MrBallen

But the truth was, Dorothy didn't really know Kenny at all.

I mean, she had just hired him the day before.

But he seemed nice enough, and she was hoping he would stick around for a while.

After all, she had had a pretty high turnover rate amongst her handymen over the last year, and so she was hoping now for some consistency.

So both the pet cemetery itself and Dorothy's house, which again was on the cemetery grounds, required a lot of upkeep that Dorothy was just not physically capable of doing.

Besides her bad hip, she also took medication for her depression that made her weak and sometimes very disoriented.

Now, sometimes Dorothy would ask her neighbors for help, but generally speaking, she preferred to just hire people to do the work because, you know, people needed steady work.

She could give that to them and she appreciated the help.

However, the problem with hiring these handymen was that unfortunately, a few of her former handymen had turned out to be criminals.

Last fall, her handyman at the time, this guy named Elkin Childress, had lived with her and worked on the grounds, but Elkin was always just sort of wandering around and exploring the property instead of taking care of it.

Then she had found out he'd been arrested for robbery, so she guessed that what he was really doing when he was walking around was casing the place, you know, looking for ways to break in or to steal something.

Luckily for her, he actually quit before she had to fire him.

And the guy before Elkin was even worse.

His name was Brandon Nodier.

Brandon was a total loudmouth who had started working for Dorothy right after her mother had died.

He and his wife Bonnie had moved in with Dorothy so Brandon could keep up with the repairs while Bonnie drove Dorothy around.

But, just like Elkin, the issue she ran into with the Nodiers was theft.

The previous spring, Dorothy had had this really intense depressive episode and was taking a lot of medication for it.

And while she was all, you know, medicated and groggy, the Nodiers convinced her to sell them her land for basically nothing.

But when Dorothy realized what had happened, she made the Nodiers move out and then got a lawyer to overturn the deal that she had signed.