Prologue
We called it “the cottage,” but it was more like a storage unit with bedrooms.
In the seventies, when my grandparents were still alive, they’d painted the main space a deep Pumpkin Orange. That went over well, so they did the bedroom doors China Red, and the kitchen cupboards Harvest Gold. As a finishing touch, they pasted hippie daisy stickers all over everything—doors, walls, chairs. Obviously, they were trying to disguise the dinginess of the place. Funny enough, they turned the cottage into such an eyesore that you didn’t notice how run-down it was. So, in a way, their plan was a roaring success.
That is, until you stepped into the bathroom.
I guess it couldn’t technically be called a bathroom, since it didn’t have a bathtub. Or a shower. It was more like a powder ro
