The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

On Tuesday Brice Penhallow came back to Ila’s with a fresh pound cake. I know because Aldene watched from her front window with a pair of opera glasses she says she keeps for birds.

Ila opened the door and said, loud enough for Aldene to hear across the street, “Laverne says this house is worth a hundred and twenty-four thousand. I will wait fourteen days, and I would like somebody sitting with me.”

Marcene Pennock, who had been in the kitchen since breakfast, came in carrying her thermos and sat down in Hobart’s recliner.

Brice stood in the doorway holding the cake. He said, politely, that perhaps he would come back another time.

He raised his offers. At Ila’s it went from forty thousand to seventy, then to ninety-five. It did not matter. Every woman had a card on her refrigerator, and every card said what her house was worth.

On the twelfth day he came to my back door at four in the afternoon. No cake. His haircut was a little less perfect, and there were shadows under his eyes I had not noticed in January.

“Mrs. Burgess,” he said, “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

I said I had not been aware we had a foot.

He gave me a tight little smile. He understood I had influence on this street, he said, and that we were two professionals in the same line of work.

“I would pay you three thousand dollars for every house you sent my way. A finder’s fee. Perfectly legal. You wouldn’t have to say a word against anybody.”

“Mr. Penhallow,” I said, “would you say that again, a little louder? My hearing is not what it was.”

He frowned. “I said I would pay you three thousand dollars.”

And a voice from across the street said, in a carrying schoolroom tone, “I heard him fine, Laverne.”

Aldene stood on her porch with her arms folded. Behind her were Dorcas Whitlatch and Clarabel Rinehart, who had come to visit and no longer had porches of their own.

The three of them looked at Brice Penhallow the way I imagine women once looked at the man who ran the dance hall.

I watched a man who had done business behind closed doors for six years realize that every door on Alder Street was open.

I would like to tell you the cards were the end of it. They were not, because a card only reaches a woman who looks at her refrigerator.

Leota Sorley never came to the Thursday table, the standing coffee at ten in my kitchen that Aldene started the week the cards went out, so that no widow on the street would sit alone at that hour.

She was eighty-six and could barely walk, and she lived on Pike Street, the last house before the creek, in a white frame house her husband Delmar built with his own hands in 1964. She had not answered my knock with her card, and I told myself she was napping.

On the last Wednesday in October, Aldene called me at nine at night. “Laverne, there is a pickup truck in front of Leota Sorley’s. It has been there since Monday.”

I put my coat on over my nightgown and drove.