The Closing Photo Over the Fireplace

What It Took to Buy It

Here is the part Yvonne left out, because it did not fit the story she needed.

I bought the house in September, two years back, the fall I turned twenty-six. It is a brick ranch off a county road, built in 1964, three bedrooms, one bath, a carport with a crack running through it, and a dogwood in the front yard that turns the color of a bruise every October.

I paid a hundred and fifty-two thousand dollars for it. I know that number better than I know my own birthday.

I am a registered nurse. I work the floor at the regional hospital over in the next county, medical-surgical, nights, three twelve-hour shifts a week and every fourth weekend, and I picked up a fourth shift most weeks for two years to do what I did.

My base was twenty-seven dollars an hour back then. The night differential added four, the weekend differential added a little more, and overtime after forty paid time and a half. I lived on about half of what I made and I banked the rest.

I drove a Corolla with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. I ate a lot of eggs. I did not take a trip. For my twenty-fifth birthday I bought myself a good pair of nursing shoes and I called it a present, and it was, because my feet stopped screaming at three in the morning.

It took me two years and two months to save eight thousand dollars and change for the down payment and the closing costs. Nobody gave me a cent. My daddy passed when I was nineteen and my mama does well to keep her own lights on, and I would not have asked her if she had it.

The loan officer at the credit union was a woman named Donna who had been doing it thirty years. She ran my numbers twice because she said she wanted to be sure I could carry it without drowning. My payment came to eleven hundred and forty a month with the taxes and the insurance folded in. On my pay that was doable if I stayed careful, and I have stayed careful my whole life.

Donna told me something at that desk I have never forgotten. She said most of the single women who come in to see her are there because a man left, or died, or drank it all, and they are trying to hold on to a house somebody else put them in. She said it was a different thing to watch a young one come in on her own two feet, before any man, and buy a place with money she dug out of the ground herself. “You remember you did this,” she told me, sliding the papers across. “Years from now, when somebody tries to tell you who you are, you remember you did this.”

I thought that was just a nice thing a bank lady says. I did not know I would need it.

Closing day was a Thursday. I remember because I had worked the Wednesday night before, clocked out at seven, drove straight to the title company, and signed forty pages of paper with a hand that was shaking from being awake twenty-four hours, not from nerves.

When it was done the closing agent slid a single key across the table on a paper ring. Just the one. “It’s yours, honey,” she said.

I drove out to the house and I stood on the porch and I could not go in. I just stood there with the key in my fist. A woman from the real estate office, a kind lady named Pam, had followed me out to hand me the garage remote, and she saw my face and she said, “You want me to take your picture?”

I did. I gave her my phone and I stood by the new front door with my hand flat on it and the key held up, and I was crying and laughing at the same time and I did not care how I looked. She took three. In all three I am by myself, because I was by myself, because that was the whole point.

That is the photograph. Keep it in your mind. It matters later.