the name of our unborn children. I was the lucky guy who find the woman he would marry at a young age, we did science fair projects together, we went to prom together and we also applied to be together at college. Life was all love and laughter until a guy who drank a little too much decided he could drive.

  I still remember being at the office, just working on some drafts and getting a phone call from Alice, Janeth's mother, “Samuel, you need to come to the hospital right now."

  Janeth had gone to have lunch with some of her friends from high school at a restaurant near my office and afterwards she was going to pick me up and we would have our date night. I took my keys and ran out of the office. I found a colleague outside the building and begged him to lend me his car, I drove as far as I could to the hospital where Janeth's father, Mark worked.

&n
bsp; "I am so sorry dear, Janeth is in coma", Alice who is the strongest woman I've ever met had her eyes filled with tears, but she wouldn't break. I was sure she was telling herself everything was going to be okay. Janeth face was covered by bruises and scratches, but other than that she looked okay. I just hoped that one of the McDoctors my sister loved watching on TV appeared and magically Janeth woke up. Mark was pacing back and forth; the doctors came in and did another test.

  "She is 4 in Glasgow scale, I'm sorry Mark", the neurologist patted Mark's back before writing something in Janeth's chart and leaving as coldly as someone could do when giving such awful news to the patients family. This is why I hated hospitals so much, why is everything cold and white and the AC is always freezing, everything seems so robotic.

  "What does that even mean?" I asked confused about what had just happened.

  "You see Sam, Hollywood doesn't really tell the real story, most people who enter a coma don't get out of it and if they don't score a good Glasgow then it is likely they won't ever recover. A four is a bad number. You may need to start saying your goodbyes…" Mark knew how health work, but I just wished he was remembering this chapter of his med-books wrongly, I hoped that Janeth could beat the odds and magically get better. Everything seemed so surreal. I felt as if the words getting out of his mouth were making pirouettes, they stopped being understandable. I felt as if all the blood in my body fell towards my feet, and if my heart was beating, it didn't feel like it used to.

  Every day after that felt like a nightmare. I went to the hospital feeling drained from my day at work, the bags under my eyes didn’t do anything but grow deeper and bigger inversely proportional to my desire of keeping alive and each day that passed broke me just a little bit more.

  I used to take her hands between mine and whisper all the plans we hadn’t concluded. I talked about the weekend we were planning on New York and even spoiled the secret and told her that if she woke up, we would get married. Everything was already planned, the only thing I didn’t thought about was having to go through this experience.

  I used to comb her hair while telling my nightly prayers, I stayed awake because I know that the moment she woke up, she would feel grateful of having me there. I went to the hospital each day, hoping to see her awake trying to remember what happened, laughing about how going for that lunch wasn’t worth it. I hoped and I wished and nothing at all happened. The days went by and they took the decision to stop prolonging her stay.

  I said goodbye the best I could, but I wasn't even able to see her eyes for one more time, to hear her laugh after one of my silly jokes. Her hands were still cold, but when I touched them, they felt nothing. Her bruises had healed, and she looked better than ever, but inside she was still sleeping. She was just a doll, a lifeless representation of the woman I loved.

  Things got worse with time. Nothing I did felt good and it was as if there was something missing in my life. I struggled to finish drafting the projects that once excited me, I had no ideas, no creativity. It was as if life had vanished with Janeth's death. It was as if the same day played on repeat and everything I did was just part of a routine that was slowly killing my soul. Doing the same things, talking about the same things with the same people, visiting the places Janeth loved so much to see if I could ignite even the tiniest part of my soul with its memory. Yet, nothing happened. I was like a sea shell were once upon a time life existed but now is only a souvenir of adventures that could never be forgotten. I decided to quit my job and try to find something else that could really fulfil me.

  One day I was looking for something to watch on TV when I stumbled upon a house flipping tv show. There were a lot of things that weren't accurate, and I knew because of my experience as an architect that they made everything seem fun and easy to the audience and that on real life it was going to be hard work and sweat.

