The Rent Bill In Howard’s House
What the house cost, and who paid it
I took my reading glasses out of the nightstand and a yellow legal pad out of the drawer, and I started a list. A teacher’s habit. If you want to know where something went wrong, you write it down in columns.
Howard and I built that house between 1988 and 1991, which is a long time to build a house, but we did not have money, we had weekends. Howard worked the line at the axle plant in Lima, and every Saturday and half the evenings in summer he was out on that lot with a level and a pencil behind his ear. His friend Lloyd Dawson, who then ran a small excavating outfit, dug the footing and poured the foundation at cost. I carried block. I painted every wall. I laid the kitchen floor on my hands and knees with a chalk line and a rubber mallet, and I have never in my life been prouder of anything than the straight line of that floor.
Howard built the kitchen table out of oak boards from a barn that came down on County Road 12. He sanded it in the garage, stained it twice because I said the first color was too dark, and carved our initials underneath, in the corner where nobody would ever see them unless they were lying on the floor looking up. I know because I have lain on the floor looking up.
Two years ago, Stan and Sheila came to me with a plan. They were living in a rental in Columbus, drowning in the usual things, car payments and credit cards and the cost of a “business” Sheila kept describing as a consulting practice without ever naming a client. Sheila sat on my sofa and said, “Marlene, honestly, you’d be doing us such a favor. And it would make everything simpler for you, too. If the house were in Stan’s name now, there’d be no probate, no lawyers, no fighting later. We’d just be getting ahead of it.”
I want to tell you I saw it coming. I did not. I saw my only child looking tired and thin. I thought of Howard, who used to say a house is just a tool for keeping a family together. So I drove to the courthouse with Stan, and I signed the transfer, and I moved my things into the downstairs bedroom and gave them the whole second floor.