The Moving Truck That Wasnt Mine

I am not going to pretend it was a mansion. It was not. It was an old house that a retired schoolteacher named Eloise Pruett had lived in for forty years, and when she passed her kids wanted it gone fast and cheap because none of them lived within four hundred miles of here. I knew the bones were good because knowing bones is my whole job. I knew the foundation was solid and the roof had ten years left and the wiring had been redone in the eighties, which sounds bad but in a house like that is a small miracle.

So I bought it. Me. Rennie Coyle. I sat at the closing table at Farmers and Merchants with a cashier’s check I had put together nickel by nickel, and I signed my name eleven times, and the title lady slid the deed across to me and said congratulations honey, and I cried right there in front of a stranger.

I did not tell my family the price. I did not tell them much of anything. I said I was buying a fixer on Sabin Street and I let them think it was some sad little thing, because I had learned a long time ago that my family does not celebrate my good news. They inventory it.

I spent the next four months fixing it up on nights and weekends. New paint. Refinished the floors myself, on my knees, with a belt sander and a respirator, coughing sawdust for a week. I hung the shutters. I planted two maples out front, little whips of trees that will be big someday when I am old, and I liked knowing I would be there to see them get tall.

Moving day was going to be that Tuesday. I had taken the day off. I had a lasagna in a cooler for the first supper in my own kitchen. I was going to sit on my own porch that night and drink coffee and listen to the crickets and not talk to a single living soul.

That was the plan.