Zach's Grandpa

Zach's beloved grandfather, Kevin Taylor (March 9, 1954 -- December 19, 2010), but better known to Zach simply as "Grandpa," was a union man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin of mixed Polish immigrant, German immigrant, and slight Native American ancestry. As a "union man" in Milwaukee, Kevin was essentially a Teamsters organizer (specifically for transit and brewery workers). Things got a little too heated for him and his wife in 1976 with the imminent consequences of what it would mean for labor if the United States seceded part of itself to an invading force, and conservatism and anti-union advocates got a fresh dose of steroids with saying that anyone trying to organize labor was anti-American. Kevin might have proved them right by bailing for Portland, Oregon before the year ended, but the threats started to target his wife. Kevin wasn't a coward with death threats, but he wasn't going to let his wife get involved with his work.

After taking a year to let the political situation settle down, Kevin and his wife had two sons (one in 1977 and one in 1978; the older died of pneumonia when he was 4) and he started working as a construction worker and organizing labor and workers' rights for construction crews. The Imperial Japanese government thought of people like Kevin as annoying thorns in their trampling foot of conquest and would have loved to find some way to make him disappear, but they desperately needed construction workers to rebuild their new territory and put up with him and others like him. If the Japanese architectural and engineering firms that popped up around Portland wanted to build something larger than a small house, they would need to go through people like Kevin to get it done.

All in all, the man had an impressive career of 35 years as a labor organizer in some of the most inhospitable places for that kind of person, and his actions lead to improving the quality of life and preventing the exploitation of thousands of vital workers.

Unfortunately, one construction worker he failed to stop from being exploited by a Japanese architect and engineer was his son (and later, his grandson).

 

 

When Kevin Met Samantha

Kevin and Jeff Taylor had a great father-son relationship and were quite close, so of course Kevin was told about this girl Jeff was interested in at college soon after Jeff realized he had feelings for her. Kevin candidly told his son to find his balls and pull his dick out of his ass to ask her out. They naturally swore to each other a lot, a habit Zach developed from his dad and grandpa.

Kevin didn't think much of this at first as his son had always been enough of a ladies' man to make him feel proud, but Jeff brought up this girl again a little over three months later, about thirteen weeks after they had started dating. This was quite a bit longer than Jeff's usual relationships and Jeff was unusually the one who asked her out, so Kevin started to get curious and asked his son what she was like.

The way Jeff described Samantha over the phone was something Kevin has never heard from his son before. He was gushing over this short and feisty little German/Japanese girl (with a great body) who he said was a genius that could talk and run circles around him (and everyone else) at the same time. Kevin backed his son up and tried to get Jeff to tell him how they first met, and Jeff explained how he literally bumped into her. He admits that he honestly didn't think much of her at first, but she came back next semester with an entire image change and a more confident and vibrant personality, and they started talking because he realized they were in the same major.

A few warning bells went off in Kevin's head over this, so he asked his son if he remembers exactly what he said to this girl when they first met.

Not thinking much of it, Jeff told his dad what he remembered of that brief conversation, and those warning bells started to get just a bit louder in Kevin's head. He knew his son was a lady killer, but it'd be insane for a girl to fall in love with him within 3 minutes of meeting him, to change her look, her major, and even her personality for his tastes from that. That, or the girl was insane.

Either way, Kevin became intensely interested in meeting his son's new girlfriend and suggested dinner at his place soon, and Jeff told him he'd pass the message to her.

 

Samantha was over the moon about this invitation because meeting Jeff's dad meant that she and Jeff were getting serious! The obvious question was about where the mom was, but Samantha has always been one of those people who won't ask a question to a person's face when they can find it out by looking it up, and she found out from a newspaper obituary that Mrs. Taylor died in a car accident when Jeff was 17. That's tragic, and not just because Samantha wasn't getting a mother-in-law who might be her surrogate mom, making them all one big happy family. Mrs. Taylor seemed like a genuinely wonderful woman from her obituary, and Samantha realized she would have big shoes to fill to be the next Mrs. Taylor.

Jeff and Samantha showed up at Kevin Taylor's humble home a week later. Samantha was spritzed out, of course, as she knew firsthand the power of a strong first impression from her future husband.

While the conversation over a dinner of fantastic homemade chili is lighthearted and even jovial at times, one thing starts to click about Samantha for Kevin as he sees how she interacts with him and his son: "She's not crazy about my son, she's just crazy."

Samantha, of course, volunteered to do the dishes, so the father and son retreated to the garage and started talking. Kevin was still trying to figure out Samantha's angle, so he asked his son what he thought she liked about him.

The two seconds of that blank stare from Jeff were the most worried Kevin has ever been as a father. Jeff realized that his dad was actually being serious, but he struggled to articulate a real answer beyond "She thinks I'm kind and cute."

Not ready to go in for the kill yet, Kevin started to dance around the subject of how he thought his son was being taken for a ride by a woman who didn't have all of her screws there and was too busy staring at his son to see the road, so he asked Jeff is he thought that it was just a little bit suspicious that Samantha underwent such a drastic change to nearly everything about her in less than a month.

Jeff shrugged and said that maybe he just read her wrong when they bumped into each other, but Kevin asked his son if he seriously thought he was that bad at reading people, especially women. Jeff sheepishly had to admit that he wasn't, so his dad then asked why he thought this girl changed so much about herself in such a short period of time, and Jeff didn't have an answer.

Kevin, in the bluntest terms possible (bluntness is a trait of the male Taylors), told his son that he offered his hand to a starving feral animal and that she was clinging to him as he was likely the first person in her life to ever show her kindness that wasn't out of obligation.

Jeff immediately got defensive over this point, saying that his dad didn't know her like he did and that he'd only talked to her for a bit of a single evening, and then Kevin shouted at his son to stop being a naive jackass and ask himself how much he actually knew about this woman.

Jeff shouted back that Samantha obviously didn't have a good home situation so he'd never asked her about it out of kindness, and then Kevin told his son that was exactly the fucking point he was making.

 

If Kevin Taylor's humble home had been a bit bigger, Samantha might not have heard the shouting in the garage from the kitchen, and Kevin might have had time to convince his son that he was dating a psychopath, and Zach might never have been born. But she did, and she picked up on the tense atmosphere in the garage in an instant as she opened the door. She then quickly picked up on the subject of the conversation from the difference in the looks on both faces because unlike Zach, Samantha is keenly aware of social cues.

Without hesitation, she wrote off getting Jeff's dad's approval as a lost cause, which was a pity as she would have loved to have a close relationship with her future father-in-law in addition to her future husband.

Samantha quickly invented an excuse about how she was feeling a little lightheaded and would like to take a break in the fresh air of the garage, and she asked Jeff if he'd be a dear and finish the dishes. Imposing on her future husband was a big bending of Samantha's skewed moral code, but he happily agreed without a second thought.

Kevin knew a confrontation attempt when he saw one, and he had never been one to shy away from them. While the dinner was enough to convince Kevin that Samantha is crazy, it was also enough to convince him that she's frighteningly intelligent and coercive and not someone to let his guard down around.

