By Saturday morning, I was standing in the front yard wondering why anyone had ever convinced me homeownership sounded relaxing.
The lawn looked like it had given up weeks earlier. Grass brushed against my ankles. Weeds pushed straight through the flower beds. Whoever owned the place before me had clearly stopped caring long before they put it up for sale.
I’d just hauled another box inside when somebody knocked at the front door.
A teenage boy stood on the porch, one hand resting on the handle of a beat-up red push mower with chipped paint and a front wheel that leaned slightly off-center. He looked about fifteen. His baseball cap had faded from years in the sun, and his sneakers had been patched so many times I honestly couldn’t guess what color they’d started out as.
“You the new owner?” he asked.
“I am.”
Instead of answering right away, he looked past me at the house — not a quick glance, but a real study of it. His eyes drifted from the front porch up to the second-floor windows, then settled on the detached garage sitting behind the house. He held there a beat longer than everywhere else.
A faint smile crossed his face. “Good,” he said quietly. “I was hoping somebody would finally move in.”
