Dad left a simple will, drawn up years earlier by a lawyer in Grove City. Everything was to be divided equally between his two sons.
There wasn’t much. There was a checking account with about $11,000 in it, most of which went to the funeral home. There was a $25,000 life insurance policy through the plumbers’ union, which we split evenly. There was his old blue truck, which Travis took because, as he put it, “You’ve already got a car.” And there was the house.
It was a three-bedroom brick ranch on a quiet street outside Columbus, with a detached garage, a chain-link fence, and a vegetable garden in the backyard where Dad grew tomatoes every summer. He and my mother bought it in 1994 for $87,000. When they divorced in 2006, he refinanced to buy out her share, and he spent the next fifteen years paying it off. He made the last mortgage payment eighteen months before he got sick. I was there when he did it. He framed the bank letter that said PAID IN FULL and hung it in the hallway.
When the estate went through probate in Franklin County, the house passed to Travis and me as co-owners, half each. The new deed listed both of our names, as tenants in common.
At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant. I’d learn.
“We should both live there,” Travis said after the funeral, standing in Dad’s kitchen with a beer. “It’s paid off. No mortgage, no rent. We’d be idiots to sell it.”
He was right about that, at least. So we agreed to live there together.
The plan was simple. We’d split everything fifty-fifty: the property taxes, the homeowner’s insurance, the utilities, the groceries, the repairs. I set up a shared spreadsheet on Google Drive, because I’m a network engineer and that’s what we do. I even color-coded it.
For the first couple of months, it worked.
Then Travis “forgot” his half of the electric bill. Then he was “between paychecks.” His real estate career hadn’t exactly taken off. He’d sold two houses in three years and spent most of his commission checks before they cleared. Then the lawn became my job. Then the repairs. Then the cooking, the grocery shopping, the trash.
Then Britney showed up.
Britney was his girlfriend, a dental hygienist with long blond extensions and a laugh like a car alarm. At first she stayed a couple of nights a week. Within a few months, she was there almost every night. She never paid for anything. She ate my groceries, used my laundry detergent, and turned the thermostat up to seventy-four in January.
She also rearranged the house without asking. She moved Dad’s recliner to the garage because it “didn’t go with the vibe.” She took down the framed mortgage letter in the hallway and hung a canvas print that said LIVE LAUGH LOVE.
And one Saturday, while I was at work, she threw away my father’s tackle box.
I came home and found it in the garbage can by the side of the garage: Dad’s old green metal tackle box, full of fishing lures he’d collected over forty years. Hand-tied flies. A red-and-white spoon he’d used to catch a nineteen-pound walleye on Lake Erie in 1998. Rusty hooks wrapped in tiny paper envelopes with his handwriting on them.
I pulled it out of the trash after dark, when nobody could see me, and wiped the coffee grounds off it with a dish towel. My hands were shaking.
“She was just helping clean,” Travis said with a shrug when I brought it up. “It looked like junk, bro.”
“It was Dad’s.”
“I know. But come on. You don’t even fish.”
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