  I decided to go for it, I took the engagement ring fund and used it to buy a little house. I did some little changes, painted the whole place, cleaned it and sold it with a good profit. I found something I enjoyed, and every day came with different challenges and things to do. I stopped thinking and started doing and life gained momentum, I was going forward and although I still felt sad and angry about everything that happened, at least I was able to find the energy needed to acknowledge those emotions and do something with them.

  I talked to a realtor about becoming a house flipper and she guided me through all the process, I started documenting everything, from the credit I used and the bank that had the lowest interest rates to the pennies I spent on nails. The third house I flipped helped me understand that I could be good with a house flipping business.

  After that my life started getting in shape, I met David and we started flipping houses together. After a couple of projects together we decided to make it a formal business.

  My mom talked me into going to a support group for widows even if legally I wasn't one of them, those Wednesday’s nights slowly helped me heal and I discovered all the things I had done wrongly. I called Alice and ask for forgiveness. She had considered me part of the family for so long and when Janeth died it wasn't only her who left the family but also me. I promised to keep in touch and visit Mark and her for occasional dinners.

  I went to the office to explain to my boss what had happened with me and why I suddenly left with all my projects unfinished. Talking with them about my new projects helped me strengthen my network and get better deals when buying materials.

  I started paying attention to the people around me and I realized that even if I had lost my soul mate, there were many other people concerned by my well-being. I started really paying attention.

  And finally, one of the members of the group, Marilyn, Wednesday by Wednesday, helped me rediscover the love of the one I had unfairly blamed about everything. Letting God enter once again to my heart was what really helped me move forward and find a better and stronger version of my life.

  Slowly I tried to get my life back on track, I started exercising and taking more care of myself, I promised not to let my friends feel alone and at some point I even started feeling happy of the business I had built from scratch.

  Furniture hunting

  Spa day is the best idea ever. I had never been to a spa but now I know why they are so popular. You literally don't have to do anything but relax and take that sweet time to think about whatever.

  Soft music played in the background that transported me to a forest where a river softly travelled through the rocks and the birds were part of an orchestra, the wind wrapped everything in sweetness and played with the water to send a soft breeze of water to the trees who thanked him for giving them water.

  As Leila (the girl who was working on me) extended the cold but refreshing mask around my eyes, I could feel the stress of my week leaving my body, pore by pore. Work didn't matter anymore, not having a decent bed didn't matter anymore, having an empty fridge wasn’t a big deal. All that matter was surrounding myself to the experience of letting someone else take care of me.

  And it felt so nice.

  It felt wonderful knowing that I would be safe and sound, that I didn't carry the weight of the world this time and that maybe I never did. Maybe all my troubles were caused by myself, I bet the Lord didn't expect me to try to micromanage everything. He knows how things are going to play out and He has everything in control, maybe I should trust the course of life and accept the past the way that it is. It has been difficult to live without Brandon, but I think I am pulling it off the best that I can.

  "You know, spa day is heaven-sent. I usually book with Leila but today you stole it from me! But everyone here are finger genius goddess, so I forgive you," said the gorgeous redhead on my right. She had arrived a bit after I did and asked for the complete package.

  "It is actually my first time here, so I was hoping this was a good idea. Best thing I have done since I arrived to the city," my nails were now perfectly manicured, my face felt as soft as baby skin and the hydration was
something my pores were screaming for ever since the flight to Ottawa.

  "Are you here because of business or pleasure? You will adore Ottawa, if you want me to show you around, I'll gladly do it. Today my boys have activities all day long and I really miss talking to adults."

  "More pleasure than business since I am using my pay check to get to know Canada, but I will be working here for three months, I got myself an internship in the Embassy and what I need to find as soon as possible is a nice place to rent. How old are your children?"

  "Both Lucas and Thomas are five, and let me tell you something, having twins is not as fun as everyone tells you! I can't even tell them apart half of the time. Tell me, what is your budget."