They lived opposite each other, on Albemarle Street, they hadn’t gotten along for the last two years, and the son-in-law knew it, the old man was moving away, away from everything. Often the old man’s daughter would walk across her patio, not saying a word on her way to the bar across the alley. Her husband, Mike, worked at the bar from time to time. John and his wife moved into the house with Jean Lee; they worked for the old man for a few years, often taking what they could in merchandise, and John overcharging the old man for much of the work he did on his rental property, he was for a long period his manager of sorts (the old man he gave him free rent, electricity, water, everything was paid plus a salary); However, knowing that the old man was sick and had no one else to trust, he would take advantage of him, along with Mike and Jean Lee’s blessings. Then one day, he confronted the old man, and when he discovered that life wasn’t so sweet by himself, he tried to get his old job back, but the old man wouldn’t accommodate him.
Mike wasn’t much of a helper, you could tell, though he got a reduced rent from living in one of the old man’s houses for years and he and his wife got a paycheck, working for his father-in-law he would create jobs with John. robbing the old man when he could, he even told the inspectors that they would check the old man’s houses, to convict them, when he saw something wrong, something that he should, or John, had taken care of the old man. Also, Mike would spread gossip to the neighbors that his mother-in-law was nothing but a child, and he would pile on lie after lie, to the point of annoying the neighbors, but for some reason, the neighbors wanted to believe the ogre.
But this isn’t where the story begins, it’s just the backstory to a short story that sadly took place, and never should have, but too often it doesn’t nowadays, too often it does, with kids badmouthing their parents, or in-laws, those who feed you. In any case, Janet, her neighbor, now disliked the old man, whom she once cared for, if not respected. But then again, this is not where it all started, it started the day the old man sent a letter to her daughter, the one who wouldn’t speak to him because of a proud and greedy husband, the husband who grabbed him eighteen months before . , and he tried to break his ribs with a bear hug because he told him to fix the kitchen floor at one of the several rental properties he’d worked on and he did it wrong, the old man was a hundred and seventy pounds, the son- father-in-law, a few hundred pounds heavier and a few inches taller, survived that, of course, and when the husband was told to leave, he whispered, “You’ll never see your two grandsons again” (ah, poor Willie and Keith) and he would try to keep his word, because every time the children saw the old man sitting on his steps, or on the porch, and walked by, if the children looked at their grandfather, the husband would slap them on the head, ” Turn around, don’t look…!” he would tell the children. And they continued.
But like I said, it all started with a letter that the old man sent, saying in essence that he was moving far, far away (without elaborating), but that he was having a hard time staying where he was and not being tied down. to abuse by her daughter and her husband. So he gave her the remaining photos he had of them and her birth certificate, along with other items he had been saving for her. She never returned a response to the letter, although a response was not requested.
And then what happened was this:
It was the winter of 2004 that the old man had sent the letter, indicating that he was leaving, and would never return, it would be in March 2005, he would leave, although Mike and his wife did not know the exact date. Therefore, Mike talked to John and said, “I’ll never get a dime from him, he’ll spend it all now…!” For some strange reason, John came and told the old man this, but he just smiled and walked away. However, John and Mike were worried. The old man, according to them, had a lot of money, and he was selling all his rental goods, one after another, and they saw this, they also say that the old man’s brother was going back and forth with people buying things in the house, so they had to make their move, if they were really going to. So they devised a plan, and they would carry it out.
It was 2:00 am when the old man and his wife went to sleep. Janet was looking from the window next door, she called out to Mike and said, “Okay, just turn off the lights…!” And John and Mike got out of bed, got dressed, their wives still asleep and the kids, and then they walked across the street to the old man’s house. Mike still had the keys to the old man’s garage (and maybe John did too), and he thought one of his former residents would be blamed for what was about to happen, but the resident was now in prison, so he would remove him from the list of suspects. In any case, John and Mike opened the garage door, a double garage, Mike thought, it was now or never, Janet watched and considered somehow it could be implemented, besides, she didn’t want her property to be destroyed along with the old man.
Mike walked through the garage, gathered up some wood, some brooms, papers, and other flammable things, gathered them together, poured gas on them, then poured gas from where these items were (John watching, leaving his footprints in the snow, waiting for light the chamber did not light), to the car in the next compartment, lit the fire, and smoke came out of the low flames, to the point that they had to leave the garage early or be absorbed by them; soon, the fire would surely burn down the wooden cabinet next to it, and then, being attached to the house, it would burn the whole place down in a matter of minutes, it just needed to burst into flames more.
During this time, smoke seeped through the metal door, into the pantry and kitchen, and a little around the corner of the old man’s room, where the door was closed. (If the old man hadn’t had a metal door instead of the old wooden door by the garage, he would have already allowed a lot more smoke into the house, since it had been at least ten minutes since smoke had been infesting the garage. .) circling around them, and Mike and John left the garage, went back to their house across the street, and went to bed, as if nothing had happened.
The old man was sound asleep, and his wife, a few years younger, heard a voice, which resembled her mother-in-law’s, Elsie’s voice: “Ros-a!…Ros-a!” And he woke up to find out who he was, because Elsie had been dead for four months. When she opened the door, the smoke nearly suffocated her, engulfing her, but not to the point of subduing her. She reached for the fire, called out to her husband, “Fire… fire…!” But where she was, I mean the smoke was there almost everywhere, and her husband, half dazed, sick, said “Check the garage”, and she did, and there in the garage, it was much worse than in the house . She then ran back into the house, grabbed a wet towel and covered the small fire, and opened the garage door, at which point the old man came into the garage coughing (and counting his blessings).
If they hadn’t stopped the fire, when they did, as the Captain of the Fire Department would later say, “The way the fire was placed against the cabinet, the whole house would have gone up in flames once the flames got up, and you with him!”
And so I leave the good reader with this: beware of those whom you try to love to death, because often they are the ones who wish in their hearts to harm you. Because what comes out of their actions and mouths is from their hearts.
Note: Written on 10-22-2007
