I am the Skeleton in the Closet

Inheritance and What Not to do with it

Soon enough, my new SUV started dying. They cylinder head gasket had blown, typical for that vehicle, and now the engine compartment was pressurizing to overheating every time I drove it. Every few minutes when I was driving, I'd have to pull over and decompress it by ever so slightly unwinding the coolant cap until a burst of steam and coolant flowed through. I'd have to keep a spare shirt or rag in the car so that I could decompress it without burning myself. I would go through roughly a jug of coolant a week just to keep it filled.

At one point I took it to a shop and they told me it would be around two thousand dollars to fix. I had PLPD insurance so it wasn't like I was going to be reimbursed for anything. I was done getting old used cars, but I had always been a little against leases since I wanted to own my car and if anything happened to it I didn't want to have to get it fixed on a specific time frame; but I had been backed into a corner. I went to the closest dealership one gorgeous day in the summer.

I had a car already on my mind. I liked the idea of an SUV but also I didn't want the lower MPG that most of those had. Austin and I had a thing with our cars. He always had the small car and I always had an SUV of sorts. It helped us in situations where we had an unexpected large purchase we needed to transport like when Austin decided to get a safe because his new room mate was stealing from him.

I strode into the dealership that day. I had made an appointment with one of the dealers and asked for a test drive. He had the staff pull up a black SUV to the door for me to test drive. Getting in it, it was a tad smaller than it looked on the outside. The engine was much louder than I had originally anticipated, it scared me when I accelerated through downtown clarkston and onto the highway just by how loud it really was. I pulled into Austin's driveway and popped the hood. It was a beautiful engine block, new, the sun glinted off as if it were made of sterling silver.

Steven, being an employee of one of the major car companies, got a discount that a piece of paper allowed to me to also get through him. So instead of leasing it for a bit over three hundred dollars I'd be leasing it for just over one hundred. The only catch was that I needed a cosigner. The obvious choice would have been Austin; but neither of us were ready for that commitment, we'd been dating maybe a little over a year now. Not an amount of time that we were willing to bet a car lease on. For all he knew I could break up with him, or vise versa, within the next two years and totally tank both of our credits by not keeping up with payments. Just so happened that Dawn started texting me while I was at the dealership. I was in no position, or hurry, to ask for favors from either Dawn or Steven; but I needed a car. So I asked her if she'd cosign. After a little bit of a fight she accepted. She was worried that I wouldn't pay on time all the time; but I wasn't Alex. So within a few hours I was leaving the building with a brand new car. I couldn't have been happier.

That was when I found out what Gabe had done. I guess when I had left for college at some point he had gotten his hands on Steven's credit card. He spent a few grand on it within a night. A few months after this all went down he got his inheritance. See I had been brought into a long line of successful families. On Dawn's side I had a well established farmer for a long deceased grandfather, and on Steven's side I had an industrial worker who had participated in the war. I'm not sure what my grandma on that side had done, Steven had never particularly gotten along with either of his parents, but I knew that she had money.

When I knew them they lived in a gated community. Each of the houses was about the same with different plants in the garden and each had a rather small backyard. The pale blue houses bumped up next to each other with barely ten feet between on the sides and another ten in back. They each had a garage out the front big enough for two cars. Through the garage was the laundry room and bathroom, from there a full kitchen and walk in pantry, an island separated the kitchen from the dining room. Past that was the TV room. Entering through the front door emptied you out into the foyer and to the left my grandad's study. Dead ahead was a sitting room that held all of my grandma's knick knacks. She always loved crystal figurines and russian nesting dolls. She had at least five cases filled with them. Some of the nesting dolls were even made of crystal. To the right of that was the main and guest bedrooms with another full bathroom. Finally the last, and my favourite room of the house, was the sun room. They lived in South Carolina so they didn't much have to deal with winter. This room was made of windows. There was a white french door lined with a grid of windows that opened to the back yard. The doors were shrouded in delicate thin white curtains that glowed in the light through the windows. She had a number of plants in here as well that sat in front of the panes and on various victorian style white painted wire shelves that almost blended into the cream colored walls. She had a futon in here also that had the same white metal frame with a green and orange randomly striped case around it.