The House I Bought Back

Why I Bought The House

I am not going to pretend I had a plan. I did not.

For a while I thought about a lawyer, and I talked to one in Knoxville, and she was honest with me in a way I appreciated. The fines were probably unlawful under the Fair Housing Act, because a wheelchair ramp for a disabled resident is close to the textbook example of a reasonable accommodation, and an association that refuses one and then fines a woman into a lien is not standing on solid ground.

But Judy was dead. The claim was old. The association was insured. And what I would get, after two years and a great deal of money, was a settlement with a confidentiality clause.

I did not want money. I had money.

In June the house came up for sale. The couple who bought it from Judy were relocating to Charlotte.

I looked at the listing photos for about forty minutes. The front steps were bare. You could still see, in the third photo, the four slightly lighter rectangles on the concrete where the ramp posts had been anchored, because Judy had cut the posts off flush and never patched the holes.

I called the agent that afternoon and paid cash and did not negotiate.

I did not tell anyone on that street who I was. Not because I was planning anything. Because nobody asked.

Bev Rowan stood in my driveway on my second day and talked to me for eleven minutes about garbage cans, and never once asked me my name.

Deputy Tate, Three Days Later

He came back on a Monday evening, out of uniform, in a pickup truck, and stood at the bottom of my front steps with his hat literally in his hands like a man in a movie.

I let him stand there a minute before I came down.

He said he had looked her up. He said he was not there in any official capacity and that he understood if I wanted him to leave.

Then he told me he had remembered her before he ever looked her up. He said he had known who was in that photograph the second he saw it, and that he had thought about that October morning more times than he could count, and that it was one of two calls in eleven years that he had never been able to put down.

And then he told me what she said to him at the door.

She was polite to him. That is the first thing he said, and he said it like it was the worst part. She read the writ. She did not argue, she did not cry, she asked him how long she had.