Design Flaw?

So now this social distancing business will endure through April 30, we’re told. Might last longer than that. Darker rumors swirl. I understand it, the medical necessity of it, but I sure hope that the cure doesn’t end up being worse than the disease. But that is a problem for people far above my pay grade. I can only keep my hands busy with the task in front of me. In the meantime, I have a bone to pick with the Creator of the Universe, to wit...

What the heck is the meaning of this?? Every year its the same thing. It has literally been over two months since every other leafy tree has shed its leaves. It’s always these pathetic spindly oaks that hold out. The bottom branches hold on to their ugly, shriveled brown leaves like Scrooge McDuck holds on to his money. You cut your grass, it looks beautiful for less than 24 hours, then you wake up and the entire yard is covered with crunchy dead leaves and yet there are still more clinging to the tree. I mean, I hate to second guess the Almighty but doesn’t this qualify as a design flaw? More importantly, why does this irritate me so? Am I the only one who is disturbed by this phenomenon? Probably. 

7

Kevin parallel parked his Toyota Camry into the space on Miller Street directly in front of his townhouse with the practiced skill of someone who had lived downtown his entire adult life. The kind of money he was making meant he could live anywhere, but Kevin Rigsby wasn’t fond of change, so he still lived in the same townhouse he had rented with three others guys for three of the six years it took him to graduate from college. Once his buddies had all moved out, he had approached the landlord with an offer to buy the place, an idea which practically everyone he knew, especially his sister, had thought idiotic. Why in God’s name would you want to live in the same place you lived with three slobs from college? everyone had asked. It’s going to cost you at least ten grand to fumigate the place! But Kevin was persistent and finally prevailed with the landlord. And even Liz had to admit that once the place was his, he fixed it up quite nicely. But all the upgrades in the world wouldn’t change the fact that it was an old building in a sketchy part of town. 

During her first visit after Kevin finished the renovations, Liz had been shocked at what he had done to the place, knocking out almost every separating wall on the main floor to form one giant room that contained his kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom, all in one open space. There were no doors anywhere except the one that closed off the bathroom, thank God, she had thought during the tour. The other two floors of the house were virtually uninhabitable save for one guest room he had minimally appointed with a water bed, one yardsale night stand, and a flimsy chest of drawers from a thrift store down the street. All the other rooms functioned essentially as storage for all the minutiae he had accumulated over the quarter century of his life. Liz had noticed that no photographs or artwork adorned any of the walls. She added this troubling oddity to her long list of worries about her brother.

Kevin had been a computer geek since he was old enough to know what a computer and a geek were, and it started to pay off during his otherwise unfortunate college experience. He began making money buying and selling junk online, then discovered web design almost by accident when he stumbled into a chatroom of like-minded geeks. One thing led to another, and suddenly he found himself making six figures as a freelance web designer—work he realized could be done from anywhere with an Internet connection. But once Kevin finally earned his degree, he decided to stay put in Lexington. Within six months most of his college friends had moved away, and his family had begun incessantly badgering him to move back to Virginia. He had countered with the perfectly reasonable argument that he was making plenty of money, so he could fly home as often as he liked. Why, therefore, should he upend everything familiar to move back someplace he hadn’t lived in over six years? His parents had eventually stopped their pleadings, but his sister had persisted unrelentingly. He had finally slowed her advance with, Okay, sis—I’ll move back when you move back.

Kevin threw his jacket on the arm of the sofa, passing his unmade bed on the way to the kitchen. He made a quick stop at his desk, positioned to look out over the street. To the casual observer, this setup looked like the secure location of some rogue CIA operation, with three big screens, two keyboards, and a host of metal storage containers stacked randomly on the expansive work surface. He tapped out a series of letters and numbers on one of the keyboards, then walked back towards the kitchen. By the time he had twisted the top off his beer, the aggrieved voice of Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers filled his house with the travails of unrequited love.

