by Chris Fabry
Clara looked over the pages, the catchy phrases that realty companies used to draw people in, and she thought about prayer. Of course. Everything came back to the topic. Most people made it more complicated than it really was, she thought. They looked for a formula or a mathematical equation. And believed that if you didn’t do every step right, you didn’t get what you were praying for. She knew nothing could be further from the truth because prayer was about relationship. Prayer was talking and listening and being excited to spend time with someone who loves you.
She turned the page and felt like putting a finger down and letting that be the determining factor—wherever her finger landed. Then the doorbell rang. Maybe it was God bringing a Realtor to her without her even calling!
She opened the door and saw the young man before her and realized she’d forgotten the appointment she had made. She searched her mind for his name until it came.
“It’s Justin, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. My mom said you needed some help with yard work.”
“That’s a fact,” she said. “Now you come on in here and let me pour you a glass of lemonade and we’ll talk about terms and conditions.”
The teenage boy didn’t seem to understand, but he came inside anyway.
“Your mother says you’re fifteen. Is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I like the way you talk. You’re showing respect, and that’s good.” She poured a glass of lemonade and set it before him, thinking of the conversation she’d had with his mother the day before. The worry she had as a single mom who couldn’t spend as much time with him as she wanted. All the bad choices a young person could make these days.
“I have two rules,” she said. “Take pride in yourself and in the job you do.”
“Ma’am?”
“I want you to do a good, thorough job on my yard. No skimping or shortcuts. You don’t try to race around and see how fast you can get it done so you can do something else. You take your time and take pride in how this yard looks when you walk away from it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Justin said. “I can do that.”
“The Bible says whatever you do, do it to the glory of God. Whatever you put your hand to, do it with all your heart.”
“Yes, ma’am. But what do you mean about taking pride in myself?”
“The way you dress. The way you stand up straight and look people in the eye. I can tell your mother has done a good job. I want you to keep that up—along with those pants. A man wears his pants around his waist, not sagging down to his knees.”
Justin couldn’t stifle a smile, and Clara knew this was the way you changed the world. You first let God change you. And pretty soon He brought somebody else along and if you were attentive enough to listen and hungry enough, He would bring others who wanted to not only see a change, but live change.
Clara showed Justin the yard and the hard-to-get places with the mower. When she finished, she asked, “You don’t know any good Realtors, do you?”
“No, ma’am. But the next-door neighbors just sold their house and they seemed to like them.”
“What was the company?”
“The sign had a number and then rocks, I think. No, stones. That’s what it said. Twelve Stone.”
Clara nodded, thanked him, and told him to come back the next day to start work. She found the listing for Twelve Stone Realty and called, finally reaching a woman named Elizabeth Jordan. She sounded young and pleasant. Easy to work with.
“Now I’m not sure when I want to sell, but I need somebody to help walk me through it.”
“I would be more than happy to help you, Ms. Williams,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll give you my cell number so you can reach me anytime.”
CHAPTER 3
Elizabeth got up early Sunday morning and went for a walk to clear her head and heart. The blowup with Tony a few days earlier still hung over her. The distrust he felt about her sister and brother-in-law was like a knife in her side. But the strain in their relationship didn’t seem to bother Tony at all. He was just as stoic and stubborn as ever. His running off to the gym and grabbing something to eat rather than eating with them told a lot. He was like a little boy who couldn’t deal with issues. Things simply had to go his way or he’d take his toys and play somewhere else.
Elizabeth got the uneasy feeling that there might be something else going on with him, bigger than the money struggles or their constant bickering. Bigger than the communication problems and the way he’d get antsy and snap at them. But what could it be?
She walked past the finely manicured lawn of a man in their church. Carl was always tinkering with the lawn mower or string trimmer, spraying weeds or digging out a new flowerbed for his wife. The brick house looked like some Thomas Kinkade painting, everything clipped and in its place. A lantern hung over the mailbox. Even the sidewalk in front of their place somehow looked better. Did people ever have a perfect marriage? Was her family the only one that went through this kind of pain?
She woke Danielle when she returned but decided not to disturb Tony. She wasn’t going to nag him, wasn’t going to remind him what day it was and that they needed to leave by 8:45 to make it on time for church. But to her surprise, he was already up and in the shower.
They didn’t talk as they drove, mainly because Tony flipped on the radio to a sports station counting down to the big game that afternoon. He didn’t ask what she wanted to listen to. He didn’t speak to Danielle about her report card. He just drove and reacted to the sports news.
At church, Elizabeth sat with an arm around Danielle and listened to the pastor speak about a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. She was having a hard time concentrating on the message because all she could think about was Tony. He had absolutely no compassion, no understanding of her or Danielle. He was upset about the money and hadn’t even asked about her sister. Cynthia was going through a really hard time and Elizabeth wanted to be there for her. But Tony stood between them. He was obsessed with getting ahead and getting enough in the bank, when he knew good and well that there would never be “enough.” The more he made, the more he needed to make. And any withdrawal, no matter how necessary or compassionate, was looked at as a personal affront to him.
