Resident Manager: Part I

(This story is – mostly – true, with some important name changes…)

My first job out of college with a BSBA was at the same place that I had worked the previous two years – a small (only 100 rooms) Motel 6 near the campus. I had been the evening shift supervisor there, and now, the owner made me the Resident Manager. This was not only a big promotion, and a raise, but it also came with a furnished apartment. What’s not to like?

The owner was a really smart businessman, and a genuinely nice guy – a rare combination. The motel was only one of several ventures he owned – a couple of upscale restaurants, a car-rental franchise, and various other things. He and his wife could not have children, so they had adopted three infants, two boys first, and then a girl. All three were about two years apart in age, and all three came from unrelated families, and all three knew from the beginning that they were adopted, and all three knew that they were loved and wanted, come what may. I got the job because the oldest of the three, Cory, was a classmate of mine in the Business school. I knew his younger brother Brett also, from college, where he was two years behind Cory and me. Their younger sister Regina was still in high school.

All three were completely different physically and temperamentally. Cory was about 5’9”, with dark wavy hair and black eyes, that were mild in repose but which, when he was excited or intensely feeling something, turned into dark pools in which it was easy to lose yourself entirely. He was smallish, and more of an intellectual than the others. He used to dress up at Halloween parties as Edgar Allan Poe and could have been his double. Brett was bigger – about 6’3” – and bulkier, with piercing blue eyes below a cap of golden ringlets that belonged on a Cupid in some Titian painting. The total effect was rendered less angelic by his full, sensuous mouth and the sardonic grin which it often wore – if he looked like an angel, it was definitely a fallen one. He was a total jock, and was in college on a baseball scholarship. He was majoring in Phys Ed and Sports Medicine, but already in his sophomore year he was being scouted by the major leagues, and there was talk that he might postpone school. Regina was a fiery redhead with a temper to match, and green eyes that were just as piercing as Brett’s baby blues. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but had one of those ‘interesting’ faces that you don’t soon forget.

All three of them had worked at the motel in some capacity, and I was brought into the mix when Cory and I were juniors in college and Brett was a freshman. We all three worked together, we all did everything in terms of jobs that needed to be done, and we all got along, and I had great respect for the owner and his wife, not only professionally, but personally as well. My own parents had divorced when I was a small child, and I hadn’t seen or heard from my own father in years. My mother was far too