Full House
by Robert Granader

The mornings were the worst.

When COVID-19 closed my office, it was one thing, but when it closed my coffee shop, I found myself spending days in my car and far-off park benches.

It wasn’t the “work” part of work-from-home that bothered me. It was the home part, and the people in it.

Nothing bad—my wife and three teenage kids were all dealing with their own stuff. But it was enough and too much. Enough of the questions, too much of the dishes, enough of the eating, too much of the complaining.

So I wandered the neighborhood. A place I’d lived for twelve years, but never seen. I would leave early in the morning and walk until they settled: someone in the kitchen, another in the dining room or at any table that could house a laptop. And once they staked their claim, I would return to find my own sliver of space where I could park half a butt cheek.

The weather on the east coast during those first few months of COVID-19 quarantine was gratefully glorious. So much so, I could walk the streets in a light jacket or just a summer shirt. I could take phone calls on my route and read emails in increasingly smaller font.

The neighborhood used to be a place I’d pass on the way to somewhere else. But when you walk at different hours, you notice things. The houses that are well-kept, the ones with new flowers, the ones without drapes. I was proud of the neighborhood and to be part of it. It wasn’t all no-name McMansions; these were houses that had history. Some bragged that they’d been there since the 1990s.

The people weren’t cookie-cutter either. Some sped by me with expensive cars that matched their house, but not their income. Others had only the big house, and everything else was miniature.

Occasionally after dark, we’d hear the squeaking sound of brakes, the bells of trucks backing up, and Marissa and I would peek through the blinds, huddled in our bedroom darkness, to see a moving van packing somebody up, a child’s crying mixed in with shifting gears. And then a day or so later, another family would show up, and there would be different faces in the windows, different children in the yard, new toys littering the driveway.

I kept a little notebook near my desk where I listed all the families who “left” the neighborhood, wondering where they would pop up again.

Sometimes, we would stay up in bed after a neighborhood party or pick-up basketball game and try to predict which of the neighbors was next. Who was faking it, besides us? I thought.

When I was young and stupid and unaware of how the system worked, I assumed that if the bank lent us the money to buy the house, then magically by some algorithm in the sky, we could afford it. Some computation somewhere that overrode my common sense and my W-2.

But once we were shoehorned into the house and rented furniture and cars and gadgets, the gaping hole in my belly told me it shouldn’t be this hard to pay the bills.

In those first days of quarantine, I’d memorized the houses in order with some characteristic about each: the bent shingle, peeling paint on the shutters, mismatched blacktop, ugly hedgerow. Every house became markers of my walk, the number of times I spun the block, the time it took me to get there and back.

Marissa never asked where I’d been. Was she so busy with the kids and her own worries? She never asked, “How was your walk?” whether I was gone for twenty minutes or two hours. Instead, when I walked in the door, all I got was a request as if I’d been in the next room: “Where’s the screwdriver?” “Can you pick up eggs?”

“The Habers are moving out,” I told her. That stopped her.

“Where are they going?” she asked.

“Cleveland,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“How do you know?”

“The driver of the moving van,” I said.

“Now?” she asked.

“About an hour ago,” I said.

“I thought he was in government contracting?” she asked. “Cleveland?”

“Exactly,” I said.

I didn’t see it coming. I’d walked by their house every day, noticing the grass was a little longer than it had been, but no tears, no fights, nothing different from the fifty or so other houses I pass by each day.

But now the house looked dead. Walking by all these bay windows, I’d witnessed a new liveliness in these houses that used to just be facades. I could see faces in the windows, pillow fights, a young girl petting her cat. Now this house had no stirring; it didn’t breathe.

Until it did.

I saw a flutter.

Nothing had moved since the moving truck, but now something—maybe a real estate agent—was inside. But there were no cars. I tentatively walked toward the front door, feeling like I was doing something wrong. Maybe there was an intruder, and I was just being a good citizen. Maybe they had one of those cameras on the doorbell, and I was gonna end up on YouTube.

I fiddled with the front door. It was locked. Everything was still. It was a home, and now it was just a house.

Over the next few days, I paid special attention to it. It was a beautiful house with a soaring roof, and I admired it in the morning sunshine, in the midday rain, in the long shadows of the evening. I was looking for some clue as to what went wrong, why they left. How did they decide it was time to go? Did he come home one day and tell his wife the money was gone? Or maybe she committed some crime. Regardless of the malfeasance or bad luck, what did the other spouse think?

“I need the kitchen; I need the sound of the dishwasher to drown the rest of you out,” Jess, our middle child, declared one morning. I rolled my eyes and headed for a walk.

I looped back through the neighborhood to the Habers’ house. Why hadn’t the house sold? The rest of the neighborhood had competing offers within hours.

And then it happened again. I saw another shadow pass; an upstairs drape twitched, I was sure of it. I ran around the side of the house and peeked in a window; was there someone in the empty kitchen standing with a plate in front of a microwave oven?

I ran to the back of the house to find a backyard full of mismatched lawn chairs.

Someone was looking at me. I pivoted toward the house, and there was a face through the half-open sliding glass door. He waved me in to find a room filled with small school desks with attached plastic chairs and middle-aged adults in each one, hunched over laptops.

