(Note: All personal names and corporate identities have been changed – grudgingly – to protect the guilty.)
The offer they mailed us was damn near irresistible. A night in a hotel. By ourselves. Without the children. We hadn’t sipped from that Holy Grail of parenting in years. The cost? Just walk in to JetSetter Resorts, listen to a timeshare sales pitch, and prance out the door with coupon in hand.
Unfortunately, they never told us to expect the Spanish Inquisition.
We made the 30-minute drive one Saturday afternoon from our home in Bellevue, Washington down to Issaquah, a sprawling Seattle-area suburb with tentacles of office parks and strip malls dangling off the body of its historic downtown. Unlike most office park businesses, which prefer to remain cloaked in anonymity, JetSetter advertised its presence with a sporty banner tacked to the top of its one-story rental space. We had seen the company logo before on sponsorship banners for local arts and holiday festivals. It spoke of fun and adventure, but with a dollop of civic awareness. We felt like we were in responsible hands.
Once upon a lease, my family found itself in the financial grinder. An unexpected increase in child support for my first daughter became retroactive, leaving us for an ironic nine months with our sole source of income reduced by one-fourth. I sat down at the end of October and calculated the impact on our expenses. Conclusion: We wouldn’t be able to make our rent come December. We needed either to hold up a bank, or move – immediately.
We moved on a shoestring. Even though my mother- and brother-in-law were moving in with us to pool resources, we were beggars, not choosers. But there were certain absolutes. We needed five bedrooms and two bathrooms. We had an upper-limit in terms of rent. Above all, we needed a good landlord – one who wouldn’t blanch (as many did) at inviting four adults, three kids, and a teenager to squat on their property, and who would be good, if not saintly, with repairs.
And so we met Patric O’Brien – our doomed, drug-dealing landlord.
