Free Glass House by Patrick Reinken

where Illinois Street met Sixth. Broken stairs led from
the screened front porch to the cracked and rarely used sidewalk
that ran along the road. The stairs separated two ragged halves of
overgrown, dying lawn and three massive black walnut trees that
were dense enough to have killed the grass off entirely in patches
beneath their branches.
    The house was a Vallonia. A Sears, Roebuck,
Modern Home Number 3049, straight from the 1921 catalog, purchased
for $1,870 in a pre-fab kit. Ben had found the original paperwork
while rummaging in the attic. Megan came across him there one
afternoon, dirty from his knees to his chin, his hair a tangle and
his soft smile on his face. The sun was a cotton ball glow through
a cloudy window, its light picking out the attic’s floating dust
and falling on Ben, who held the catalog out to her. They shared a
chuckle about his grandmother’s businesslike drive to get a home
that she could pass down through her family.
    She’d actually managed that passage not
quite three years ago. The lawyer reading her will after the
funeral surprised the gathered family of mother, son, and
daughter-in-law, telling them the Vallonia was going to Ben and
Megan. Ben’s mom had smiled the same soft smile that Ben showed in
the attic. She’d patted a knee of each as they sat on either side
of her, and she announced with a tear that it was just perfect that
way.
    Ben’s mom died about a year after that. She
was sixty-three and a smoker, two packs a day at the peaks and one
pack easy, even in the valleys. She had pulmonary hypertension and
borderline emphysema, the yellowy skin and watery eyes of nicotine,
and a heart that, if anyone ever got a chance to listen to it,
probably would have screamed its weakness long before she tipped
gently forward over her book during a late night of reading.
    They buried her next to her mother. Coming
only a dozen months apart, the funerals matched down to the
tombstones. And in another twelve, Ben got the same. A year after
they moved into the Vallonia together, the house had passed to
Megan alone.
    Like all the houses in the neighborhood, the
entrance everyone used was in the back, off the alley. It didn’t
come in the original plan, but someone added a porch there at some
point. Like the one in front, the back porch was shielded with a
heavy, black-painted and countless-times-patched yardage of
screening. Thick gray paint on the porch boards. Two chairs, one
metal and the other a rocker needing repair. A bare yellow bug bulb
lit it all with a fakeness that made Megan cringe when it caught
her eye as she came popping up the graveled alley in the
Chrysler.
    She pushed the garage door opener clipped to
the visor and waited as the door lifted. It creaked, she gave it a
second to collapse if it was going to, then she drove in and
thumbed the button shifter to park.
    Attached garages didn’t exist for houses
bought as kits from 1921 Sears, Roebuck catalogs. The garage was
separate and a dozen yards over. It was built there sometime after
the house, no doubt with another kit Ben’s grandmother saved to
buy. A dotted line of divided sidewalk slabs, grass between them,
marked a path between the two buildings.
    Megan slung her briefcase, heavy with
papers, over her shoulder. She collected a box from the trunk and
strode toward the steps.
    She balanced the box on an uplifted knee as
she opened the screen door. It was hung on a spring, and she
squeaked in as the door slammed behind her. She repeated the box
balancing and the careful opening for the house door, then set
everything inside the kitchen. She turned the porch’s bug light off
and closed the door.
    The kitchen was long past its original
color. Back when she once gave it thought, she supposed the paint
originally was a pleasant pale blue or buttery yellow. But she’d
never dug deep enough through the layers to get to the bottom. She
and Ben had attacked it when it still showed the sickly key lime
green they’d always known