“Jesus gives us the cure for anxiety in this passage,” the pastor said. “He tells us to look at the birds of the air and the way they go about life. Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a stressed-out bird, except for ones in cartoons.”
The congregation laughed, and the pastor transitioned into a story from his childhood about how stressed his mother would get when they went on vacation. His father planned the route of the trip with pinpoint accuracy, and if anything went wrong, he got flustered and angry. The two of them together made a volatile mix and provided anything but relaxation. “Vacations in our home were things you needed a vacation from.”
Elizabeth glanced at Danielle and smiled. Her daughter was only ten, but she already had an open heart to the things of God. She paid close attention as the pastor talked about God knowing every human heart and having a plan for each of us.
“God can’t be finagled into doing what we want Him to do. The favor of God can’t be bought, traded, or manipulated,” the man continued. “So if you think putting on your Sunday best and throwing a halfhearted smile across your face impresses God, you are deceiving yourself. And we all know we can deceive ourselves. You and I cannot manipulate the hand of God. He looks for those that seek Him with their whole heart, and He does incredible things in their lives. So it all comes down to this. Either we truly seek Him, or we don’t.”
Elizabeth heard the door open behind them and saw a young woman walk past them to an open seat nearby. She wasn’t bothered that the woman had come in late or that she had distracted her from the message. She was just a teenager and the length of her skirt and the amount of cleavage she showed were a little too revealing for Elizabeth’s tastes, but that wasn’t what bothered her either. The thing that galle
d Elizabeth was that Tony watched the young lady walk past with the concentration of an archaeologist studying a newly found artifact. She kept expecting him to look away but he didn’t. His eyes followed every movement until she sat. And then he looked some more. Elizabeth couldn’t shake the sense that Tony was on the hunt. But that was preposterous. Tony would never . . .
After the service she slipped into the restroom and gathered herself, then walked toward their car. A woman approached and stopped her, introducing herself as a mom of one of Danielle’s classmates at school. She apologized for keeping her.
“It’s no problem,” Elizabeth said. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve been looking for an opportunity to ask you something.”
“What about?”
“I know you’re a Realtor and I’ve always been fascinated with real estate. I’d really like to get my license, but I’m not sure about the process.”
Elizabeth answered her questions and suggested a book she had read before she entered the realty world. One of her colleagues was also giving a class at the local library. She handed the woman a card and told her to get in touch with anything else she wanted to know.
“Maybe we can have coffee at some point?” the woman said.
“That would be great,” Elizabeth said, knowing that time for “coffee” was nonexistent in her busy schedule. She smiled politely and gave the woman a hug.
“So who was that lady you were talking with in the parking lot?” Tony asked as they drove home.
Elizabeth kept her eyes straight ahead. “She’s interested in being a real estate agent. Why?”
“I could tell you had your professional voice on,” he said.
She glanced at him and he gave her a smirk.
“Are you saying I do something you don’t do?”
“When I come to church, I’m just being myself,” he said.
Steam didn’t shoot out of her ears, but she could feel her heart rate quicken and her face flush. “I guess you were just being yourself while you were checking out that young girl who walked past us.”
She regretted saying it as soon as it was out of her mouth. She regretted saying it in front of Danielle and not in private. She regretted putting her in the middle of one of their disputes again. But she didn’t regret letting him know what she had clearly seen.
“You better watch that tone, Liz,” Tony said, his voice a little too flat and unemotional.
Before she could answer, her phone rang. She stared at him a moment and in her peripheral vision saw Danielle shift uncomfortably.
“Elizabeth Jordan,” she said, answering with her “professional voice.” Tony raised an eyebrow.
“Elizabeth, this is Clara Williams. I spoke with you about my house.”
“Yes, Ms. Williams, how are you?”
“I’m well, thank you for asking. I’ve made my decision to move ahead with the sale. And I’m calling to see if you could come by in the morning and take a look at the place.”
Elizabeth checked her schedule on her phone. “Yes, I can see the house at 10 a.m. tomorrow.”
“That’s perfect. It’ll give me a chance to spruce the place up a bit.”
“Very good. I look forward to it.”
“See you then.”
“Bravo,” Tony said sarcastically when the call ended.
Elizabeth set her jaw and willed herself not to respond. She turned and saw Danielle putting in her earphones. Better to listen to music than hear her parents fight again.
Tony turned on the radio for the latest sports report.
Tony put up his feet that afternoon and watched the game. He couldn’t believe Elizabeth had seen him looking at the young lady in church. He didn’t even realize he had been staring at her—that was a natural thing for guys, he was sure. Just checking out the beauty of creation.
Danielle said it was time for lunch, and he came to the table to grab some food. One look at Elizabeth told him she was upset. He shook his head, turned off the TV with the remote, and sat, pulling out his phone to watch the score. There were a couple of text messages he hadn’t seen, one from Calvin Barnes at Holcomb.