 

That tense talk started a second after Jeff closed the garage door with Kevin making the first move.

"Why are you dating my son, Samantha?"

Samantha dropped the polite and kind smile that had been on her face all night.

"Do you want the long answer or the short answer?"

Kevin has seen this type of misdirection before.

"Saying that it's because you love him isn't going to be enough."

"It's all that matters in the end."

"If that were the case, one of his past girlfriends would have beaten you to the punch."

Samantha's eyebrow twitched very slightly at this. She hated being compared to his past girlfriends.

"Those sluts didn't deserve him."

Kevin took advantage of the fact that Samantha made a rare verbal misstep right onto a landmine to pivot the conversation.

"My son isn't something a person 'deserves,' girl."

"I didn't mean it like that!"

Samantha hadn't quite mastered her ironclad composure by this point, so she started to fray a bit.

"What's so great about Jeff anyways? If you're looking for a trophy husband, you could do a lot better than an oblivious nerd like him."

"Jeff isn't an oblivious nerd! Do you have any idea how nice he is?!"

"Of course I do, but you're both too blinded by love to think clearly. You're turning a blind eye to his faults and he's turning a blind eye to your red flags."

"Again, why does anything else matter when we love each other?!"

"Does Jeff love you, or does he love the girl you are turning yourself into for him?"

Kevin got to the heart of the matter fast enough that Samantha needed to start treating him like a threat.

She sighed a bit because she was so disappointed in her lack of self-control. She made a mental note to be more careful from now on so incidents like this won't happen in the future before she turned to Kevin with her "frost witch" glare and spat venom at him.

"You don't have to like me, Kevin, but I am marrying your son. Either get out of my way or get run over."

Samantha had just made a statement that could easily be interpreted as a death threat referencing how Kevin's wife died, but he wasn't even slightly fazed. Kevin had built a career out of standing up to people who wanted him dead, and while Samantha's threat was certainly the most novel, it'd take a lot more than that to make him back down. Much to Samantha's annoyance, Kevin remains to this day the one person she has ever met who wasn't even slightly intimidated by her "frost witch" glare.

"It's going to take more than that to get my approval, girl."

With her trump card disarmed, Samantha stormed out of the garage and told her husband to back away from the sink so she could finish the dishes. If she needed to earn her future father-in-law's approval the hard way, she would.

 

From here and out of sight from Jeff, a weird rivalry formed between Samantha and Kevin. As an unstoppable force and an immovable object, the two were natural enemies. Samantha's last two years of college were a lot more stressful than her first two years as she was divided across two fronts trying to be Jeff's perfect future wife and Kevin's perfect future daughter-in-law. Despite all her work on this new front, she never fully got Kevin's approval. The most she ever got was a conversation had a few days after Jeff proposed to her. Samantha, a bit smugly, asked Kevin what he thought of her now. He wearily told her, "Jeff could do a lot worse than you." Samantha might have several loose (or missing) screws, but she'd more than proven how much she genuinely cared about Jeff, and Jeff loved her. They made each other happy, and as long as that stayed the case, Kevin didn't really get to have a say in it.

It's a weird stroke of cosmic irony that Samantha met the love of her life but ended up spending more time around his father than her husband. They could have found a lot worse company.

 

The one thing Samantha did get approval from Kevin was her skills as a cook. While Kevin was completely untrained and barely consulted recipes, he had an almost preternatural talent for cooking (although he remained modest about his abilities). One of his trump cards as a labor organizer was getting someone who hated his guts to come over to his house and sit down with him for a home cooked meal as they talked over some contract dispute. As he liked to think of it, a good meal at a dinner table had a way of making people less upset, but a great meal would make them want to come back.

It is no exaggeration to say that at his peak (before his sense of smell and taste started to fade from lung cancer) he was capable of making unforgettable culinary experiences that made his guests want to return just for the food alone.

Unfortunately, his recipe book is either missing or never existed in the first place, but he fully acknowledged Samantha's skills in cooking (although Samantha busted her ass to get her skills and Kevin was apparently born with that culinary sense).

 

 

Kevin and Zach's Relationship

Kevin's improving opinion of Samantha did a 180° pivot when Zach was born. Like Samantha, he had reacted to the news of the coming grandchild with great enthusiasm, but he sensed something worrying from the brand-new mother when he made it to the hospital a few hours after the birth to give his grandchild a teddy bear (a Taylor family tradition). He hadn't gotten a call from either of the new parents and had been forced to leave a voicemail that he was on the way. Samantha was alone when Kevin showed up as Zach had been taken for some tests as Samantha's blood pressure and oxygen levels had dropped to dangerously low levels during labor and had partially ruptured her uterus as Zach came out, and Jeff had briefly stepped out to use the restroom. While checking his texts to make sure he had the right room because he wanted to step in with a big cheery smile on his face and making a lot of noise and didn't want to do that to some random woman, Kevin heard Samantha talk to herself with a voice on the verge of despair (Samantha has a bad habit of talking to herself out loud, especially with muttering under her breath while audible, and she usually doesn't even realize when she does it).

"Why did his eyes have to be red too?"

Kevin stepped in the room with a smile that was more "nervous" than "cheery" and saw his daughter-in-law clutching her wrist with a pained expression on her face. She looked so miserable that Kevin briefly thought that his grandchild had died during labor.

Samantha put a slightly pained and nervous smile on her face when asked where her child was and if they were okay.

She told Kevin her son was fine, but a doctor had just stopped by and told Samantha and Jeff that it would be very dangerous for her to try and have a second kid, and bluntly, that she shouldn't attempt it.

Kevin was sorry to hear that and gave Samantha a comforting hug, but then Samantha said something that gave him a stark reminder of just how unhinged Samantha was as a person.

"I'm simply going to have to make this one count."

 

Kevin stayed at the hospital overnight to see his grandson (and to keep an eye on Samantha, who needed a few days of observation after her partial uterine rupture but was clearly broken inside in a way that the doctors weren't checking). By all accounts, the as-of-yet-unnamed Zach was a very cute baby. A few doctors expressed concern and fear about his unusual red eyes, but like Jeff, Kevin thought the distinct feature was little more than a neat curiosity. Unlike Samantha, all his vision checked out perfectly fine according to the family optometrist, who was a specialist in ocular albinism who had heard about the unique case of Samantha and her mother and transferred hospitals to observe them and later Zach as he was fascinated by their lack of telltale genetic markers for the hereditary condition. According to him, Zach's eyes were normal eyes except for the red pigmentation, their elevated sensitivity to bright light, and an increased risk of being damaged by ultraviolet light. Samantha was incredibly relieved to hear this tiny bit of good news about her son, even if he had been born with a trait she had always considered undesirable.

 

Kevin was at first going to be hands-off with his grandson, but as he learned the details of how his son wasn't going to be present at home very often due to work and how depressed his daughter-in-law became after Zach's birth and the heartbreaking news that she couldn't have more kids, he felt obligated to be in his grandson's life and started to stop by the house on Wednesdays and weekends to help out (and to keep an eye on Samantha, who was starting to show cracks in her outward facade of being okay).

