The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

On the front I wrote, “What Your House Is Worth,” then the woman’s name, her street address, and a number. Underneath, in smaller print: “Written for you by Laverne Burgess, thirty-one years in Tarwater real estate. No charge. I will never ask to buy it.”

On the back I wrote five lines.

“Wait fourteen days before you sign anything for anybody.”

“Have a person sit at the table with you. Any person. Call me.”

“Roof, furnace, windows: call Lavon Ulrich at the lumberyard before you decide you can’t afford them.”

“Taxes or bills: call Oleta Brigham at the credit union.”

“When you are ready to sell, there are young families in this town who want your house and will pay what it is worth. I have their names.”

That last line was not true when I wrote it. It became true over the next ten days, which is the part I am proudest of.

I called Lavon Ulrich first. He has run the lumberyard on Route 9 since his father died, and he is sixty-six and built like a deep freezer. I asked whether he would give a straight roofing price to any widow who called.

Marcene Pennock ran the front desk at the title company for thirty years and knows more about paperwork than any lawyer in the county.

“Honey,” she said, “I have been on my porch with nothing to do but read the legal notices. I will sit with anybody. I will bring a thermos.”

I called Oleta Brigham at the credit union, and she offered a home-repair loan nobody had ever asked about, with her own fee waived. Then I did the hardest part, and called the young people. A realtor knows who they are.

Reuben Kenyon teaches shop at the middle school, and his wife Mireya is a nurse at the county hospital. They were renting a duplex whose landlord never fixed the water heater.

Tobin Bowers, a sheriff’s deputy, and his wife Joss were living in her mother’s basement. Anneliese Hatfield, a respiratory therapist, was raising two little boys on a rent she could not afford.

I told each of them the same thing. “When one of my neighbors is ready to sell, you get the first call, and you pay her what her house is worth. If you can’t do that, don’t take the call.”

Not one of them said no.

Then I walked them. I started at the church and worked down Alder toward the creek in a cold October drizzle, the cards in a bread bag inside my coat.

I did not use the mailboxes. I knocked on every door, sat at every kitchen table, and read the card out loud.

That was Aldene’s rule, and she was right. A card in a mailbox is a flyer. A card read aloud across a table is a person who cares.

Ila Beecham broke my heart. She was sixty-nine, and her husband Hobart had been buried twenty-two days. She came to the door in her robe, her hair flat on one side, and she held the card a long time.

“One hundred twenty-four thousand,” she said. “A man was here yesterday. He said he could give me forty.”

“I know,” I said. “His truck was in front of your house.”

She put the card on her refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an ear of corn, one Hobart had gotten free from the seed company for twenty years. I was halfway down the walk when I looked back and saw her through the kitchen window, standing in front of it with both hands over her mouth.