Amber Moved Into Our Basement Apartment
By: Karen L. Jones
Tags: Humour, Relationships, Family, Love, Sex

I was too focused on the fact that someone with a steady job, her own car and a reference list in hand, wanted to rent the small one-bedroom basement apartment in our home.

Amber was twenty eight, with long dyed red hair and a nice smile. She was excited about moving in. She visited the place with her mom. It all seemed great.

I was busy and didn’t check her references. We signed a one-year lease.

It started a couple of days after she moved in.

Knock, knock. We were eating dinner and it took me a minute to register the knock was coming from the other side of the kitchen door. Our last tenant phoned if she needed something, and I’d asked Amber to do the same.

I opened the door and Amber stood there smiling, a bit too much.

“I just wondered, you guys like, don’t mind if I paint the place a bit do you?”

“Um, no, I don’t think so,” I said. “We just painted it last year though.”

“I know,” she said smiling “I just prefer a bit of color.”

“Sure, add a bit of colour if you want. Yea, that’s OK,” I said, distracted as I saw my daughter knock her glass of water over and go grab the dish towel.

I went back to dinner as my daughter mopped up the water. I never thought that maybe I should ask to see the color first.

A week later, my young son and his buddy tore around the kitchen and living room, playing dragons and knights, while I tried to get some work done.

The phone rang. Amber’s voice, minus her smile came through the line.

“Look. I’m trying to work down here and it’s very noisy up there — I can’t concentrate at all.”

“OK,” I paused to take this in. “Well, I was upfront with you that there were young kids in the house and not much noise proofing. You said that wasn’t a problem because you’d be out at work during the week days.”

“Well now I’m working from home so it is a problem. Please have them quiet down,” she said and slammed down the phone. The slam came through the phone line, and the floor.

I chalked it up to a bad day. She didn’t complain about the noise again, but in the next weeks there were lots of calls and visits at the kitchen door with things that weren’t quite right for her. She needed to use the shared laundry on different days then we had agreed to. Did we have an extra extension cord as there weren’t enough outlets. I asked her about her job and she explained she now worked from home as her company had moved their office out of the city.

She knocked on the door to show me a picture of some pill bugs she found in the bathroom. I reminded her it was a basement unit, and gave her some bug spray. She returned the next day, asking for a plumber because she didn’t find the hot water, hot enough. I checked it out and told her it was as hot as upstairs but we could turn up the hot water tank and see if that helped. When she came up later to report it wasn’t hotter, I suggested if the apartment wasn’t what she’d hoped for, she could break the lease. No, she said and stormed off back downstairs.

And then, another thing started to happen. I’d hear a knock at the side door and Amber letting someone in, as I cleaned up the kitchen at night. I started to notice there was a lot of coming and going in the apartment, the side door slamming shut late into the night or early in the morning.

Most mornings, I’d hear voices on the other side of the kitchen door and lots of giggling and chatting — always her voice and a deeper male voice. Of course, she could have people over whenever she wanted — it was her place. A couple of mornings I looked out the front window, trying to catch a glimpse of her new boyfriend. I saw him, and the next time I saw another guy.

The next time she called to ask about something, I mentioned there seem to be some different people coming and going from the place.

“I rent this unit and there’s nothing in it about having whatever friends over that I want,” she said. She was right. I have to say, I admired her tenacity.

Sometimes, one of her friends came in the afternoon instead of later at night. Hallway chatter and giggling, sometimes voices got raised a bit, music played.

One evening the kids and I were eating dinner. I’d heard the side door just as we were starting to eat. As we made our tacos, I heard some loud talking, laughing in both a female and deeper male voice, directly below our table, in the bedroom of the apartment.

As we ate and chatted about our days, the sounds below got louder.

“Oh, yea, Oh yes baby, yes..”

“I’ll give it to you..”

“Ahh, Ahhhh!” screams of pleasure reverberating around our feet in the dining room.

My son looked up from his plate, eyes wide.

“Amber hurt herself!” he said, concerned.

“Yea, I’m not sure,” I said half smiling. His older sister looked worried, a bit confused.

“We should go help her,” he said getting down from his chair and heading to the kitchen door.

“No, no I think she’s maybe just having some fun with her friend.”

I pulled him back to the table, turned up the radio loud and sat back down. I didn’t think of myself as uptight but clearly I was. I wasn’t ready to explain the sex that was happening beneath us as we ate our tacos. I turned up the radio a bit more.

I learned to keep the radio handy in the dining room and turned it up often.

One evening a few weeks later, the knock came at the door. I braced myself.

“I’m going to be moving next month. Its just too noisy here,” she said.

“OK, sure. That’s fine with us,” I said. I smiled and didn’t hide my relief.

After she left I walked through what used to be a white basement apartment — a neon orange kitchen, a lime-green bathroom and a deep-purple bedroom.

No Amber.