Samantha was at first thankful for the extra help, but as Kevin realized that she was raising her infant son in a clinical manner with all the precision and lack of emotion of a machine, and as Samantha realized she didn't approve of that, his help was less welcome. Samantha suffers from severe OCD and Kevin was not well-versed in its symptoms, but he was alarmed by how she treated Zach's play time, feeding time, rest time, and his entire life like he was a product being assembled on a factory line.

It wasn't Samantha's intent to raise Zach like this, but one of the few comforts she found for the severe depression and anxiety she felt during the first 3 years of Zach's life was not fighting her compulsive urges to have control over her surroundings through ritualistic OCD behaviors. If something were to happen to the only child she could ever have, and it was her fault and something she could have prevented, she would never forgive herself. Samantha would never admit this out loud to anyone, but she knows she would have gone insane clawing her way out of the pit she'd fallen into had Kevin not been around to provide her consistent reality checks.

 

But just because Samantha understood the stabilizing factor her father-in-law provided didn't mean she liked it. A particularly tense argument between Kevin and Samantha about how she was wrong for insisting on only feeding the 18-month-old Zach at the exact same times every day turned to a shouting match. It ended instantly when someone else spoke up.

"Kebbi!"

Zach was a late talker, but to Kevin's great delight and Samantha's great disdain, Zach's first words were an attempt to say his grandpa's first name (Samantha made it a point to only ever call and refer to him as "Kevin" and not "Dad" or even "father-in-law.")

From then on, Kevin had to fight a bit more to be around his grandson. Even from an early age, Zach was showing signs of a high degree of intelligence and an uncanny ability to learn through passive observation, and it seemed like he always had at least five new words in his vocabulary every time Kevin stopped by on his twice-a-week visits. The little toddler's face would light up in joy whenever Kevin walked in the room, and by the age of four, he was capable of holding relatively complex conversations with Kevin. Zach liked to talk Kevin's ear off (Kevin supposed he got that from his dad), but it's hard to describe how excited he was to talk to Kevin about anything he could think of. Kevin was always happy to listen and was patient with Zach's bad stutter, but he got the distinct impression that Zach was lonely. He didn't seem to have many friends besides that huge half-Japanese kid next door and the son of Jeff's best friend (and boss), but those were boys, not men. Zach was smart enough that he could operate on the wavelength of a tween or even a young teenager for conversations, and he couldn't have the types of conversations he had with Kevin with boys his own age.

 

Zach knew that he had a dad, and that Kevin was his grandpa, but he treated Kevin like his dad. He didn't really know why Grandpa didn't get along with Mom, but they didn't. It wasn't good to be in the same room with both of them, and while it was okay to be in the same room as Mom, it was really good to be in the same room as Grandpa.

Kevin was a great grandpa. Zach adored him, and he had a clear love for his grandson. If nothing else, Kevin's presence was an escape valve for Zach and a way to escape Zach's overbearing mother and his overprotective daughter-in-law.

Samantha hated that she was the one who was truly raising her son yet never got the same adulation that Kevin gave Zach just for showing up once a week, but she swallowed her bitterness since Zach was so much happier around Kevin that she couldn't just deny him access to his beloved grandpa and her nosy father-in-law. Like she had privately acknowledged for herself, Kevin provided a stabilizing effect on Zach.

 

Zach and Kevin's favorite activity was something they called "outings." Kevin would ask Zach where Zach wanted to go, and Zach always had something fun in mind. They weren't always realistic (Zach would sometimes ask to do something like visiting a rocket museum in Florida he had read about or a professional motorsports event with ticket prices the family couldn't afford), but Kevin tried his hardest to make the realistic trips possible.

These would be things like watching movies at a movie theater (Zach had fun watching movies, and Kevin thought Zach was old enough to see the PG-13 stuff; he even taught him every curse word known to man by the time Zach was 7), museum trips (Zach really liked dinosaurs, but he had his mom's thirst for knowledge), aquariums, zoos, car shows, trips to new playgrounds and parks, and fireworks shows, but the most memorable of these were baseball games.

One time, Zach had insisted on bringing a friend to a home game of the Portland Pioneers against the Milwaukee Braves: his teddy bear, K Bear (which Zach would never admit had been named after Grandpa). Even though it cost him 7,000 yen extra, Kevin bought a third ticket so K Bear could get a seat in case he got tired of sitting on Zach's lap. He even bought Zach the extra-large ice cream bowl that was served in a big Pioneers baseball cap souvenir bowl, split it with him, and cleaned it out with beer and napkins so that K Bear could wear it and root for the home team. For a lifelong Milwaukee Braves fan, this was almost an act of betrayal against his home team, but Kevin was willing to put his baseball fanaticism aside if it meant making Zach have a more fun and memorable day.

Even if Kevin thought the activity wasn't to his tastes (like trips to RadioCity to browse the aisles of electronics that Kevin didn't understand the function of) he made it a point to pretend he was having fun or at least understand why Zach thought it was fun.

No matter what, all of Zach's outings with his grandpa would end with a visit to some kind of ice cream place. With how much Kevin liked ice cream, Zach occasionally thought his grandpa was making excuses to take Zach out somewhere so he could get ice cream on the way home.

Kevin always got vanilla, but he always insisted Zach try flavors he hadn't tried before, and he kept track. Zach once asked his grandpa why he wasn't allowed to get the same thing every time like Grandpa did.

"You need to try everything you can when you're young before you realize what you like and only get that when you're old like me."

Zach doesn't bring it up that often because of how much it hurts to talk about his grandpa, but these visits from age 5 to age 9 were by far the happiest period of Zach's life. He looks back on them with a mixture of nostalgia, pain, and happiness. In some way, Zach's sabbatical was an attempt at recapturing the whimsical nature of his trips with Grandpa.

 

 

Kevin's Cancer

In April 2009, just after Kevin's 55th birthday, he got some disastrous news from his doctor: he had stage IIIA lung cancer. The doctor was optimistic about Kevin's treatment since it had been caught relatively early, but Kevin told him to cut the shit and tell him how long he had. He tried to tell Kevin that wasn't how survival rates worked, but Kevin insisted.

"12 months if treatment goes badly, 24 months if things go well, and anything further than that is luck."

Kevin had smoked a pack a day up until Zach was born, when he cut back to half a pack a day. As he figured, he'd either need to die before his grandchild developed long-term memory or he'd have to die at a ripe old age. He tried to quit cold-turkey several times once he realized he was ending up as his grandson's surrogate father, but he had never been able to kick the habit fully despite Zach saying how the smell of his cigarettes made him feel a bit queasy.

 

 

The first person Kevin told about the diagnosis was his son. This happened over the phone.

"Well, shit." Jeff had figured something like this was a long time coming, but he didn't blame his dad for not taking better care of his health. Jeff could normally talk his dad's ear off, but he was very terse with this call and didn't say much. Jeff asked his dad if he could afford to take work off for treatment (he could) and told his dad to not be afraid to call if he needed help (he would).