Nobody looked up when I entered. It was library-quiet and library-awkward.

There was a whiteboard with the date and a list of rules written in blue: No talking, no fraternizing, no recognition.

A voice of a man standing behind the drapes said, “If you would like to work here, please go downstairs and talk to the proprietor.”

Scattered across the room were men and women, some staring at laptops, iPads, even books, but I was invisible.

Downstairs, there was a room that smelled of detergent and a thump thump thumping like a dryer full of clothes. A striking woman sat behind a small desk, a large computer monitor dominating the space, cords flowing from everything to every available socket.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“If you need a place to work, we provide a space of your own, air-conditioning, and Wi-Fi,” she said.

“Where are the Habers?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The Habers,” I said. “They used to live here.”

“We don’t know them,” she said.

“How did you get this space?” I asked.

“Do you want a desk?” she said.

“Is this legal?” I asked.

“I’m a real estate broker,” she said.

It was twenty-five dollars an hour, which got me a seat, the Wi-Fi code, and anonymity.

In my first days on the second floor of the Habers’ house, I realized that the windows weren’t empty eyes into these room. There were blinds covering the windows that were painted on the outside with pictures of empty rooms, so from the street it looked empty, hiding the bustling, shared office space that sat behind.

In the early days of this, I avoided eye contact, unsure of whatever it was I was doing. But after some time, I would nod at people on the way to the bathroom or upon returning from lunch. But with masks covering half our faces and my already below-average ability to recognize faces and remember names, I was isolated.

The house was big and fairly spread out, but each person looked familiar.

There was no talking, fraternizing, or recognition. We were in hiding. This was truly a place in-between, a world where no one knew each other, where memories were deleted when you walked through the sliding glass door. A place where people were Bubble-Wrapped, cellophaned, and phone-boothed into a place without a past.

Since walking around Haber House was frowned upon, except to use the bathroom, to get any real circulation I needed to leave the house, and to leave I needed to be told when the coast was clear. Standing by the door, ready to make my exit, I was up close to a tall brunette. When I made eye contact, I knew her. It was Lee from down the street. But they moved out a year ago? They were one of the late-night escapees, as we called them. I raised my brows, nodding, but her face was as empty as a robot.

The seasons turned, and no one in my family recognized that I would leave most days after breakfast and not return until dinnertime. No one noticed when I had a Mr. Coffee machine delivered to our house but didn’t open the box. Instead, I took it with me to Haber House, where I set it up on my desk and washed my mug in the bathroom sink.

They assumed I was just walking the block? No one asked about the days I was gone for eight hours. The days it rained?

I didn’t even have to lie.

Each day, I was doing less work and more piecing the people back together. One day, my bladder screamed for a bathroom break, and I hurried across the floor and barged into an inadvertently unlocked door, and I saw a naked face. Thankfully, he was done with his business, but his mask rested on the counter.

“Jeff,” I said.

It was Jeff Friedland; I know it was.

He hurried past me and out of sight. Jeff and his wife had left mysteriously with their kids right when COVID-19 began. Supposedly he got a promotion. And now here he was on a toilet seat in the Habers’ house?

Late in the day when most of the place had emptied, I went down to the proprietor. “Are these all people who used to live here?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s time you left,” she said.

“Why? I’m following all the rules,” I said.

“You’re not,” she said.

No recognition, I thought.

“I don’t belong here,” I said to her.

She finally looked up from her book and asked, “Why do you think you don’t belong?”

“Well, I mean, these are all people who left the neighborhood,” I said. “They couldn’t afford to live here. They don’t belong. I do.”

All I could see were her eyes above her mask, but she was sending a message. I didn’t belong in this neighborhood. The difference between me and them was just the moving trucks.

“Do you prorate the months?” I asked.

“We don’t,” she said firmly but no longer looking up from her James Patterson. “Why? Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said.

Now she looked up.

“I’ll keep a desk for you,” she said. “You’ll be back, when you’re ready. Most people came here too late; that’s the problem. I thought you were smarter.”

I turned to leave, walking the gauntlet of desks until I reached mine. I left the coffee maker and Star Wars mug. Maybe the next guy will want it.

The middle-aged man standing at the house’s back door spied the backyard like a Navy SEAL. And when it was clear, I ran to the point where the fence and hedges met. I ducked my head and sneaked through to the street, where I returned to the world and walked toward home.

At two in the afternoon, the sun was still high, and it was summer hot even as September lingered. I recognized the person walking toward me. Not just from her familiar gait, but the two dogs that were hooked to her waist as they pulled her east and west.

“Hi,” my wife said, pulling pods from her ears. “You’re done early today.”

I stammered, unsure how to answer.

“How was Haber House?” she asked.

“What’s Haber House?” I tried to ask convincingly.

“Do I need to pack?” she asked in a voice that made me want to cry. “I’m not doing a middle-of-the-night thing.”

“We’re not leaving,” I said.

“But that house is for people who can’t afford to live here anymore,” she said.

“Yeah, I heard,” I said.

“Then why are you there?” she asked.

“I hated it there,” I said. “We don’t belong there.”

“I hope not,” she said.

“I just want to work from home,” I said.

“We’ll make space,” she said.