The Breakfast Order At My Lake House
I did not sleep well that night. I lay in my own bed in my own house and ran the conversation over in my head, the easy confidence of a man who had clearly made this exact pitch before, who had the cadence down so smooth it barely sounded like a pitch at all. I thought about Jill’s new, borrowed voice. I thought about the note on the counter, dry wheat toast, no small talk before nine, and I thought: this is not a son in law getting comfortable. This is a man running a plan, and my daughter is standing somewhere inside it without knowing she is standing there.
Wednesday morning he tried a different angle. He found me on the porch with my coffee, the real kind, the kind nobody had left instructions for, and he sat down across from me with a yellow legal pad and a pen, the way you sit down for a meeting you have called yourself. “I did some homework last night,” he said. “Looked up comparable lake properties, rental rates for three season cottages this size. Patty, you are sitting on close to double what you think this place is worth, and none of it is doing a thing for you right now except costing you in property tax and upkeep.”
“It’s doing plenty for me,” I said. “It’s doing exactly what Gordon built it to do.”
“I understand it has sentimental value,” he said, in the gentle, patient voice people use on children and the very old, a voice I was beginning to recognize as his only voice, the one he used for everything, as though sentiment and arithmetic could not both be true about the same house at the same time. “I’m not suggesting you sell it. I’m suggesting a home equity line, modest, low interest, just enough to get a small rental management operation off the ground. I’d handle every bit of the logistics. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger beyond a signature.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, which is the oldest lie a teacher ever learns, the one you use on a parent at conferences when you have already decided the answer is no but do not yet have the energy for the argument that telling them so will cost you.
“Don’t think too long,” he said, and smiled, and underlined something on his legal pad I was not shown. “Rates like this don’t sit still.”
Jill did not bring it up again for three days, which I understood later meant Blake had told her to let it breathe, to let his numbers do their own quiet work on me without anybody pushing. In the meantime the mornings kept arriving on schedule, two eggs over medium one day, a single soft boiled egg with a timer the next, and every single morning I made what was asked, because I was still, in that particular week of my life, more comfortable being managed than I was comfortable being the kind of mother who told her daughter’s husband no to his face in week one of knowing him.