“Hi, Mitch,” she said. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “Sorry I missed your call.”
“Not a problem at all,” she said. “So like I said in my voicemail, we’ve just got some housekeeping things to do, and I’ve got some questions.”
“Fire away,” he said, putting the phone on speaker and leaning back in the incredibly uncomfortable hotel chair that had not been designed with guys like Mitch in mind.
“First, what do you plan to do with your condo?” She asked.
Cutting right to the chase then. Wonderful.
“I…” Mitch paused, marshaling his thoughts. “Look, Sherry. I literally just arrived in LA. I hadn’t really thought much past getting myself and my skates out of Detroit.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a little chuckle that grated on him. As though he were being funny by not having his shit together.
As if it was hilarious that his whole entire life had been turned upside down in the span of sixteen hours.
“You have a couple options,” she was saying.
“And those are?”
“Well, sell, of course. You should be able to receive a great price for it in the current market. Or you could keep it.”
“What exactly would keeping it entail?”
As a professional athlete, Mitch didn’t have a mortgage or rent or any of those tedious things. He had purchased his condo free and clear the first day he laid eyes on it, feeling completely at home under the vaulted ceilings and the view of this city stretching out beyond the soaring windows.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking,” Sherry said.
“I mean, what do you need from me in order to keep it? My mom lives in Ann Arbor, and while I know it’s not that far of a drive, if she ever has to come into the city for work in the winter, I’d like for her to have somewhere to stay.”
“Oh, uhh…” Sherry sounded as though Mitch had caught her off guard. If he had to, he would hazard a guess that she had been banking on a huge commission check from the sale of his condo.
Sorry to dampen your mood, sweetheart,he thought.Sometimes we don’t always get what we want.
The hell he was currently living was proof of that.
“What do you need from me to make this happen, Sherry?”
“Nothing, actually. The condo is yours to do with as you wish. All I would recommend is having a cleaning service come in semi-regularly. In case you ever do have guests there.”
“I have one.” He was man enough to know where his limits were. Homemaking certainly fell beyond that line.
“Okay, great,” Sherry said, the clicking of a pen echoing into Mitch’s hotel room. “That settles that. So now there’s the matter of the loft.”
“I’m keeping that, too.”
“But why?” She asked, clearly exasperated, her voice on the edge of whiny.
“It’s a great investment, and properties like that don’t go on the market every day. I’d rather not let it go just because I don’t play for the Warriors anymore.”
“So what are you going to do with it from all the way across the country?”
“I’ll keep it listed on all the property rental sites it's currently on,” he said. But then another thought occurred to him. “How do we go about getting Brent Jean added to the title?”
Mitch could practically hear Sherry’s scowl through the phone, and he held in a laugh. This woman had clearly expected this to be a very different phone call, one with her garnering a hefty payday for her efforts.
“I can fax you over some paperwork to sign. It’s basically a deed. It’ll go from just being you on the property to you and Mr. Jean. If that’s what you want…”