 

The second person Kevin told about the diagnosis was his grandson. This happened in-person as Zach was finishing his ice cream after a trip to an aquarium. Kevin had spoiled his grandson by buying him two plushies (a clownfish and a shark) from the gift shop before leaving since he knew breaking the bad news was going to be hard on Zach.

The 7-year-old Zach did not take the bad news well. He hadn't quite grasped the concept of death yet, but cancer is that thing that kills you; therefore, cancer is going to kill his grandpa.

Zach's reaction fit the five stages of grief perfectly.

First came denial.

"Th-The doctor said it's survivable, right? B-Because h-h-he caught it early?"

Kevin didn't know how to tell his grandson that he almost certainly wasn't going to see him get to grow up, so he just slowly shook his head.

Zach then got angry at his grandpa.

"Y-You're such a st-stupid asshole! Y-You knew smoking was bad! I-I-I told you it was bad!"

"There's no need to cry about it, Squirt. Remember, a man is only supposed to cry when his favorite team loses a playoff game or his mom dies."

"H-H-How can you b-be so c-c-c-casual about this?! Th-This is g-gonna k-kill you! A-And it's a-a-a-all your fucking fault!"

Zach was crying loudly and having a hard time reigning in his stutter to yell at his grandpa. He had only recently started speech therapy classes and hadn't learned better ways to control it.

"What's done is done. I can't un-fuck my lungs."

At the mention of his grandpa's lungs, Zach then switched to bargaining.

"Wh-What about g-getting new lungs? O-Organ transplants exist!"

"The cancer's also in my lymph nodes. If I got new lungs, it'd just spread to them too."

Zach tossed his mostly-eaten ice cream in the trash.

"I-I want to go home a-and lie down, Grandpa. M-My ch-chest hurts."

"Same here, Squirt. Same here."

Zach slipped into a deep depression for the next two weeks and a more moderate one for the next several months. Zach never quite got over it, but he was going to be damned if he wasn't going to make his last few months with his grandpa the best yet. They were going to be his last, after all.

 

Samantha was about the eighth person Kevin told. This happened in-person as she angrily asked what he had done to Zach on their last visit to make him so depressed.

"I told him I have stage 3 lung cancer."

Samantha lightly sighed and rolled her eyes at this.

"You idiot. I told you that you needed to stop smoking a decade ago."

"You want a fucking 'I Told You So' medal or something, Samantha?"

"No, Kevin, I want you to try to avoid dying right before Zach's birthday. He doesn't take loss well and that would mess that whole month up for the rest of his life."

"Thanks for the reminder. I'll be sure to tell the cancer that December 1st through December 7th are off-limits."

Kevin was the type of guy to make wisecracks in the worst situations. He found them useful for easing tensions, because while everyone gets mad at a joke told with bad timing, nobody ever wants to kill someone for it. It's like jumping from boiling water to hot water.

"Sorry, that was a bit unnecessarily coldhearted of me. What's your prognosis?"

"'12 months if treatment goes badly, 24 months if things go well, and anything further than that is luck.'"

Samantha grimaced and inhaled through her teeth.

"You've got 18 months."

"You can't just say stuff like that, Samantha. You're a fucking brainiac, but you're just guessing right now."

"Then prove me wrong."

Kevin knew this was his daughter-in-law's way of trying to give him encouragement, but he hated that she had to be such a fucking bitch about it.

Kevin ultimately did prove Samantha wrong by living for 20 more months, but that was little more than a Pyrrhic victory.

 

Those next 20 months were a slow decline of Kevin's health. He shaved his head before chemotherapy even started and tried to pass it off as a new look to impress Zach, but neither really believed it.

Kevin did his best to keep both their spirits up, but it was clear he was in a lot of pain for the last 4 months of his life. Besides the pain, he was consumed with worry about what was going to happen to Zach without him around to provide a reality check for his mom. He had some very frank talks with Jeff about how that boy desperately needed a father figure and how Jeff was going to have to "step up to the plate" after he was gone, but Jeff had full confidence in his wife's ability to raise his son and the family wasn't financially solvent enough to switch careers for more local work (maybe it wasn't the best idea for two young adults fresh out of college to take out a sizable loan to build their own large house). Kevin at least managed to get a solemn promise from Jeff that if Zach ever decided he truly wanted to do something with his life, and it was even remotely realistic, Jeff had to support him, no matter what it was, even if it meant standing up to Samantha. Unfortunately, this promise was why Jeff didn't raise an objection to his son's expensive sabbatical.

Through sheer force of will of not wanting to turn Zach's birthday into a sad annual event, Kevin held on just a bit past Zach's 9th birthday. He had tried to get Zach a puppy for Zach's 9th birthday since he knew that this was going to be his last one with his grandson and wanted to give him a gift to Zach that would cheer him up and let him know how much his grandpa had loved him, but Samantha summarily rejected the idea because a woman with severe OCD was not going to have a pet in her house.

Kevin never fully realized it, but he had already given Zach a birthday present that did all of that: his teddy bear from when Zach was born.

 

Zach's birthday came and went, and Kevin even thought he might even make it into the new year when his health took a sudden sharp decline on December 18th.

Samantha had been listed as Kevin's emergency contact because of his son's traveling for work and she got the call that he was going to die very soon at around 11:00 PM that night.

She first called her husband and told him that he had to stop whatever he was doing, book the first flight he could, and come back home now. She then woke Zach up and very briefly explained the situation to him. Zach was told to shower and get dressed, but he hadn't been asked to take an overnight bag, so he knew that this was it.

Zach had accepted that his grandpa was going to die several months ago, but it didn't make confronting the reality any easier. He left the house with just his clothes and opted to leave his beloved teddy bear at home with him.

The mother and son showed up to the hospital room a bit after midnight. Kevin was not in a good state. He was hooked up on a ventilator and in a lot of pain, but he had declined all the pain medications because he wanted to be lucid enough to say goodbye to Zach, hopefully Jeff, and if he had the time and energy, Samantha.

"Hey, Squirt."

His voice sounded so weak.

The full weight that Zach's grandpa was going to die in this room in the next few hours hit Zach like a freight train. He broke down into sobs. There was so much he wanted to say that he thought he would have more time to say, and none of the lessons from speech therapy classes provided any help.

"You don't have to say anything, Zach. I can't talk much either right now. Just hold my hand."

Samantha has a complex about trying to make things about her, but she forced herself to hold back all her snarky and snide comments and let Zach stand there in silence, holding his grandpa's hand so tightly, like if he was strong enough he could keep him here.

Zach slowly regained his ability to talk to a certain degree, but he tried so hard to think about what he was going to say to his grandpa that he couldn't settle on anything. They were his last words to his grandpa. What if they were the wrong words?

One of Zach's biggest regrets in his life was that he didn't know what to say to his grandpa in his final moments despite knowing this moment was coming for almost 2 years. He has tried to tell himself that he didn't need to say anything in those moments, but it doesn't make him feel much better.

