Chapter Text
1.
What got Scout to buy the house, the thing that made him come and see if he’d want to buy it in the first place, was that it had three bedrooms. Three bedrooms meant there were two bedrooms that weren’t his. He could have a guest over and give them their own room, he could have a bunch of guests over and give them each their own place to crash, but no matter how many people came to visit he wouldn’t have to share his room if he didn’t want to.
After he’d signed everything in the stack of paperwork and handed over the check he got the keys. After he walked into his own house for the first time, he went through the house slowly, sniffing in that weird smell empty rooms got when nobody had been living in them for a long time. He sat down in the middle of the living room, looking out across the city all the way out to the ocean, and then lay down, hands on his chest, looking up at the ceiling in his house. It was his, he’d paid for it, the whole thing, and he’d live here. A house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a garage, a freaking enormous kitchen, a washer and dryer and big windows all over the place, a huge living room and a balcony with a million-dollar view out to the Pacific Ocean, right in the middle of a gorgeous neighborhood.
He’d wanted to buy his mother a house like this. Sort of like this. Something like it, something big and fancy all for her with all the money he’d brought home. She smiled and hugged him and said with everyone else gone, the house was already all for her, and she had plenty of space now, and she’d miss it too much. So he’d hugged her and kissed her and smiled back, and promised to share whatever he could with the rest of his family.
The living room was big enough that two bedrooms and one of the bathrooms from the old house would have fit inside. Scout got up and started walking through the house again, rubbing the keys in his pocket to get his fingers used to them. Back in Boston, his house had been three stories tall, plus the basement, plus the little attic, because they’d needed to stack as much as possible on top of everything else when they’d built it, because that’d been the best way to get the place bigger. Here, nobody’d seemed to care about that when this place went up. He did a circuit of the downstairs, the laundry space, bathroom, and bedroom and little extra room for whatever could fit in there that wouldn’t fit in the garage. Upstairs had the bedrooms next to each other looking out at the street, and the bigger one, the one that’d be his, had a door out onto the patio on the side of the house. He went through the kitchen back to the living room, looked at where he’d been sitting, then turned around, opened up all the doors and windows and went out onto the living room’s main balcony to feel the wind on his face, watch the sun set over the ocean and get the empty room smell out of the house.
It was about as big as the house he’d grown up in, maybe a little bigger with the balconies and the extra room attached to the garage, but the rooms that people would use all the time – the bathrooms and bedrooms and kitchens – all of that together was about as much as the house he’d grown up in. Just sharing it around between less rooms, so the rooms it had were bigger. Even his apartment hadn’t had this much space in it, and that thing’d been built newer than this. This house, his house, got built in the twenties, and his apartment went up in the sixties. And he’d made sure that’d had a guest bedroom in it, too.
He’d had to go back to Boston for a few days to make sure his stuff got sent across the country good and safe. And his mom’s stuff, too, the stuff of hers he’d gotten that hadn’t gone to his brothers and their kids. Her stuff needed to get packed up by real professionals, not just some random moving guys from some random moving place – a lot of his stuff, too, not delicate but sure as hell needing to be handled with care. And it made more sense to buy stuff new in Frisco than ship it all the way clear across the country, so by the time all the boxes arrived, he was pretty well settled in already, and had already been sleeping in his new bedroom for the past four days.
The first thing Scout ate in his house was cioppino delivered from all the way over from North Beach, a stew too thin to be a chowder, made with crabs and clams and fish and all sorts of spices he ate on the living room floor. He’d gotten vanilla ice cream for dessert to go with it, and he ate that out on the back balcony looking out towards the ocean at the fog coming in. When he was done, he locked the front door behind him and went back to the hotel for the night.
When he got back from his first-ever morning run around the neighborhood, hot and sweaty and happy to be pissed at the hills, the first thing Scout made in his house was pancakes. He threw more butter than he needed onto the pan, served them to himself with plenty of syrup, and stopped halfway through the little stack to look around at where he was. Really look around himself and take it in. Eating the pancakes he’d made himself in his own house.
“Welcome home t’me, I guess.”