No light came through his window, and his only indicator of the morning was the electric alarm clock that sat next to his bed. He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
He could stay in bed, call in sick. The guys at the rest stop would be surprised, and probably worried. A man his age, people start to look at sick days as a sign of foreboding death rather than initially trying to skip work.
But Walter had never missed a day of work in almost forty years, and this day wasn’t going to be any different. Besides, once you start to stay in bed too much, it gets harder and harder each day to get out of it.
A few things cracked as he sat up in his bed, but that was to be expected with someone his age. He put his feet down onto the wooden floor.
He had built that floor almost seventeen years ago. He knew that it needed to be replaced, perhaps with some of that fancy locking floating vinyl tiles or whatever the hell it was the people still went to Lowes for. Last time he went into Lowes, he had been so overwhelmed that he hadn’t gone back. Everything was so loud, and people wanted to try and sell you stuff, continually asking if you need any help, or this or that. It made him sick. If he was going to redo his floor, then he would do it himself!
But he wouldn’t be able to do it himself.
Although he wasn’t, in his mind, a senior yet, not by a long shot, he wasn’t as young and useful as he had been when he first put the floor in. He would have to get help, and once he did that, there would be questions, or if not questions, then perhaps people mildly keeping their odd thoughts to themselves, the way that their mothers had taught them to do and such. People wouldn’t outright call him incapable, but their faces would tell the story for them.
Besides, Walter didn’t like anyone else in his home.
So when he put his feet down onto the wooden floor, the insulation long gone and the boards themselves starting to give, he almost had a heart attack from the chill.
“Have to get a rug or something,” Walter said out loud, his voice sounding very loud in his house. He found his slippers, the same pair that he had owned for close to a decade, put them on, and then walked over to the bathroom.
Well, it looked like no, he hadn’t grown younger in the night.
His hair was still grey, though, so that was something. Hell, everyone in his family had been early “grayers.” His mother even had grey hair in her twenties. It was a genetic thing and not an indicator of age. The day he saw white hair starting to sprout upon his head, he would no longer be the early grayer.
He’d be old in a way he could no longer lie about.
Jack and Annabelle might have ended up as “grayers,” but Walter didn’t need to think about that. He wouldn’t have been able to check. He wouldn’t have been able to know if Jack had inherited his father’s love of baseball, or if Annabelle had wanted to try her turn at softball.
Walter found himself not liking the person looking at him from the mirror.
He walked out of the bathroom and into the main room.
The Davis house was a small one, but compared to where Walter had grown up, the house was a godsend. It was one story, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. They had a cellar, and their attic was always to become a new storage lodge if they needed the space once the kids grew up. They had also talked about trying to build on another room, one for either Jack or Anabelle. It was all right for the twins to share a place when they were younger, but once puberty started, no one thought it would be a good idea for them to share anymore.
Neither Walter nor Beth had planned on having more than one child. They didn’t have the money or time. Also, there was a fear of responsibility that plagued many people who were hippies in the sixties. Coming from families with five or seven children, they had seen what it could do to a person and would much rather prefer to have a small household.
Now, if they did happen to have another child by mistake (neither one of them were perfect), they, of course, would raise the second, or God help them, the third child.
But when they had originality set out with the intentions of making a child, they had only intended it to be a single one.
Well, three months later, they were informed that they were not going to have one child, but a pair, Jack and Annabelle. The guest room was transformed into the nursery, and then the kids’ room.
No one had been in there in twenty or so years.
Walter walked over to the coffee pot and turned it on. The TV kept playing ads for this thing called a Keurig, which sounded like the stupidest thing in the world to Walter. There wasn’t anything wrong with a good old-fashioned coffee pot, and Walter intended to stick to tradition. He started up a batch, a small one since this coffee was going to go with his breakfast. When he set out to work, he’d pick up a light roast or something from Stewarts, to which he would drink throughout the day since he was old and the old like to take things slow.
“Especially dying,” he said, chuckling a little. He took out a few eggs and made himself breakfast.
Now, years prior, he might have made a few links of sausage with the eggs or even a few strips of bacon. But his doctor had been all over his ass of late to try and get his