Kevin Taylor died about 90 minutes after Zach and Samantha arrived in that hospital room. He was 56 years old.

 

As the doctor pronounced the time of death, Samantha and Zach were asked to step away from the body.

Grandpa wasn't a person anymore. He was a body.

As Samantha ushered her son to the corner of the hosptal room, she said two words that would change Zach's perception of her forever.

"Thank God."

Samantha has a bad habit of talking to herself out loud, especially with muttering under her breath while audible, and she usually doesn't even realize when she does it.

Zach turned to his mom and shot her his angriest glare.

"Y-You're glad Grandpa's dead, aren't you?!"

Samantha's eyes opened wide like saucers as she quickly forced a slightly pained and nervous smile to her face.

"No, no, Zach! I meant 'Thank God' that he died peacefully surrounded by people who love him!"

"Dad's not here, a-and you didn't love Grandpa."

Zach didn't let his mom respond. He was fucking tired of her lies. All she had ever done was lie and try to control him. Grandpa was the only person in Zach's life who ever wanted Zach to be a person and not a puppet. He had tried to warn Zach, but he had never listened until now. And now Grandpa was there, not a person, a body, lifeless and with its strings cut. He was the only person who had ever stood up for him against his mom. Now Zach was going to have to do that himself.

"Get out, Mom! You don't deserve to be in this room."

This was the first time Zach had ever acted this way to his mom. She was quite upset at this (and Zach couldn't help but notice that she was more upset at him for not being upset that Grandpa was dead than she was upset that Grandpa was dead), but she left the room instead of starting an argument.

"Let me know when you've calmed down and gotten tired of huddling over your grandfather's body so we can get something to eat."

As she gave that parting shot, Samantha told herself that this was just Zach acting out in grief. She was sad too (she loved Kevin, despite what Zach claimed; it was just in a muted way because he drove her crazy sometimes, and not in the good way that her husband did), but just like her, he would get over it in a month or two (since that's how long it took Samantha to get over her dad's death 5 years ago).

But Zach didn't get over it. The pain of his grandpa's death is something that hurts Zach to this very day. There was now a void in his life that he didn't know how to fill, and he was terrified that his mom was going to step in and fill it for him (and herself) before he knew how to fill it. God dammit, it was his life, not hers! She doesn't get to turn her son into an extension of herself just because she felt lonely! She doesn't get to live his life for him!

Zach's thoughts were very close to what his mom thought when Kevin expressed his condolences that she was told by her doctor she shouldn't try to have another kid just over 9 years ago in a room in this very hospital.

"I need to make my life count."

From that moment on, a wedge started to grow between Zach and his mom.

 

As Zach felt his grandpa's hands get colder and stiffer, and Zach's heart started to get colder, Zach had an epiphany. About 10 minutes ago was the last time Zach saw his grandpa, and it would be the very last time he would ever see him. This wasn't his grandpa. This was the body of his grandpa. His mom, the smartest person he or anyone he knows has ever known, has said it herself.

Zach's been told some vague concepts about religion before. His dad was an agnostic former Catholic and his mom was an outright atheist who prefers to keep her views on religion private but has told him that she finds all that hogwash about religion stupid.

While Zach didn't get as far as realizing that death is a visitor who will come knocking for himself one day, he came to a firm conclusion at this moment that that there was no afterlife and that there was no God. This was a shockingly edgy conclusion for a 9-year-old boy to reach, but as Samantha said, Zach doesn't take loss well and this was the hardest he had ever felt a loss in his life.

 

Kevin's funeral on the 26th was huge and filled a large Catholic church with over 600 people in attendance. Kevin had made a lot of enemies in his line of work, but he had made far more friends.

Had the pastor delivering the sermon performed a more secular rite, Zach might not have reacted in disgust to the concept of organized religion as a delusional fantasy to avoid suffering and the pain of loss. Zach was only 9, so why was he able to clearly see that when a room full of adults couldn't?!

Besides, Kevin had been agnostic too (although he had been a devout Catholic at one point). He had only brought it up to Zach once, but the loss of his dad's older brother and his wife convinced him that God doesn't smile down upon his proudest creation. He had adopted a more secular worldview later in his life that man has to support his fellow man, because the only thing we had on this bitch of an earth was each other. Zach could understand a bunch of his grandpa's friends getting together to mourn his loss, to celebrate his life, and to honor his memory, but there was no need for the mumbo-jumbo. And the pastor had the gall to make a casual remark about a church fundraiser during the sermon for his grandpa!

The funeral concluded with a nice but overly long and rambling speech from Jeff and a fantastic and rousing speech from Samantha (public speaking is one of her strong suits; one way or another, that woman knows how to control a room). Zach wanted to say something too, but he was terrified of his stutter getting in the way of his words and he still didn't know that to say about Grandpa that could truly describe how much he loved him and how much he misses him. Next came the open mic of dozens of people coming up and saying what a lovable bastard Kevin Taylor had been with expletive-laced tall tales about this stubborn dumbass with balls of steel who kept throwing himself headfirst into danger because he was always looking out for the little man.

Zach was glad they at least got that part right about Grandpa's legacy.

 

Zach never found a way to properly fill the void in his heart left from his grandpa's death, but he viewed the jolly old bastard as nothing but a positive influence on his life. Sure, he set Zach up for trouble by teaching Zach every curse word known to man by the time he was 7 and Zach sometimes misses him so much that he physically hurts, but he's thankful that he got to know his grandpa at all. He just wishes his grandpa had taken better care of his health so he could have gotten to know him more.

 

 

Zach's Stuffed Animals

Zach has 13 stuffed animals he's acquired over the years. All but three were given by his grandpa, and he has given elaborate backstories and personalities to all but one of them as he played with them as a kid.

 

K Bear

Zach has had this teddy bear since he was an infant. A gift from his greatly-cherished grandpa in the hospital given to him when he was born, its name comes from Zach's first attempt at saying a word: his grandpa's name, Kevin, which his mom always called him instead of "Dad" or "Father-In-Law" because she didn't like the nosy father of her soulmate poking his head into how she was raising her son. It's a little mangled because Zach took it everywhere until he was 7, at which point Keisuke told Zach it wasn't normal for boys to carry stuffed animals everywhere when they got that old and he took his best friend's advice.

He's a bit headstrong and has a bit of a pottymouth, but he's got boundless courage and strength and Zach can confide in him about anything. He's naturally the leader of the animals as he's the oldest and has the most experience with the outside world.

 

Pinkers

Zach's second-oldest stuffed animal is a pink stuffed animal wearing a 1900's British male sailor uniform. Zach got her when he turned 1.

She is K Bear's best friend and helps calm him down when he gets too heated or comes up with a plan that is too unrealistic. She's a fantastic swimmer, which is why Zach trusted her on a voyage on Oswego lake that nearly drowned her when the boat capsized. She's not been swimming since and was honorably discharged from maritime service and now serves as a civilian diplomat.

