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Notgrass:
Lesson 144
Creative Writing
When Helladius Angelo's wife, Marian, was seven months pregnant with their second child, he lost his license to practice law. The family was soon out of money and was struggling to make ends meet. When the time came for Marian to give birth to a handsome baby boy, she named him Nicky. When Nicky was only a ten months old, Marian tragically died by a lightning bolt which hit their apartment, leaving her two children motherless. Helladius moved from Washington D.C. to Nevada and raised Nicky and his daughter Biana, who was two years older than Nicky, in a government housing complex named The Desert Lotus.
Nicky started school when he was seven years old and by that time Helladius had remarried a woman named Mariette. Mariette had a daughter named Hazina who was a year younger than Nicky. The apartment in Desert Lotus was incredibly cramped with the five of them living there so Helladius applied for a Habitat for Humanity house. It took a few weeks for an answer to come back, and when it did, it wasn't good news. The Angelo-Lavonte family had been denied a house at that time. Helladius could do nothing except find another job and send the kids to more after-school care.
When Nicky was ten and Hazina was nine, Biana got into an accident on a school field trip and died. She was only twelve and her father's favorite. Helladius sank into deep depression and left Mariette with the remaining children and moved to Los Angeles. As time progressed, Mariette's financial situation only worsened. She had been working as a jeweler at a small shop in town, and a fortune teller in their home. The shop where Mariette had been working laid her off due to budget cuts. Mariette was down to only one income left to raise a fourteen year old boy and a thirteen year old girl. Being a fortune teller didn't bring in much money, due to the non-superstitious citizens of their town. Now if the family lived in New Orleans, she might have had better luck.
Hazina had luck finding gold and other precious stones, so all the gems she found; it was really only a little more than dust, she pawned away, hoping to improve her family life. Nicky took time off school and got himself a job at the local funeral home. It didn't pay much, but every little bit helped. Mariette looked hard to find a job, but nobody even wanted an interview with her. Eventually, Mariette remembered the organization he husband applied for years ago, Habitat for Humanity. She went through the application process and a few weeks later, the letter came back saying that they had been accepted. Construction would begin on their house in a few months. Mariette was overjoyed.
Nicky and Hazina were at camp in New York when their mother got the acceptation letter. The children were going to be there for the whole summer, so the house would be close to completion when they came home. Mariette worked long and hard to better her finances. She started by finding a job at a local grocery store. She picked this up so they would have a steady income and Nicky could return to school. After many long hours at the store, at the construction site and at homeowners' classes, Mariette was finally able to move into her new home. On August fifth, Mariette met her kids at the airport and drove them to their new home. They took a different route than normal, which confused Nicky and Hazina, but when Mariette parked the car, a large bus was parked in front of a house that they could only see the tip of. When the bus pulled away, Nicky and Hazina saw a new house and looked to their mother for explanation. Mariette smiled and told her children how over the summer, she had help construct the house through Habitat for Humanity.
She explained that the house was theirs; that the children didn't have to share a room anymore. The two kids screamed and ran towards the house but paused when they saw the interior. The house was nothing special, but it was finer than anything that they could remember. Hazina and Nicky bolted up the stairs and found their respective bedrooms. Nicky's was painted black and silver with posters of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco. He flopped onto his bed and sighed in contentment. Hazina's room was filled with posters of horses and old timey, WWII era posters. Tears sprang to her eyes as she took in the wonderful room. Nicky gave up his job at the funeral home and returned to school. Mariette kept her job at the grocery store, but gave up fortune telling. The family's life improved drastically over the next few years.
One day Nicky wrote his dad, telling him about their new home and saying that he wished that he was here. A few weeks later, when Nicky and Hazina came home from school and Mariette returned from work, there was Helladius, sitting on the couch, waiting for them to come home. Nicky gasped and ran to his father. Helladius wrapped his arms around his son and hugged him tight, four years was too long to have been away. The four of them lived out their days in the new house, paying off their mortgage and staying out of debt. Habitat for Humanity had changed the Angelo-Lavonte family forever.