Steel Glances (Rocky Mountain Novella Series #1)

  Chapter 5

  Kristen stood against the back of the door, hoping the infuriating man she had just met would walk away. She held her breath and listened. She never heard him walk away, but he didn’t knock on the door or say anything either. After a few minutes, when she assumed the coast was clear, Kristen focused her mind back on the task at hand.

  As she walked slowly through the house, she became overwhelmed at everything her father had accumulated in his lifetime. She would normally never consider him a hoarder, but there was clutter everywhere. For the first time, she was having second thoughts about using a moving service. She didn’t feel comfortable letting strangers handle and rifle through her father’s belongings, though. His things were personal…parts of his life, of her life, and she needed to know they were packed and organized by someone that could respect what they stood for. And, she was the only one who fit the bill.

  The only question was, where to start? She decided to tackle the easiest room on the main level first. Since her father didn’t really cook, Kristen began in the kitchen. After going out to her car to retrieve the boxes and tape she had in her trunk, she set out to pack up all of the dishes. Lucky for her, her father kept months worth of newspapers on hand. She never understood why, but he hated throwing them away. She wrapped the plates carefully and then moved on to the bowls. Her father’s dishes were about as old as she was. The pattern on them was seriously dated and Kristen had no idea what she would do with them. She just knew she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of them. There were too many memories.

  She stared at the bowl in her hand, remembering how she would eat out of one of them every single morning before school. Growing up, she must’ve eaten at least a thousand boxes of sugary cereal. The kind with cartoon characters on the boxes. And, then, during winters, she would use the same bowls to eat bowls of hot soup. With every bite, she would slurp the soup from the spoon.

  As Kristen moved on to the pots and pans, she could recall the Christmas she had purchased them for her father. It was at least ten years ago, but some of the pans still looked brand new. She wondered how someone could live almost exclusively on take out. That’s what her father liked, though. “Your mom was the one who loved to cook,” he would say whenever Kristen would suggest he start making his own dinners. She wasn’t sure if he was afraid to try something new, or just trying to preserve the memory of her mom. Either way, she eventually stopped prodding him. She still refused to let him eat a takeout Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, though.

  Every year for each holiday, her father would come over to her house. He’d watch sports or a parade while she slaved away in the kitchen. Every year, her father would say the same thing as they began to eat, “How many people are you expecting? This food can feed an army!” And, every year, she would laugh as if it were a brand new joke. She did cook a lot, but that was mainly so that she could send leftovers home with her father. At least then she knew he’d be eating something home-cooked for the rest of the week.

  After the dishes and pans were all packed, the only thing left was the food in the pantry. Most of it was non-perishable items that she would donate. She did take a few of the items home…things she could eat and remember her father.

  She felt like she had been packing forever, but there was still so much to do. She decided that since she tackled the easiest room first, she should at least make a dent in the most cluttered room as well before calling it quits.

  Her father’s office. It was a large room that contained several bookcases and a desk. Although those were both piled high with books and papers, the biggest issue with the office was that there were also stacks and stacks of papers and folders covering almost every inch of the floor. Some of the stacks were piled as high as five or six feet. She realized that most of her father’s work was done in an era before scanners and computers were used by the masses, but she still wondered how one man could accumulate so much. Not only that, but how he even kept track of what was what.

  Kristen felt completely overwhelmed. Her legs started shaking and she was forced to sit. She collapsed in a chair and dropped her head into her hands and just wept.

  “Daddy, I can’t do this,” she cried through her sobs. “It should’ve been me.” She knew some of the tears were because she missed her father dearly, but she was also dealing with the guilt she felt.

  She knew her father would chastise her for even thinking she was responsible, but Kristen knew that her father would still be alive if she hadn’t picked him up that day. She was also the one who first suggested leaving lunch because of the storm. Had they just stayed at Daphne’s Café and waited out the storm, things would be so different. That thought haunted her every minute since she woke up in the hospital.

  She knew exactly what her father would say if her were still around. “Kristen, things have a way of working out how they are supposed to. If it was my time, I would’ve died…somehow, some way. If we had stayed at the café, I could have choked on my food. This is not your fault.” Strangely, she could actually hear his voice inside of her head saying those words. Still, they did little to comfort her. It was a father’s job to make his kids feel better.

  She was wasting time, though. Realizing she was having a pity party, Kristen picked herself up, wiped the tears from her face and taped up a new box so she could fill it up. “Why did you keep so many papers?” she asked under her breath, as if her father could actually answer.

  Kristen flipped through each set of papers before packing them. Most of them were just accounting papers that probably should’ve been in storage years ago, or at least in file cabinets. After a while, Kristen started to see a pattern in the stacks. They seemed to have been stacked in both alphabetical order as well as by year. Kristen stopped to grab a marker so she could label the box with the information.

  As she started on her second stack, her phone rang. Looking at the Caller ID, she saw it was Adam. A part of her wanted to just let the phone go directly to voicemail. She was still mad at him for the night before. Not only that, but also because he didn’t call earlier to apologize. By the time the phone rang for the sixth time, she reluctantly answered.

  “Hello?” she said. Her voice was cold, but not mean.

  “Hey, babe,” Adam answered playfully. He could tell she was mad, but wasn’t about to apologize. He knew it would make things easier, but saying he was sorry wasn’t something he had a lot of practice at. “Are you still at your father’s?”

  Kristen couldn’t believe that Adam was going to completely ignore what happened the night before. Maybe to him, it was no big deal. As much as she wanted to stay mad at him, his voice sounded so playful. It was one of the things she loved most about him. Plus, she needed to talk to someone if only so she didn’t hold in all the stress she was feeling over packing up her father’s stuff. “Yes, and I haven’t even made a dent,” she finally answered.

  It was true. What Kristen hoped would only be a two-day project, she now realized was going to take a great deal longer. She wasn’t even a tenth of the way done with the office yet and still had the living room and upstairs to do. She would let movers come in and move all of the furniture and packed boxes into storage until she could figure out what to do with everything, but first she had to pack the lifetime worth of belongings.

  “Did you come across anything interesting,” Adam asked, but Kristen told him that she really had only tackled the kitchen so far. “Well, my offer to help is still out there,” he suggested.

  “This is something I think I need to do by myself,” Kristen answered. It was sweet of Adam to offer, and for him, that was as close to an apology as she would likely get. For her, though, she needed to do it herself…for closure. She was fortunate she had accumulated a decent amount of sick days at her financial management job because it would probably take all of them to get everything squared away.

  After
getting off the phone, Kristen decided to just call it a night and return bright and early the next morning.