Finding Mom

“Is this it?”

Kyra stared out of the car window at the brick facade peeping through the purple bougainvillea. She and her father had had to navigate their way from their apartment in the city and allow their GPS to take over: the freeway’s offramps pointed to one suburb after another…Provintial, Bells Largo, Istel, Pfiner…until they finally approached Telcast. The highly desirable Telcast.

“Your mother would have liked this,” Seton said. “She tried so hard to get one of these places…”

“What was the problem?” Kyra looked quizzically at her dad.

“Long story.”

Seton and Kyra walked up the manicured pathway toward the front door, the leafy branches of the Japanese maple providing some welcome shade as they waited. The neighborhood seemed tranquil with just the distant hum of a lawnmower breaking the heavy afternoon silence. Finally, the door swung open.

“Ah, you’re here!” The man’s cheerful demeanor belied his formal grey suit as he stepped aside to make room for his visitors. “My name’s Ed..and you must be the Oberholzer’s?”

“Yes. I’m Seton and this is my daughter, Kyra. Sorry we’re a bit late but getting out of the city was…”

“No no! You’re fine! So welcome to the neighborhood…Is this your first sub-buy?”

“Yes. My wife tried about ten years ago to buy a place not far from here, but she got outbid, so…”

“Oh my goodness,” the man said with a shudder. “Aren’t you glad we don’t have that anymore? Now instead of dealing with competing bids and trying to come up with a huge down payment, you simply sub-buy! So much better!”

Seton nodded. “Well, I guess we don’t have much choice, right?”

“Your wife couldn’t make it here today?”

“No..she passed some years ago, AC. The Fifth Wave got her, you know?

Kyra turned to her father. “What is AC?”

“After Covid. BC is Before. It’s got to where I can barely remember that that was like,” Seton said ruefully.

Ed turned toward the living room. “Sorry for your loss,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s start with this room and then we’ll work our way through the house.”

The rooms were starkly bare, and a faint odor of cleaning fluids pervaded the area. The uninhabited emptiness of the house prompted Seton to remember, if somewhat dimly, a craftsman cottage that he and his wife had once visited and how the owners had put so much effort into ‘staging’ the rooms with furniture and cushions and candles in an effort to sell their property. Telcast obviously don’t have that challenge, Seton thought. Although they had installed some expensive electrical fixtures…

“I see you have dimmer switches. If those ever go out, do you fix them?”

Ed turned around.

“Oh no!” he said, frowning. “Now I can tell this is your first sub-buy! Telcast does not do anything, see! You have sub-bought the house…that means, you pay us every month and you take care of the maintenance, completely. Otherwise…”

“Wait, we don’t own the house. Why should we take on the burden of paying for maintenance?”

Ed laughed drily. “Because you get to live here and not the city, that’s why. Here, you’re not a tenant…you’re a sub-owner. You pay Telcast for the right to live in this beautiful neighborhood, or you can pay a landlord for an apartment in the city and take your chances with getting one of those bastards to do your crummy maintenance. Take your pick.”

Seton sighed. “Got it. Let’s go and look at the rooms.”

Ed seemed relieved to get that part of the conversation out of the way, and his sunny demeanor returned. “You’ll love the master bedroom! It gets all the morning sun.”

He, Seton, and Kyra meandered through the rooms, although there was very little to distinguish one from the other.

The monotony of the rooms and her father’s propensity to linger and ask questions started to pall on Kyra, who asked if she could go outside and look at the backyard.

“Certainly!” said Ed. Take a look at the shed: our workers engraved a beautiful Telcast logo on it!”

Stepping out into the afternoon warmth, Kyra indeed saw, behind the small square of lawn, the woodshed with the logo. Her childish curiosity led her to open the shed door and peek inside. The air, dark and musty, was redolent with the smell of soil, and there were a few overturned pots lying in the far corner…souvenirs from someone who must have once spent time in the garden. Kyra instinctively moved to turn over the abandoned pots, and as she did so, a bar of sun from the wooden slats caught something metallic inside one of the pots.