She is rather intelligent but a bit of a coward, and she uses her intelligence to make excuses justifying her cowardice.

 

Spot

A Dalmatian Zach got when he was 3, right as 103 Dalmatians released on home video. It's the first film Zach remembers watching.

Zach feels guilty for owning Spot, as he understands the ethical issues of 103 Dalmatians' popularity mass-breeding dogs with chronic health issues; as such, Spot is a bit more sickly than his friends and can't play as much as them, but they all make sure to spend time doing more relaxed activities he can keep up with, even though he secretly resents his own sickly body and wishes he could play more. But those are bad thoughts, and he should be thankful that he's got such loving and accepting friends in his life.

He's a bit timid and shy, but he's got a type of charisma that when he talks, people stop and listen.

 

Rojo

A vibrantly red bull Zach got as a souvenir from a basketball game when he was 4. He's not afraid of showing his colors, but he's a bit too quick to anger.

He's always fraying apart at the seams (more than figuratively, as he's a cheaply-made souvenir), but his friends understand his anger issues and try their best to forgive him after he blows up and charges at them. Just don't call him cute, and he'll be fine.

Despite his hotheaded nature, which is even more extreme than K Bear's, he's got a strong sense of justice and has learned to channel his anger to more productive tasks over the years, like protecting Tidak from Hiu Biru.

 

Armstrong

A bald eagle that Zach's dad picked this up for him on a work trip to America when Zach was 5. Named after the 37th American President, he's a diplomat from America who has a strong sense of justice, but refuses to use force unless absolutely necessary.

He gets along well with Rojo and is the most successful in calming him down, but he has issues with Pinkers and thinks she's a coward manipulating events behind the scenes to her own advantage.

That suspicious was confirmed once when K Bear and Pinkers had a civil war that divided the animals into two factions. K Bear won the war at the Battle of Piano Room, but he chivalrously refused to kill Pinkers once she was surrounded, despite Armstrong's insistence. K Bear's mercy reminded Pinkers of their deep bond of friendship and she apologized, and everyone was friends again after a big group hug.

Armstrong still doesn't trust Pinkers, but he's a peacemaker and puts his mistrust aside for peace.

 

Maple

Zach's dad's second stuffed animal gift was a moose he picked up on a work trip to Canada when Zach was 6. He serves as a diplomat from Canada and is also a driller for maple syrup, a liquid Zach didn't fully understand the manufacturing process of until after he came up with the backstory and it was too late to change it by that point. Zach says Animaltopia's maple syrup comes from the roots of their maple trees, so "driller" is still the right word.

He's a very peaceful and polite gentleman who is best friend with Spot on account of both having a more relaxed nature. He's also not the smartest of the animals, but he's easily the kindest.

His antlers a bit floppy, and he's very sensitive about it. The only time he's ever gotten mad was when Rojo tried to give him advice to fix his antlers (since he has very pointy horns) and Maple had to insist, rather firmly, that he didn't want to fix his horns if it meant going to the vet since he's scared of hospitals. Zach never got around to giving him the arc where K Bear gives him courage to visit a vet.

 

Louis

A stray orange tabby cat Zach got when he was 7. There was no special occasion, but Kevin picked this one up from a big gas station gift shop when he traveled to Seattle to settle a lockout dispute from a lumber manufacturer.

He's all action, all the time, and completely insane. He's unfortunately a bit grating on the other animals as he wants to party all the time, but nobody is better at picking up an animal when they're down than Louis.

He's also an accomplished musician, but he's very modest about his talents.

 

Tidak

A clownfish Zach got from an aquarium right before his grandpa told him about his stage 3 lung cancer diagnosis. She's the smallest of Zach's stuffed animals.

Zach has to keep her away from Hiu Biru or she'll get eaten. Thankfully, her small size means she can hide in the sheets or between her friends.

 

Hiu Biru

A big blue shark Zach got from an aquarium gift shop right before his grandpa told him about his stage 3 lung cancer diagnosis. The largest of Zach's stuffed animals, Hiu Biru is a bit of a bully, and Zach has to keep him away from Tidak or he will eat her.

That's not to say he isn't without his good points. Even though he's a bully, he's a very comfy pillow.

Zach doesn't know that this type of stuffed shark is a huge meme in the MTF trans community, but Britney does.

 

A.J.

Also known as Ankur Jurassic, he's an ankylosaurus, which is Zach's favorite dinosaur. He got him from a limited paleontology exhibit in a museum in downtown Portland a bit after he recovered from the worst of his depression caused by learning his grandpa was going to die soon. The temporary nature of the exhibit made Zach's insistence upon getting two stuffed animals a lot more convincing.

He and T.J., his sister, are psychic dinosaurs sent from the past to learn as much about the asteroid that later hit Earth so they can stop it. He's very secretive about their mission and prefers to talk to his sister than the animals, so Zach has little idea what his personality is.

A.J.'s powers are concerned with telepathy, telekinesis, and vector control. He's the dinosaur's ace in the hole against the asteroid if he ever develops that last power fully, but he doesn't have proper control of his powers and can hurt the animals if he practices irresponsibly.

The other exhibit at the museum was on Hinduism, which is why Zach gave A.J. a Hindu name and a complicated backstory with superpowers. Those superpowers and backstory proved largely incompatible with the established lore of Animaltopia and were a mistake in hindsight.

 

T.J.

Also known as Triya Jurassic, she's a triceratops, which is Zach's second-favorite dinosaur. He got her from a limited paleontology exhibit in a museum in downtown Portland a bit after he recovered from the worst of his depression caused by learning his grandpa was going to die soon. The temporary nature of the exhibit made Zach's insistence upon getting two stuffed animals a lot more convincing.

She and A.J., her brother, are psychic dinosaurs sent from the past to learn as much about the asteroid that later hit Earth so they can stop it. She's very secretive about their mission and prefers to talk to her brother than the animals, so Zach has little idea what her personality is.

T.J.'s powers are concerned with astral projection, matter transmutation, and reincarnation. She'd actually resurrect if the asteroid hit Earth due to that last power and could revitalize the planet for dinosaurs if it ever hits, but she wouldn't want to live in a world without her brother.

The other exhibit at the museum was on Hinduism, which is why Zach gave T.J. a Hindu name and a complicated backstory with superpowers. Those superpowers and backstory proved largely incompatible with the established lore of Animaltopia and were a mistake in hindsight.

 

Roger

A bunny Zach got from a crane game at an arcade Kevin took him to when he was 8. This was the first stuffed animal Zach ever acquired on his own (sorta), and he just had to get it because bunnies are secretly his favorite animal. Kevin gave his grandson a stream of quarters until he won. That sense of accomplishment sticks with Zach to this day, even though his dying grandpa would have spent any amount of money to see his grandson smile the way he did when he won his prize. Kevin's biggest regret is that he didn't get to see his grandson smile into the future as he grew up.

He's got a sketchy personality, but he's easygoing and goes with the flow. He also has a fantastic sense of humor even if the jokes are a bit too dirty and he was shaping up to be a bit of a pervert.