He sat down at his desk and saw fifty unread email messages, all less than a day old. He marked the important ones to read later, picked up his cell phone and checked for texts from Angela. There were at least a dozen. In the minds of most, particularly Liz, Angela would technically qualify as his girlfriend. They had been seeing each other for several months, getting along reasonably well and enjoying each other’s company. But Kevin had no intention of informing Liz until he was absolutely sure it was an actual relationship, and with each passing day, she was beginning to annoy him more and more. It was mostly little things: the incessant texting, her inability to resist picking up after him around the house, her relentless optimism. But she was beautiful and engaging—a combination Kevin had thought himself unable to hope for in one person. Half the time he couldn’t believe his luck. He felt like the beneficiary of some grand cosmic mistake, and soon God would stop being distracted by man’s inhumanity long enough to realize his error, and she would be gone.

Although he would never admit it to anyone, Kevin had turned into a Facebook junkie. He had resisted the siren call of most social media platforms but found himself opening a Facebook account to learn as much as he could about Angela. She was a huge fan and had insisted that he would love it if he gave it a try. She had been right. He now opened his page and began browsing through his notifications. As usual, Angela dominated. Here was a picture she had posted of the two of them having drinks at O’Toole’s, and there she was commenting on something he had posted a few days ago. He looked at the smiling face of her profile picture. God, she was beautiful!

He had met her on one of the worst nights of his life. He had just flown back into town after the worst Christmas imaginable. His dad had been a complete mess. Liz and David were overcompensating with forced cheerfulness. It had been a dark, emotionally menacing week, even worse than September. At least then everyone was free to fall apart. Three months later at Christmas, nobody knew how to breathe around each other. Kevin had felt powerless and inadequate as both a son and a brother. When he landed back in Lexington, it dawned on him that it was almost New Year’s Eve, his lifelong least favorite day of the year. After this realization, he had driven straight to O’Toole’s to drink, the prospect of going back to his empty house seemed out of the question.

He saw her the minute he walked in. She was sitting in a booth with two other girls—two of the most plain, featureless females he had ever seen. Angela’s striking beauty seemed magnified by the proximity. He felt a bit guilty for thinking such thoughts. He was sure that these two girls were perfectly lovely human beings, and to punish them for not measuring up to this Hollywood angel was misogyny at its most piggish. Still . . . he settled in a booth across the aisle and tried not to stare. After an hour or so and several strong drinks, the girls looked close to calling it a night. Kevin had watched them walking toward the door, Angela hugging each of them and sending them on their way, then looked on in amazement as this stunning woman glided across the aisle to his booth, dropping herself in the seat across from him.

“Hello, I’m Angela . . . and you have been checking me out for over an hour now. Is there anything I can help you with?”

Kevin had actually started to feel drunk, but her miraculous appearance in his lonely booth sobered him up like a gallon of black coffee. 

“No, actually, I haven’t been checking you out for the past hour,” he had managed to say. “But, your two friends? Now, I have to admit . . . I might have been checking them out a little.”

It had been the most out-of-character, incongruous sentence he had ever spoken. Angela’s face had gone blank, as if she couldn’t believe what he had just said to her. For a moment, Kevin wasn’t sure whether she might suddenly slap him. But then, almost magically, her face relit with radiance, and she burst out laughing. Two hours later, he had a date for New Years. 

The problem with Angela was simple enough: he didn’t deserve her. Here was this beautiful, smart, well-adjusted woman with a promising future and a shining personality, free from any of the creeping darkness of his own. What did she possibly see in him? One night, he had asked.

“Well, for one thing, you’re adorable. But I guess what keeps me coming back is . . .”. She had paused dramatically, choosing her words with great care. “. . . I think you need me.”

“So, you’re saying I’m needy?”

“Well, maybe. Ha! I know that’s usually a negative thing, but from the first time I saw you at O’Toole’s, you looked a bit lost . . . adorable, but lost.”

Kevin had quickly changed the subject, worried that if they continued with this sort of examination, Angela might discover just how right she was. He had told her nothing about his family, but with each passing day the subject was becoming harder and harder to stonewall.

He flipped through her texts and read the last one: We need to talk. Then one from Liz: You see that email from Dad? We need to talk.

Kevin rubbed his unshaven face in his hands. The two most consequential women in his life both needed to have a word with him. Great.