Stolen Belonging

The sheriff arrived with the locksmith before nine to change the locks and enforce the eviction order. Eve Weider was chain-smoking Marlboro 100 cigarettes in her kitchen and pacing. She had found an ashtray in the cabinet from the ‘90s, which was the last time Roy had let her smoke in the house. It was ironic that they had paid off the mortgage on the house, but got so far behind on property taxes in the process that they lost a lifetime’s investment anyway.

Roy got the door and was affable as always. “Is it really that time, sheriff?”

“Afraid so,” the man said. “You can gather your things while we change the locks. I’ll give you a few hours, and then we’ve got to escort you out.”

Eve Weider said, “You can go fuck yourself, you know that.” She felt waves of heat in her neck and chest. Her face felt like it was on fire and a bit damp. Maybe it was the menopause. Or maybe, if she was lucky, she thought, she might be having a stroke. She wasn’t.

“Don’t mind her. I’ll talk to her,” Roy said. He turned viciously and gave Eve a gesticulation of open palms as if to say ‘What?”

Nothing much, Eve thought. Just the end of everything they had built together. Eve remembered thinking how clever she was when she had taken the escrow off their mortgage. How she had let those payments get behind while paying down their loan and the children's college tuition bills. And how stupid she felt when the process server showed up with the tax lien lawsuit. She told Roy for months that it must be some kind of mistake by the bank.

* * *

Eve had her brown leather Louis Viton purse, a duffle bag, and about seven suitcases. Roy was in the garage trying to arrange them in the trunk of their Ford Expedition SUV. Roy had one backpack. Everything else had gone into storage with the movers a few days back. But Eve kept finding little pieces of their life here and there that she couldn’t part with.

“Everything is packed up,” Roy said. “We can head out to the motel, and we’ll go out for dinner later tonight.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Eve said.

She went into her bathroom to check that she hadn’t left the curling irons on. It was a habitual compulsion. How many times in her life had she driven back after driving off, just to check the curling irons? This would be the last one. Maybe if she had really forgotten one of those times, all their troubles would have been avoided.

Walking into the empty bathroom, it was confirmed. She had packed everything. Including the curling irons. The place wouldn’t go up in flames. But what if it did?

That was the first time Eve thought of what it would look like if the house went up in flames. She imagined a curl of red and yellow flame shooting up from the charred faux marble laminate. She pictured the wall igniting, the vanity mirror blistering, walls of flames, and heavy gray smoke consuming everything. This was the place she had sat with her mother on the morning of their wedding and prepared herself for the special day. The place that held the prologues of so many other special days.

“Be right there,” she yelled down to Roy.

Eve was transported back to the day they first crossed the threshold. Roy had fumbled with the unfamiliar door lock but had managed to pick her up in his arms and carry her over, nearly throwing out his back. They had cracked a cheap bottle of wine and ordered a pizza, which they ate on the countertop in the kitchen. They had danced to an old handheld radio, beginning a new life together. Roy was waiting in the garage, where he was idling the engine, anxious to leave. For the last time.

Roy had been a young car salesman working at BMW and Eve had been a medical assistant at Holy Name. Nearly three decades later, their son Charles was working in finance in California and deeply ashamed of what he knew of his parents' troubles, and their daughter Carla was finishing school at Kean University and ready to go to work at a Social Media Marketing Firm in New York City. They both had promised to come home for Christmas. Eve didn’t have the heart to come clean about the house and had said they’d all meet for a dinner out in New York City instead.

As they pulled out of the driveway for the last time, Eve scoffed at the wet cement still drying and cordoned off with cones, right in front of the home they had lost. Apparently, the town's public works budget could survive the unpaid property taxes from one struggling couple after all.

* * *

It was dark by the time that Eve Weider broke into her home of nearly thirty years. Roy was sleeping off the four whiskey sours he had with dinner. She waited to make sure he was asleep in the disgusting motel twin bed before kissing him on the forehead, leaving, and driving the SUV back to the house. She checked her purse. She had the matches, the lighter fluid, and a steak knife.

She and Roy had closed the title and moved in the month after they’d married. Furnishing the home was a priority and weekend or nighttime trips to Bob’s Furniture Outlet had been a regular activity for the newlyweds. Then it was landscaping. After that, remodeling of the kitchen and bath. And on and on. In a way, she thought, the home itself was like a monument of their marriage.

There were two locked U-Haul trucks on the curb. A lifetime of belongings split between them. More out on the lawn.

She was surprised at how easily the crowbar cracked the rotting wood of the doorframe. Back in the vanity by the master bedroom, she covered the faux marble laminate in lighter fluid. Then she lit a single match and watched as the wallpaper peeled in the flames before she went to the bed. She waited for a few moments until curls of noxious smoke flooded her bedroom. Then she took the knife and thrust it into her chest four times as deep as she could manage, blood pooling over her blouse and warmth leaving her chest.

A tear ran down her cheek as she gasped and inhaled a mouthful of blood-tasting smoke—it was the last breath she took before waking up in Holy Name Hospital.

Her nosy neighbor Louise had seen her break and enter and called the police the second the fire became visible in the bedroom, through the open bedroom windows. Apparently, her knife thrusts felt deeper than they actually were.

In her last thoughts before passing out, Eve had fixated on the stolen belonging they had taken from her, and a smile had crossed her lips that she might have stolen back what was hers in the end.

When the firefighters arrived, they found carved into the wet newly laid town sidewalk in front of her drive the words, “EVE WEIDER LIVED HERE 1995-2023.”