The House My Daughter Never Sold

What It Cost Elmo

The Prices did not walk away from the cabin. A title company lawyer explained to them, gently, that unwinding a completed real estate closing over a scope dispute would cost more in time and legal fees than simply keeping a cabin they liked reasonably well, on a lake they had already decided to love. What they did instead was retain their own attorney and send a formal demand letter to Alicia and Elmo, the sellers of record, alleging that the listing and the verbal representations made during the sale had promised property that the deed never actually conveyed.

Elmo’s two hundred thousand dollars in wholesale debt had already been paid off with the cabin sale proceeds by the time that letter arrived. What was left over, a little under thirty thousand dollars Alicia had been quietly setting aside for a kitchen renovation, went instead to a settlement with the Prices rather than risk a courtroom where a judge would hear, in plain terms, exactly what had and had not been sold.

It did not clear Elmo’s name at the marine dealership he still owed vendors for, and it did not repair whatever the wholesale lender still had on file about the guarantee he had signed. It only meant that the two hundred thousand dollars he had been so relieved to see disappear had, in the space of about six weeks, quietly become two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of problems he had traded for peace of mind that lasted less than a season.

I did not sue my own daughter, though Mr. Halstead told me plainly that I could have, for the use of a power of attorney she never should have exercised the way she did. I decided the county recorder’s office had already handed down a truer verdict than any court could, and that watching Alicia explain to her own husband why the debt he thought was gone had grown by thirty thousand dollars was punishment enough for a woman who once stood in her own doorway and told her mother she was homeless.