The Picture Over My Fireplace

Sandra Hollis knocked once on my front door and walked in before I could get to it, the way she always did, like the knock was a courtesy to the house and not to me.

Her sisters came in behind her, and all three of them slipped off their shoes at my door and left them on the mat. Pat was the short one with the reading glasses on a beaded chain and a pink blouse. Jan was the quiet one, kind and tall, with blonde hair going soft gray and a gray sweater she kept pulling down over her hands.

Sandra had a yellow tape measure out of her purse before she had even set the purse down. She pulled out a foot of tape and let it snap back, just to hear it.

“Tree goes right here, girls,” she said, sweeping her arm toward my front window. “Ryan’s house has the best front window in town. You can see the lights clear from the corner.”

Ryan’s house.

I had heard her say it before, on the phone and once at a Sunday dinner at the steakhouse out by the interstate. But I had never heard her say it standing on my living room floor, in her socks, with a tape measure in her hand.

I was standing by the fireplace in my maroon scrubs with a cardigan over them, because I had a twelve-hour night shift starting at seven. I folded my arms. Not hard. Just the way you fold them when you have decided to be very still.

Ryan was in the kitchen doorway in his red plaid flannel shirt, leaning on the frame with his hands in his pockets. He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything yet.

Above my head, over the mantel, hung a picture that had not been there the last time Sandra walked through my door.

I should tell you about the house, because the house is the whole thing.

It is a little brick house on a corner lot on the east side of Mitchell, South Dakota, built in 1954. It has a stone fireplace someone built in the eighties, and a front window that really is the best on the block.

I bought it when I was 26. I paid $165,000 for it. I put $5,800 down, which was three and a half percent on an FHA loan, and every dollar of that came out of my own paychecks from the intensive care unit at the regional hospital.

I had been a nurse four years by then. I worked nights because nights paid a differential, and I picked up extra shifts every holiday nobody else wanted. Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July. I ate a lot of cereal standing at the counter of a rented apartment.

My dad farms outside of Howard, and when I told him I was looking at houses he offered to co-sign. I thanked him and told him I wanted to see if I could do it on my own first. He said that was fair.

The day I closed, my real estate agent, a cheerful woman named Kim who had sold half the houses on my street, walked me out to the front yard and had me stand on the sidewalk in front of the porch.

“Hold the keys up,” she said. “Higher. There. You’re going to want this someday.”

It was April and the wind was blowing my hair across my face. I was squinting into the sun and grinning like a fool. She took about ten pictures on her phone and texted me the best one before I was even back in my car.