Here’s the reason I laughed, if I could have put it into words at the time. Because when he was happy and excited, which he never had been before, that I knew of, he was sort of… adorable. But that’s not the kind of thing you say to a sixty-eight-year-old grown man, even if you can wrap words around it while it’s happening.
“We’ll play Twenty Questions,” I said. “Paul? Did something happen?”
“Yes. Not a huge something. Well. Yes. It was huge. But you might not think so. Something happened, but not everything. Does that make sense?”
“I’ve only asked one question so far.”
“She kissed me. I mean, we kissed. But she kissed me. I’m not saying I didn’t kiss her back. Of course I did. But she was the one who kissed me. That’s how it started.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And then… why did she leave?”
“We both just sort of… we talked about it. We didn’t want to go rushing ahead. You know. Hurry things too much. We decided to go to our separate corners and see how we feel about what happened. I bet that sounds pathetic to you. Really old-fashioned. When you’re sixteen, that must seem pathetic.”
“As a sixteen-year-old who has, pathetically, not yet been kissed, I’d be a fine one to judge.”
He threw his left arm around my shoulders—he needed the right one for the fishing pole—and pulled me in close to him and gave me a big smack on the forehead. Hard enough to bend my head back.
I laughed out loud again.
“Thank you, but that still doesn’t count.”
“Of course it doesn’t. I didn’t mean for it to. If you think it’s pathetic to never have been kissed, imagine if your first kiss was from me. Now that’s pathetic.”
“I bet Rachel didn’t think it was pathetic.”
“That’s entirely different. Rachel is—”
Then he stopped talking to reel in a fish.
He pulled it up out of the water, and it twisted there on the end of the line, and he stood there in the lake and stared at it. Didn’t try to get it in the landing net. Just watched it hanging there, like he hadn’t expected any such thing to happen. That fish must have been hooked deep, because it couldn’t capitalize on the opening.
Finally I opened the creel basket and held it right under his fish, and he lowered it in and then took the hook out.
“It’s all about focus,” I said.
He cast back into the middle of the lake, and I put my rod between my knees, so I wouldn’t drop it. And then I threw my arms around him sideways and gave him an awkward sideways hug, pinning his arms to his sides, and sloshing the lake a bit higher onto us.
“What was that for?” he asked, quite a bit after the fact.
“It’s just nice to see you so happy.”
“Even though…?”
He never finished the question. But it didn’t matter, because I knew the finish of it, anyway.
“Yes. Even though, if it works out, we’ll be looking for a new place. It’s still nice to see you so happy.”
We fished in silence for a few minutes.
Then he said, “That’s unusual. Most people think of themselves first. That’s a pretty damn good friend.”
“Well, I’m glad you think so, because this pretty damn good friend is about to ask a pretty damn big favor. You know how I’m always looking at the real estate ads in your paper? Well, I found something I want to look at. I was hoping you’d take me out there to see it. I know I told you I wouldn’t need rides after I got my license. But I don’t want to ask my mom if I can borrow her car, because I don’t want her to know why yet, because she’ll try to talk me out of going. Because she’s totally down on the idea of buying something. She says we’d never make it work. That she doesn’t have the credit.”
“Does she have a down payment?”
“Is twelve thousand dollars a down payment?”
“It might be.”
“Good. I’ve asked her twice before to go look at places with me, and she won’t do it. I think it makes her feel degraded when they ask a bunch of money questions.”
“They don’t.”
“They don’t?”
“Not the seller. The bank you approach to handle the financing, now they’ll ask questions. And the answers had better be on paper. But the seller or the real estate agent just shows you the place.”
“Oh. Then I don’t know why she won’t go. I can’t really go by myself. Even if I could get the car. Because I don’t even think they’d show it to me. I mean, who shows real estate to a sixteen-year-old? But if we didn’t happen to mention that we’re not related…”
“That’s not such a huge favor.”
“It’s almost twenty miles outside of town.”
“I think I could manage that all the same. What do they want for it?”
“It’s cheap.”
“How cheap?”
“Cheap enough that I don’t want to tell you how cheap, because you’ll say there has to be a catch.”
“Well,” he said. “Only one way to find out. Let’s give the fish another half an hour, and then we’ll go see if there’s a catch.”
We were driving out this little winding highway. Farther and farther from town. Paul was all lost in his own head, and I was just looking at the scenery. Even though it was nothing but trees.
You could do worse than trees.
“Why did this happen?” he asked. Just out of nowhere like that.
“Why did what happen?”
“This thing with Rachel. Why did it not happen for fifty years and then happen?”
I swallowed hard and tried to get a bead on how he meant it. He seemed kind of intense, and I couldn’t figure out if he was just being philosophical, or if he really thought there was something there to investigate.
“Well, forty-eight of those years she was married.”
“Forty-seven.”
