The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door
There was nobody in that kitchen to speak for the house but me. And I am not fast, but I am thorough.
I put my left hand on the cane, which is backwards from how the therapist taught me, because I wanted my good hand for the pot. I took three mugs down. I poured.
“Sit down,” I said. “Coffee’s fresh. I’m Maxine.”
“Sit,” I said again. “You came to see a house.”
They sat.
His name was Josh. Hers was Abby. They had been married three years and were renting half of a duplex over by the fairgrounds. He worked maintenance at the mower plant, second shift, which is why he could come on a Wednesday morning. She worked the front desk for a dentist.
I got all that in the first five minutes, because when you talk slow, people fill the quiet with their own lives.
Ms. Dunning did not sit. She stood by the counter with her folder shut and her coffee untouched.
“Mrs. Weber, I think I should call your daughter.”
“You can.”
“I think I should call her right now.”
“After,” I said. “After I show them.”
“Show them?”
“The house.” I had to stop and line the next ones up. “They ought to see it. From somebody who knows it.”
Josh turned his mug around on the table. “Ma’am, you don’t have to do that.”
I will tell you honestly what was in my mind, because a person could read this and think I was being sly. I was not trying to scare those children off. I was not laying a trap. I did not know yet whether that house was going to be sold out from under me or not. That paper in the folder was real.
What I thought was this. If my house was going to go to strangers, it was going to go introduced. Don and I did not live in a place forty-four years so that it could be walked through like a furniture store.
So I stood up, and I showed them.
We started in the living room, because that is where you start.
“We bought it in March of 1982,” I said. “Thirty-eight thousand, five hundred dollars. At fifteen and a quarter percent.”
“Don called it robbery with a handshake.” I had to rest between those. “We were twenty-six. I was expecting our boy. We ate a lot of macaroni.”
I showed them the big front window. It was not there when we bought the place. There were two small windows with a wall between, and you could not see the street. Don took that wall out himself over the Fourth of July in 1987 with his brother and a borrowed saw, and for two nights we slept with a tarp nailed across the hole and every moth in Gage County in the house.
“He hung it a quarter inch out of level,” I said. “You can see it if you look at the top against the ceiling. He saw it every day of his life. It drove him wild.”
Josh went over and looked. He put his head on one side.
“I see it,” he said.
“Don’t fix it.”
I showed them the hall closet where the furnace lives.
“Open it,” I told Josh.
He did.
“That went in January of 1996,” I said. “The old one quit on a Sunday night. It was eleven below. We slept all four in the kitchen with the oven door open, which you should never do.”