Before You Renovate My Kitchen
Part One: 6:30 A.M.
My sister called at 6:30 a.m. and said, “Dad died last night.”
I looked across the kitchen.
Dad was sitting three feet away, drinking my coffee and eating my bacon.
It was a Thursday in early December. Still dark outside. Frost on the windows of my little brick house in Pittsburgh. I’d gotten up at six to make breakfast because Dad likes his bacon crisp and his coffee black and his eggs over medium, and he likes them all at the same time, which is harder than it sounds.
He was wearing my late husband’s navy bathrobe. It was the only one in the house that fit him. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the sports page spread out next to his plate.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
I stared at the glowing name on the screen.
Vanessa Cole.
My older sister almost never called before noon. She never called at all, really. Once a month, maybe. On my birthday, if Grant reminded her. On Christmas.
So I immediately assumed something terrible had happened.
I had no idea she was about to invent it.
Dad reached across the kitchen table for another strip of bacon as I answered.
“Vanessa?”
For two seconds, all I could hear was the hum of a car engine and the steady clicking of a turn signal.
Then she said it.
“Natalie,” she said. “Dad died last night.”
Part Two: Speaker
My hand froze around my coffee mug.
Across from me, Dad stopped chewing.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Then I pressed speaker and placed the phone beside the sugar bowl.
“When?” I asked.
“Sometime during the night,” Vanessa said. “Harold found him.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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