“I think the point is the same. Forty-seven years she was married, and the year before that, she was a college woman, and you were just a kid.”
“But why did it not happen in all this time since Dan died, and then suddenly happen? I still don’t quite know how it happened.”
I sat very still in the passenger seat for a minute and wondered how much I was willing to lie to cover my tracks. Not much, I think. I convinced myself that he was thinking out loud. Not really asking me, like I would know. But even if it was a rhetorical question, I still felt like dirt for holding something back from Paul. Then I realized I’d been holding something back from him for a long time. And feeling like dirt a lot. But it was a decision I made before I talked to Rachel. There was no going back now.
“Wouldn’t that come under the heading of looking a gift horse in the mouth?”
He peered through the windshield with that same furrow in his brow, that same faraway look in his eyes, for another half a minute or so. Then it broke like a fever and flew away.
“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. I hope we weren’t supposed to make an appointment. Did it say in the ad ‘By appointment only’? Or ‘Do not disturb occupant’? Or something along those lines?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look again.”
I pulled the listing out of my shirt pocket, where it had been for three days, changing shirts when I did. I unfolded it and read it from beginning to end for about the tenth time.
“Doesn’t say.”
“Well, we’ve come this far. We can at least scope it out from a distance.”
There was a realtor’s sign hanging on a wooden post at the intersection of the highway and the driveway. But I couldn’t see a house at all. Just trees. But the trees looked nice. Too nice. It looked like a farm or a ranch, all out in the middle of nowhere and heavenly. Which meant we didn’t belong there.
I was more sure than ever. There had to be a catch.
Paul took two color fliers out of a Plexiglas box mounted on the wood post. Where I never would’ve thought to look.
“Here, take one of these,” he said.
I squinted at it in the sun, and it turned out to be a sheet of information about the property. It gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. Like I definitely didn’t belong, and the realtor knew it, and the flier knew it, and the sign knew it. Even the post that held up the sign knew I didn’t belong.
“Whoa,” he said. “That is cheap. Well. Let’s go see what the catch is.”
We walked down the dirt driveway together until a house peeked out from the trees. When we saw it, we both stopped in our tracks.
“Oh,” I said. “That would be the catch, all right.”
It didn’t even look like a place a person could live. The roof sagged, the porch sagged. The paint was half peeled away. Some of the windows were broken. You could look in and see nobody lived there. Nobody had lived there for quite awhile.
“So much for worrying about disturbing the occupants,” he said.
“I guess we can go now. Sorry I wasted your time.”
“Now wait. Now hold on a minute. Don’t be so quick to run off.”
We just stood there for another minute, looking at it.
Then I said, “Still not looking any better.”
“Well, no. It wouldn’t. The only way it’s going to look any better is if somebody puts hundreds of hours of work into it.”
“Are you saying I should still think about our buying it?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know.”
He walked up onto the porch, testing his weight first. I followed him. We looked through the windows. There was nothing inside but a few loose floorboards and a ton of dust.
“That’s a lot of work,” I said.
“I’ll grant you that. But your family has never owned a home before. Sometimes young families get into a first home by taking one nobody else wants, and making it into something with sweat equity.”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“It’s like elbow grease.”
“Excuse me?”
“Work. Good, hard work.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say so?”
“I did.”
“Oh. Right.”
“You’d have to get a home inspection. Make sure the foundation is in good shape, and the floors are solid. Make sure the termites haven’t eaten most of it away. If the basics are good, the rest is more or less cosmetic. Except you’d need new porch boards. And a new roof.”
“That can’t be cheap.”
“True. So here’s what you do. You go to the real estate agent, and you say, ‘I’m interested in the house, but I’d need to put thousands into a new porch and roof, so you’ll need to come down on the price.’”
“And then she’ll say, ‘Why do you think we priced it so low to begin with?’”
“Maybe. Depends on how long it sits on the market. And whether the seller is in a hurry.”
“You think that might work?”
He peeled a strip of paint off the windowsill and looked closely at the wood underneath. “I think it’s one of those things like whether the fish are biting.”
“Right,” I said. “Got it.”
“I could show you how to replace the panes of glass in a window. That and new door locks and about forty man hours of cleaning, and you could live in it as is until the rains come. Don’t get your hopes up, though. Don’t make the assumption that no one wants it, because it’s ugly. Someone with money could swoop in here and take it for the land. Tear this thing down to its foundation and put up a modern three-story farmhouse in about six months.”
He peered at the flier again.
“Oh, it’s not that big. It’s only two acres. That’s odd. They must have subdivided it and sold off most of the original land. There must be a buffer of farmland and orchards between this place and the neighbors. Because there’s no other house as far as the eye can see.” He cupped his hands around his mouth, tipped his head back, and bellowed, “Hello! Can anybody hear me?”
We waited. But it didn’t seem like anybody could.