 

King

Zach made this stuffed tiger by hand a few weeks after his grandpa died using a kit from a hobby store. He fucked up some of the stitching and has occasionally thought of asking his mom or Britney to fix it for him, but is too ashamed to bring up the topic.

Something changed in Zach as he looked down at his stuffed animal with a vague sense of disappointment. The 9-year-old boy had tried his best to add a new stuffed animal to his collection, but the magic was gone without his grandpa there, and Zach had to accept that it was never coming back.

All of a sudden, Zach's complicated lore for his stuffed animals felt so stupid and childish. These toys were for little kids, and he had to start being a man with his grandpa dead and his dad absent.

He put all of them but K Bear in a box in his closet and only brought them out after an argument with his mom right before leaving for college that was so bad that he became absolutely desperate to feel better and resorted to bringing out his old friends just to feel a little less alone. It was an oddly successful pick-me-up.

Zach never got around to giving King a personality, as he only ever got a name, but if Zach were to go back now and finish what he started, he'd probably make animal number 13 chronically unlucky and a coward afraid of his own shadow.

 

 

Zach's Dad

Zach's dad, Jeff Taylor (born April 2nd, 1978, in Portland, OR, AKR), is Zach's elusive and largely absent father. He's a handsome 5'11", 44-year-old man with very expressive big brown eyes, medium-dark brown hair (with a hint of silver) of medium-short length, a short full beard that he started to grow once he turned 40 (like his hair, it's medium-dark brown with a hint of silver), a slight babyface with dimples worn into them because he's a person who smiles and laughs a lot, and a white skin tone with a slight tan and a great upper body because of his job requiring heavy lifting outside fairly often.

 

Jeff was extremely handsome in his youth (and has kept most of that as a middle-aged adult), but his kindness and his great looks were enough to get a sizable unrealized and unintentional harem of women around him. Until Samantha chained him down, he was basically a shounen anime harem protagonist with a talent for saying the best possible thing to a woman right when she needs to hear it the most, but he never realized how much of a lady killer he was (despite most people around him realizing that) because he's very oblivious.

In fact, Jeff would never realize any of the girls had feelings for him unless one confessed, at which point, he'd date them. These relationships only lasted a few weeks at most because he's just not clued into realizing that these girls wanted more than a casual bit of romance and the other girls would work behind the scenes to knock her out of the competition. Once Samantha found herself in that harem, she quickly scattered the herd around her husband through her strong personality and willingness to play for keeps.

He's only ever asked out two people in his life: his first girlfriend in middle school (a relationship that lasted about a week) and Zach's mom in college (a relationship that has been going strong for over 23 years). He loves his wife dearly and is a big softie for her, and they make a good pair because he has this great ability to diffuse tense situations she creates. He also never really gets mad at people, ever (a thing Keisuke saw and has been trying to emulate) and is a very likable person.

Jeff's biggest personality traits are being extremely kind and easygoing, acting like an oblivious airhead yet instinctively knowing how to help people (especially women), having a lame sense of humor and being an excessive rambler who won't stop talking until he runs out of steam or someone forcibly interrupts him, and operating almost entirely on whims and vibes.

He's not stupid (he completed his undergraduate architectural design major with a 3.76 GPA), but his intelligence feels lacking compared to the sheer magnitude of his wife's genius. Plus, he's not really able to plan for anything, like, ever, because he deals with situations as they arise, and Samantha is so much better at planning that he just leaves that to her, which has caused what little ability he has to plan his life out to atrophy.

 

Jeff's job, precisely, is the chief agent and renovator for Zhulu, the most prominent online real-estate database and marketplace company in AKR. While Jeff's job has started to turn into managing the most profitable branch of a large company, he's on the ground a lot, which requires an incredible amount of traveling to the point that he's home for only about a month total every year.

When the company buys a house or commercial building, Jeff is the guy they send to the property to evaluate it and provide a more accurate assessment of its value, but more specifically, if a profitable renovation to increase its value is possible, and if so, to direct everything involved with that renovation, such as acquiring the necessary construction materials, employing contracted workers (while the broad geographical scope of his job means he can't solely use unionized labor, the lessons from Jeff's father means he will not budge on properly compensating contracted employees and making sure they receive proper benefits), maintaining strict adherence to building codes, and occasionally, supplying his own labor.

He now runs a fairly large team of about 10 people with the job he used to have a 20 years ago, but for the major properties acquired (such as expensive historical mansions or important office complexes), Jeff is the person Zhulu sends to provide that special "white-glove service" because he's the best in the business at what he does.

Jeff still considers his wife to be a better architect than him (an opinion that makes him slightly jealous even if he mostly feels lucky to marry such a genius), but over his 20-year career of evaluation, renovation, reconstruction, and personel organization, Jeff he has built up a well-deserved reputation for hard work, fair treatment of employees under his wing, and a touch of design talent across the entire industry.

 

Despite the high demand for his talent, how important his work is for Zhulu's bottom line, and his years of experience and loyalty to a huge company with a market capital of 650 billion yen, Jeff brings in a comparably modest salary of only 12.5 million yen. Much of this salary is supplemented by bonuses from commissions and he's been having to work more than ever to help pay for his son's university.

The Taylors assumed from early on in their only child's life that he would easily earn a scholarship to university and never budgeted for the possibility that he wouldn't have one, but Zach burned his full-ride scholarship to travel the world for a year and took on 10 million yen of student loan debt to finance this trip (of which about half was used for the trip with some being withdrawn from time to time to help supplement the income from Jeff; Zach inherited his dad's inability to plan his life, but that is a topic for later).

Zhulu has a somewhat deserved reputation for the Zestimations® imprecisely relying on the square meters of the property; similarly, the commission bonuses are primarily calculated based on the amount of properties evaluated and renovated, not the types of properties and the extra touches given to improving their value. This gave Jeff an incentive to be less creative with his renovation work in order to renovate more properties. That's not to say that he isn't a fantastic renovator (he is) or that he half-assed things (he doesn't), but he is at his heart a designer and misses the excitement of giving a building that extra attention to detail, either from a complete renovation or creating it from scratch.

 

Jeff's proudest design is the home he spends so little time in. He and Samantha financed loans very soon after graduation for the construction of their forever dream home in Lake Oswego, OR (20 minutes south of their hometown, Portland). He and Samantha, then a newlywed couple, designed this house together. The two-story house with a medium-size basement is a postmodern design largely of a neo-Colonial style, with hints of blending Queen Anne and Folk Victorian revival styles and even Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie style for a large and open living room and kitchen. Every member of the family is an architecture nerd and nobody can fully agree on how to define the style of the house, but it artfully blends historical styles and features into a creative design that is distinct and functional.

Jeff and Samantha were intending to have at least 2 children, but Samantha was told bluntly by her doctor that it would be inadvisable for her to have another kid after Zach with how difficult the labor was; because of this, the house is huge for a 3-person family (especially when one of those family members is often not at home).