“What is this?” Kyra squinted in the darkness to see what was causing the strange glinting in the shed. She reached into the pot and found what seemed to be a necklace…a thin gold necklace with a locket. She held it carefully in her open hand and took it outside to see it more clearly. There she saw, delicately engraved on the locket, the words “Love, Mom”. Something told her that Ed would take the necklace if she revealed to him that she’d found it, so she hurriedly stuffed the piece of jewelry into her pocket and closed the shed door.

She rejoined her father and Ed, who by now was getting his tablet ready for her father to sign the documents.

“Ok, Seton, as we go through this, It is important that you understand the legalities of sub-ownership. As I’ve already explained to you, you are not buying this house. Telcast owns it entirely, as it does every house in this neighborhood. Also, as part of living here, you need to demonstrate your patriotism. Freedom, as you know, is not free: we have to pay to live here in this beautiful country. Telcast demonstrates its allegiance to our very own US of A by contributing to the Republican Party, and we expect as a sub-owner in our neighborhood you will vote accordingly. We can’t have our folks voting one way while we are investing in something different, “Ed chuckled.

“What if I do vote differently?” asked Seton.

“C’mon, Seton! You know the voting records are public. That’s why I’m taking the trouble to explain this all to you. I’d hate for you to violate one of our sub clauses and be tossed out.”

“I can be evicted because of my voting record?”

“It’s for the good of the neighborhood! If you don’t like Telcast, go and live somewhere else…except that the corporations talk to each other, and if you’ve violated the agreement with one, you’re unlikely to be able to sign with another. Only fair. We need sub-owners we can trust.”

Seton gazed at Ed, and then stared at the tablet for a while, as though hoping that he would find a divine oracle within the tablet’s face that would tell him what to do. He looked at his little girl – at her ten-year old freckles and earnest grey eyes – and reached for the stylus.

On their way home, Kyra turned to her dad.

“Dad, remember on our way to Telcast you said something about Mom’s looking for a house as being a long story? What do you mean? What happened?”

“Oh baby, it was such a different time back then. With the pandemic and all…”

“Mom died of Covid when I was a baby, right? What’s that got to do with her not being able to buy a house?”

“Because during Covid, house prices shot through the roof. You’d think that the opposite would be true, what with everyone hunkered down and the economy tanking. Instead, the investors took over and outbid everybody with paying sellers with huge down payments or even cash. Nobody could compete. Your mom got so frustrated…and soon afterwards, she got Covid and..” Seton took a deep breath. “Well, she died and my only concern at that point was taking care of you.”

“And after Covid…AC?” Kyra giggled at her own cleverness.

“The corporations moved in. They bought out the investors and started to work on creating neighborhoods. They figured that they could provide a so-called solution that would enable people like you and me to live in those houses while they stood to make a ton of money.”

“Dad, we don’t have to move to Telcast. We can stay where we are. I didn’t like Ed anyway.”

“It’s not about Ed, sweetheart. It’s about giving you a decent life. I want you to live in a place that has some space and some fresh air.”

Seton and Kyra fell into silence, mesmerized by the sinking sun drooped over the city skyscrapers.

“Dad?” Kyra’s little voice cut into the still air of the car.

“Mmm?”

“When you were with Ed, I found something out in the shed.”

“Yeah? What?”

“It was a necklace...with a locket. It was in an empty garden pot. What was so weird was that it was the only thing I saw in that place that belonged to a human. And it had something engraved on it.”

“What was that?”

“It said ‘Love, Mom’ and…”

“And?”

Kyra grimaced. “I…I kept it.” She reached into her pocket.

Seton glanced at the locket.

LOVE. MOM.

“I think that’s kinda appropriate. It’s yours, “ he said, as he turned off the freeway toward the city.