“That’s a big plus,” I said.
“Well, yeah. But you saw that coming, right? Isn’t that why you wanted to see the place? Because it was out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Um… no. I couldn’t picture how many neighbors there would be. I wanted to see it because it was so cheap.”
“If you want, we’ll stop by the realty office and get some information about it.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I looked up, instead of at the horrible house. Just to give my eyes a break. I thought I saw a few hanging pieces of fruit in some of the trees, but I couldn’t tell what kind of fruit it was.
I thought about how it would feel to go to the realty office with Paul instead of going alone. It made me feel like I would be okay there. Like they had no right to laugh at me or chase me away. Then I realized it wasn’t entirely because I wasn’t even quite seventeen. It was because I was broke, and I figured they would know. That gave me a little glimpse into why my mom stayed away from places like that.
Almost like he was reading my mind, Paul said, “Think you can get your mom to come out and see it?”
“That’s going to be the tough part. She has so much resistance to buying.”
“Because of the credit? The loan?”
“I think so. I think she always feels like she’s a phony, because she doesn’t have good, responsible mom answers to questions about money. So she tries to skate under the radar and not go where anybody might ask questions.”
“And a bank is not such a place. Maybe I could prep her, the way trial lawyers do with their witnesses.”
“I hope so. I hope there’s something you can do to help her. Because we’re really nowhere the way things stand now.”
In fact, the only difference between our current situation and the one we’d been in when we came up to the mountains was about twelve thousand dollars. Which was something. But only if she was willing to spend it on a house. Otherwise, we’d go back to renting, and she’d dip into that money every month, because every month, we’d come up short.
It’s amazing how much time it takes to gather money, and how little time it takes for life to intervene.
“It used to be a working orchard,” I told my mom over dinner. “Except this is only a little piece of it. They used to grow peaches and walnuts. And tomatoes, but all the vines are gone now. Now the trees are old, and they don’t produce much, and the land isn’t worth much for farming. But here’s the good part. It’s more than a mile from the closest farmhouse of the closest neighbor. And the realtor lady says if I’m willing to climb trees, I’d probably get more peaches and walnuts in a year than three people could even eat.”
“I can’t believe you’re making me say this again,” she said.
Sophie started banging her fork on the table, with a little screech on each bang. Sometimes in rhythm, sometimes out of it.
I raised my voice to be heard over her.
“Paul even said he could prep you for the loan application the way trial lawyers do with their witnesses.”
She slapped her napkin down and glared at me in a way that made my face feel hot.
“Well, that’s a little different now, isn’t it? Because all a witness has to do is talk. I have to produce pay stubs and tax returns. And I have to have more than just a down payment and a yes from a bank, which we’ll never get. I’d have to come up with mortgage payments.”
Bang. Screech. Bang. Screech.
“You’ll have to come up with rent, anyway.”
“Kiddo. You’re not listening to me. I don’t make enough money to buy a house. I don’t need a bank to tell me so. Now I’ll thank you to not bring it up again.”
“Well, we’d better start looking,” I said. “Because we may have to go somewhere. Not definitely, but it seems to be going that way. I just thought it would be nice to go someplace we could take Sophie along.”
“I’m looking into a placement for her.�
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For a flash of a second, I was filled with fight. I was going to lash out at her, and yell, and accuse her of caring more about her own fear of banks than she did about my sister. I opened my mouth, and the next thing I knew, I was just too tired. It washed over me and left me beached. I thought, What’s the point? Why am I even fighting her? I’ve been fighting her for years. It wastes my energy, and things always turn out the same.
Just when I thought I’d ducked the drama by surrendering, my mom lost it with Sophie.
“Stop doing that!” she screamed. And I really mean screamed.
Sophie held perfectly still for a second or two, and then launched into full keening mode. My mom had to grab her up and carry her down to the car, the way she always did. So she could drive her around until she wailed herself voiceless or fell asleep.
“That was a rookie mistake,” I told the door a minute after it slammed.
4. Trust
It was about three weeks after that, right before I turned seventeen, when my mom brought up the car idea. It was morning. I was lying on my bed, reading, and she stuck her head around the divider. Which I never liked. I wanted her to treat that gap like a closed door. She more or less did, but mostly when it suited her.
“I’ve been thinking about your birthday,” she said.
“What about it?”
“How would you feel about having your own car?”
I put the book down. Narrowed my eyes at her. It was a good thing, in theory. Almost too good. Maybe that’s why something felt wrong.
“I’d feel great about it if we could afford that. But we can’t.”
“If you can find a cheap transportation car for two or three thousand, I’ll buy it for your birthday.”
“Out of our down-payment money.”
I watched the look on her face darken. She must have known we’d hit that wall early on. It seemed almost like a setup. An idea for her to break into that money in a way I couldn’t object to, because what teenager says no to a car?
Where We Belong Page 30