 

This house was also expensive, which would have been fine if Samantha and Jeff had stuck to their plan to start a design firm together, but Samantha insisted on becoming a full-time mom after Zach was born. This was a problem because Samantha had built up connections with future clients interested in working with her because of her sheer talent and obsessive attention to detail and she could have looked forward to a long, distinguished, and profitable future career as either an architect or an engineer. Jeff was no slouch himself and could have gotten a small architectural design firm off the ground by his own merits, but it was simply not realistic to expect the same level of income without her involved in the process and it would take time to grow that business by himself as where Samantha could have had clients lined up at her feet just through her name recognition as the valedictorian of the LCU Class of 2000.

Jeff has always been a big softie for his wife, and she can be a very convincing person, so he put aside his doubts and agreed.

But the job hunt was difficult and started taking too long. After 3 months of constant and heartbreaking dead ends, the first bills from those loans were coming due. When Leon Burton, Jeff Taylor's best friend from college (and later Rich's father), heard that Samantha was going to be a full-time mom instead of starting that firm with Jeff, he came to his best friend with a job offer with a salary of 9.5 million yen that was too good to refuse.

 

Leon had previously made this offer in college during a quiet moment at a party to Jeff about getting in on the ground floor of this far-fetched idea he had of starting an online real-estate marketplace company together. Back in 1997 when Leon came up with this idea, the internet was this nearly brand-new thing that everyone was still trying to understand, but he realized the lucrative potential of an online directory of houses for sale, estimating the value of a home, seeing the trends of a single house or houses in an area changing value over time, and letting you compare houses. If he did it early enough, he could corner the market of search results of people trying to buy or sell a home.

Leon accurately surmised what proved to be a successful strategy in this talk, which was getting as much data as they could, having an algorithm that would accurately estimate the value of a home on as few details as possible, printing these estimates in newspapers (which Leon saw on the way out as a form of mass media but still useful for now) for far cheaper than traditional real-estate companies, generating revenue from advertising those listings in print and on its website.

And that was just the first step. Leon had talked about eventually using all this data to easily flip homes on a scale never seen before, as an algorithm could cut out the middleman cost of a professional on site estimating the property before an offer is made, meaning they could undercut the competition with lower fees while still keeping the same margin. Even better, the convenience of eventually being able to buy or sell a home online was a huge advantage over using a traditional real-estate agent and meant that they only thing that would slow growth was the number of houses that existed, and given that AKR (and Portland specifically) was being injected with a constant flow of investment capital for residential expansion, that line was going to be going up for a long, long time.

But, before a purchase could be made on a house from the company, someone was still going to have to go on-site and check the property for repairs and see that the estimate from the algorithm was accurate before the money could change hands. And if Zhulu was going to start flipping houses, they would need a guy on the ground giving a personal touch to renovations and value improvements capable of judging whether or not all of this was going to be profitable for any given property in the first place, and if so, capable of coordinating crews to get things done on time. Leon wanted Jeff to be that guy.

Leon majored in business, but he needed a guy who knew houses, and who better than his best friend?

Jeff briefly reminded his best friend that his wife was a better architect than he was before insisting that he was going to open a design firm with her after college. He was grateful for the offer, but he had his doubts.

 

Now, Jeff had little choice but to accept this job he had turned down before, but a key difference was that Leon's business had already gotten off the ground floor, was generating enough revenue to pay back loans from venture capital groups that had financed it, and many key personnel were in place. There was still a seat at the table for Jeff here, but there wasn't enough room left next to Leon for Jeff to be his partner in this like Leon had planned.

Jeff understood this, but because of the pressure of providing enough for his new family and seeing this as a slice of a pie that kept shrinking, he took the offer instead of continuing his job search.

This new job meant that Jeff was traveling a lot. So much, in fact, that he was only home for about two months total that year and wasn't even home when the house he had designed his wife was fully completed.

Jeff soon earned a promotion closer to that "ground floor" Leon mentioned, but it came with more responsibilities that required him to work even harder and spend less time at home.

 

 

Zach's Dad's Absence

Jeff has never fully grasped how profoundly his absence affected Samantha and Zach.

 

Samantha has slowly been going insane from the absence of the love of her life and loneliness in general. College was a transformative experience for the young woman that made her realize she was actually an extrovert whose life circumstances had forced her to live as an introvert, but her prickly personality and the lack of trust she places in people means she is not good at starting or maintaining friendships. She only has three friends left of note: Carol Burton (arguably her best friend), Leon Burton's wife and an ambitious woman who she has known since college; Anna Nakamura, Keisuke's extremely kind mom and her next-door neighbor of 15 years (who divorced her husband and moved away to Seattle last year), and very sadly, Zach Taylor, her son.

Samantha runs off a mix of love, her genius intellect, keen instinct, and hodgepodge of mental illnesses, most primarily severe OCD. She presents the most stereotypical OCD symptoms of ritualistic cleaning and mysophobia (an encompassing term for fear of contamination, dirt, and germs), but this pathological phobia has slowly been becoming more severe over the last 20 years (and more specifically, the last 11 years since she lost her most regular conversational partner and reality check, Kevin Taylor) to the point that she fully cleans her large house three times a week. After all, what if Jeff comes back unannounced? And the house is dirty? And he gets sick? Or even worse, thinks I am a bad wife?

Worrying ruminative thoughts like this constantly run through Samantha's mind without pause. She has a very Asiatic view of mental illness (it's not a sickness, it's laziness and a lack of willpower), but even Samantha knows she is starting to fray. She's secretly been seeing a psychologist/psychiatrist pair and has started to take antidepressants, but they only slightly take the edge off. She also hates how they make her mind feel slower, so she only takes them if things get particularly bad and instead relies on slight day drinking and keeping her overactive mind busy with painting, reading, cleaning, and what little social interaction she can get. Yes, she knows that's not how SSRIs work, but even if her mind is her own worst enemy, she feels like she's nothing without it running at full-blast.

She needs proper help, but Zach has pushed her away too much to be the person to help her get it and her husband only sees her in short bursts where she can do a much better job of pretending that she's okay.

 

Zach never got a dad growing up... well, he did with his grandpa, but he died when Zach was 9 and his death devastated Zach. Even more devastating was that his dad never stepped in to fill that role when his dad (Zach's grandpa) died. Zach never told his dad how much he needed a father and Jeff is too oblivious to realize it on his own (and his own grief from losing his father prevented him from seeing how much Zach needed a father in those following weeks), but a lot of how and why Zach is the way he is can be explained by the fact that he lacked a real father figure and his mom had such a high degree of control over his upbringing.

Because of Zach's infrequent interaction with his dad, most of Zach's knowledge about his dad comes from his mom, who gave her son a very biased and even exaggerated view of how amazing of a person her husband is. In a way, her gushing about the love of her life while embellishing his many good qualities and minimizing his few less-desirable ones made Zach feel a tiny bit of resentment that he never got that amazing person to leave much of an impact on his life. Zach wouldn't have traded anything in the world for his grandpa's impact on his life, but he really wishes his dad would have come in to fill that void left by the passing of his father figure when he was 9.