A few years older than me, my fiancee Richard was working for a civil engineering firm when I was still a student. When their grandmother’s house was for sale after her passing we purchased it in his name. The price was too good to pass up as no one was willing to go through the removal the 60’s themed wall paper and shag carpeting and we spent our weekends peeling and pulling at it all to find it a fine little home once the dayglo color scheme was gone. Though, there was still the question of the pink toilets to be tended to, we settled in for winter and spent more time enjoying the fire place and planning for life there.
Their family was problematic. Not that mine was a shining example of tenderness as I’d pretty much written them off by this point, their role here became somehow worse. My step father was from a long line of mentally ill, if slightly functional beings and being gay meant another knife in my back with them. However, the reason for we being a couple was that his sister played the role of matchmaker, against their father’s wishes and we did, in the least, get along with their mom and they. Things were always rather tense with their two brothers and their father. The few times I was at their home proving chilled enough for breath to be seen in the air. That little house in the New England countryside was our safe zone.