1. Tollie's Garden Pt.1


    Date: 3/15/2016, Categories: Love Stories, Author: Sisyphus, Rating: 6, Source: LushStories

    I was seventeen, almost eighteen, when Tollie moved into our small apartment above the carriage house. I didn’t pay much attention at first when my mom rented it to him. After moving into the huge house we inherited from her grandfather, my great-grandfather, I was too busy trying to fit in at my new school. Being the new girl wasn’t easy. It felt weird, two people living in a mansion with white pillars at the entrance, wisteria growing up to the third floor and a big Dutch door, you know, the kind where the top opens and the bottom stays shut--it was pretty cool. We had a big stone wall in front of the property with ivy growing up the sides. The long driveway curved in the front of the house and you could drive in one way and out the other way. The house had fifteen rooms, four bathrooms and four fireplaces. I had a fireplace in my bedroom and so did my mom. I also had my own bathroom and the kitchen was huge with a pantry next to it that had shelves and cabinets all the way to the ceiling. It was a shock inheriting that big stone house after living in a small row house in Hoboken, New Jersey then suddenly moving to Chestnut Hill, a ritzy part of Philadelphia. Mom’s brother Steve, inherited a lot of money because we got the house--don’t know how much--but her grandfather’s will had one strange stipulation for each of them. They would get the same amount of money from the trust each year that showed as income on their tax form. The will said he wanted them to know what it is ...
    to work for a living rather than just have money they didn’t earn. So my mom had to earn money in order to get any money from the inheritance and that made it a challenge. The problem was that my mom had always been a waitress, never went to college, got married to my dad because she had me, then he took off with some woman when I was three. For a while, I got birthday cards from him, but that was it. It was painful when they stopped coming, and I always wondered why. How could he forget his daughter? So the mansion was a mixed blessing and we felt a little out of place. We had a beautiful, luxurious house but, at first, barely enough money to make ends meet. That’s why we rented the carriage house to Tollie for five hundred dollars a month and that helped a lot. My mom got a job in a pretty swanky restaurant called the Blue Moon, not far from where we lived and made good money--the problem was it was mostly tips and some weeks were better than others. The other stipulation was we couldn’t sell the mansion because mom’s grandfather had loved the house and wanted to keep it in the family. So we were stuck with a beautiful home and a large property that needed maintenance. We closed off the third floor to save money. Just keeping the grass cut, paying the utilities and taxes and making sure we didn’t let it fall apart was a big job. It was also weird living in that house and not being friends with any of the neighbors. They said a polite hello if they saw us, but we were not in ...
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