The House I Bought Back

Three Days Earlier

I closed on that house on a Tuesday, in cash, for two hundred and sixty one thousand dollars.

I am forty nine years old. I have spent twenty two years as a surgical coordinator at a hospital in Knoxville, I have no children, and I have lived under my means since I was twenty six because my mother did not and I watched what that cost her.

None of that is interesting. I put it in because people always ask how a woman in a twelve year old sweatshirt pays cash for a house, and the answer is that I am boring and I have been boring for a long time.

What is interesting is which house.

Fourteen Hollow Creek Court is a brick two story with a wide concrete front walk and four steps up to a covered porch. There is a dogwood on the left side of the yard that my brother in law planted in 2003.

My sister Judy lived in that house for twenty four years.

She is the reason I bought it.

She has been dead since March of last year, and I did not know until eleven months ago what had actually happened to her, and once I knew it, buying that house back was the only thought I was capable of having.

The Photograph In My Wallet

Tate took my wallet out of my back pocket while my hands were on the hood.

He looked at my driver’s license and passed right over it. He was not actually checking anything. He was performing a check for the woman with the phone.

Then he found the photograph behind it.

It is a four by six. The corners are soft and furred because it lived in a purse for two years before it lived in my wallet.

A woman in her fifties with grey hair cut short, standing on the front porch of that exact house, holding a casserole dish with a dish towel under it, squinting into the sun and laughing at whoever was taking the picture.

Tate’s thumb stopped.

He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that Reyes said his name.

Then he did something I did not expect and have not stopped thinking about.

He did not ask me who she was.

He turned his shoulder, so that his partner standing six feet away could not see what was in his hands.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

Quietly. Almost a whisper. Every bit of the authority had gone out of his voice, and what replaced it was not suspicion.

I did not lift my head off the hood.

“You know exactly where.”

Because he did.

On a Thursday in October two years earlier, Deputy Kyle Tate had stood on that same concrete walk, four steps below that same porch, and served a writ of possession on the woman in that photograph.

Her name was Judy Mabry. She was fifty six years old. She was my older sister.