The House I Bought Back

I believe her. I have decided to believe her, which is a slightly different thing, and I am at peace with the difference.

And here is what I keep coming back to. Judy’s letter, the one explaining the diagnosis, the one where she offered to paint it any color and take it down within thirty days of her husband’s death, is in my folder because Judy kept her own copy.

It was addressed to the association.

Glenda never saw it. She was on the committee that decided, and the letter that would have changed her vote never reached the table she was sitting at.

I do not know what happened to it. I am never going to know. There is no version of this where somebody admits to that, and I have stopped needing one.

Glenda took the banana bread back home with her. She said it did not feel right to leave it. About a week later she came back with it again, and that time we ate some.

Bev Rowan lost the board election in February by a vote of thirty one to nine, after nineteen years.

I had nothing to do with it. I want to be accurate about that, because it would be a better story if I had organized something, and I did not. I paid a fine every week and I told the truth to four neighbors and those four told other people, and that was apparently sufficient.

What Is On The Porch Now

The ramp has been up for eleven months.

It is the first thing you see from the street, which is exactly what the committee objected to in 2019. It is pressure treated pine going silver grey the way it does, and there is a landing at the top where the porch flattens out, and the handrail is smooth enough that you could run your whole hand down it at speed and not catch anything.

Nobody in my family uses a wheelchair. I want to be clear about that too. I built a wheelchair ramp on a house where nobody needs one, and I pay fifty dollars a week for the privilege, and if you want to call that a waste of money I am not going to argue with you.

My sister asked a sheriff’s deputy, standing on her own front walk with a writ in her hand, whether she was allowed to take her husband’s ramp with her when she left.

She was told no.

So it is back on the house, and the house is back in the family, and every Monday morning I write the check.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.