I’ve never hit a ball this far in my life. Thanks, Tony!
Tony smiled, picturing the old guy swinging that big club.
Elizabeth broke the silence between them. “Danielle, I have to meet a client in the morning, so I’m going to drop you off early at the community center, okay?”
“Okay. Can we pick up Jennifer on the way?”
“Sure, if it’s okay with her mother,” Elizabeth said.
Tony often felt on the outside looking in at his daughter’s life, and this was a good example. “Who’s Jennifer?”
“She’s on my double Dutch team,” Danielle said softly, looking at her food.
He held his phone away for a moment and cocked his head. “I thought you were playing basketball.”
“I wanted to jump rope again.”
Jump rope? he thought. That wasn’t what they’d agreed she would do.
“Tony, you should go see her practice tomorrow,” Elizabeth said quickly, stepping into the uncertain space between them. “She’s really very good.”
He shook his head, trying to process the new information along with his schedule. “I’m out of town this week.”
Elizabeth held her fork pointing down, her face bewildered. “When were you going to tell me?”
“I just did,” Tony said matter-of-factly. This was how it always started. She wanted to know everything going on in his head. Every little thing. Like he could remember to tell her everything.
The frustration showed on Elizabeth’s face. She put her fork down and sat back. “Tony, I know you’re the company’s top salesman, but in order for this family to function, we have to communicate. I thought you’d be here this week.”
Slow and measured, he prepared his response, like a tennis player hitting a topspin forehand to her weak side. “Well, if you want to continue to live in this house, I have to make sales. And that means being flexible.” He waited for her comeback. But she let the ball hit and bounce to the fence, saying nothing, which unnerved him.
He took a sip of his tea and turned to Danielle. “Aren’t you a little too old to be jumping rope?” He meant well with the question. He was trying to encourage her to excel at one thing instead of bouncing from one to another, and with her height and coordination, basketball was clearly what she should go for.
Danielle’s face fell. She looked at her plate and then at her mother. Elizabeth’s lips were tight and she shook her head slightly, a signal a teammate would give. Just another indication that he was on one side of the net and they were on the other.
“May I be excused, please?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll put this in the fridge for you to eat later.”
Danielle left and Tony watched Elizabeth empty the table. Finally he couldn’t take it any longer and threw his hands up. “Hey, all I was doing was finding out about our daughter. Why did she quit basketball?”
“She wants to jump rope, Tony,” Elizabeth said. “It’s good exercise. She made a good friend in Jennifer, who you obviously don’t care enough about to know.”
“What are you talking about? Do you know how many things I have to keep in my head, how many plates I have to keep spinning to keep things going around here? So I don’t know about one of her friends. Is that a federal offense now?”
She turned her back to him. He brought his dish over to the sink and she told him to just leave it. “I’ll do these.”
It was a demand, not an offer. She wanted him to leave. So he did. He went back to the television and watched the game.
Elizabeth put in a load of laundry and organized her closet—anything to stay busy and out of Tony’s path. When she got like this, she didn’t even want to look at him. She was upset at the way he had treated Danielle and the stare he’d given the girl in church, like she was a piece of meat, and all the other things that had happ
ened in the past few months piled up like wet towels and flopped around in the drum of her heart.
She sat on the bed facing her bookshelf and spotted a book on marriage. She had bought so many of these, thinking they were a good investment. She’d learned new communication techniques and ways to show respect. She’d even read books on intimacy by pastors and counselors who promised the best sex ever, but no matter how they couched the subject, the pages always made her feel inadequate, like she was the problem. She’d set out to discover Tony’s love language but found that his was an unknown tongue and there was no translator available.
Elizabeth stood and retreated to her office, the spare bedroom upstairs. Pulling up the information about the Williams house she would see the next day, she looked through the homes in the area that had recently sold. This was part of the advance work she did to make sure they could come up with a good asking price that wouldn’t be too high or too low. The home was in a nice neighborhood and the comps came out favorably, given what the housing market had been like in the past few months.
This was part of what she loved about her job—she was not in the business of selling houses, but was matching people with homes. You could run numbers all day, calculate square feet and bedrooms and fluctuating mortgage rates, but these were not the equations of life. What she loved was matching up a person, a family, with a dwelling where life would work, where they would fit and thrive and settle in and believe that they were finally home. Conversely, she loved being able to give a seller freedom, an ability to fly, whether they were moving because of a job change or downsizing or because of a death or divorce.
She put together the listing documents in a package to give Clara Williams. She didn’t intend to get the listing contract signed at their first meeting. She’d do a good walk-through of the property and go over the contract details. If Ms. Williams was as old as she sounded on the phone, she probably would have a lot of questions about what to expect. And from the information she pulled up online, Ms. Williams had been in the same house for decades. Why did she want to move? A fall? The death of her husband? Maybe pressure from family members?