The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 7

On the Thursday after that, Naomi Yoder came to see me, in a navy suit, with a folder.

She was the loan officer at the Corliss Federal Credit Union. She was thirty-nine, with a calm, slow way of speaking that made me trust her at once, and she did not sit down until she had stood at the foot of my steps and looked at the swing.

“Seat three,” she said. “Do you remember?”

“Naomi Beiler.” I did, then. “You had braids with yellow ribbon.”

She had not come to talk about old times. She sat at my kitchen table, in Leonard’s chair, and she opened the folder.

“I want to ask you something and I want you to be honest. If you could, would you buy this house?”

I laughed. “Naomi, I’m sixty-eight years old and I make sixteen hundred a month.”

“I did the numbers before I came.” She slid a page across. “Pension, Social Security, survivor benefit. That’s stable income, and it’s for life. I’ve funded loans with a lot less. And I took the liberty of asking Gordon Lyle for an informal opinion.”

Gordon Lyle is the county’s only independent appraiser, a gloomy man who cannot be hurried, and Jerome had walked him around my lot on Tuesday while I was at the pharmacy.

“What did he say?”

“Eighty-six thousand dollars, as the house sits. He’ll do a formal one if we go ahead.” She tapped the page. “And he wrote something in the letter. He said the lot, with the porch and the established beds and the drainage work in the back, appraises about fourteen thousand over the comparable houses on the street. He said that’s what you built. He said it’s right there in the number.”

“‘The front porch is the single most valuable feature of the property, and its quality is exceptional.'”

I put my hand over my mouth.

Zero, a man had said. I looked at a typed paragraph that said single most valuable feature.

“Here is how it could work,” said Naomi. “Mr. Tauber paid, by my best guess, about fifty-eight thousand for this house in the block sale. If he sold to you at the appraisal, he makes a profit on a house he had planned to spend six months gutting.”

“He won’t sell to me.”

“He might, if he had a reason. And if the price came down by what you already put in, he might see that as fair. His own number was twenty-two four. I’d start there.”

“I have never owned anything,” I said. “Not one thing, Naomi. Not in sixty-eight years. We always meant to.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I drove out.”

I was still sitting there when the white pickup pulled up at the curb that evening, a little after dark.

I did not go to the door. I watched through the kitchen window while Neil Tauber got out and stood on the sidewalk for a time. Then he came up the walk slowly, the way you come up to a house when you have been told the news is bad.

He did not knock. He sat down on the third step.

I came out and I stood by the post with my sweater over my arm. I did not ask him in. I did not sit.

For a good while neither one of us said anything. The streetlight had come on at the corner, and the rail was bare.

“I can’t get a crew,” he said finally.

“I heard.”

“I’ve got a bridge loan on six houses. I’ve got a lender in Columbus calling me at six in the morning. My project manager won’t tear out a porch because there’s writing under it.” He laughed, once, without any happiness in it. “I walked into Hendershot’s yesterday for a box of screws and the man behind the counter handed me a copy of the paper. He didn’t say a word.”

“That would be Ward’s grandson.”

“What do they want from me?” he said. “I’m asking. I really don’t understand what everybody wants.”

I looked at him in the light from the corner. He was only a man who had borrowed more than he could carry.