The Price Card on Every Widow’s Refrigerator

Leota does not lock her doors. I let myself in through the kitchen and found her at the table in her slippers, wrapping a gravy boat in newspaper.

“Laverne,” she said, “I am so glad you came. I was going to call you.”

In front of her lay a one-page agreement with her signature at the bottom. Forty-nine thousand dollars. Closing at ten on Friday morning. The house was worth one hundred and thirty-eight.

I sat down across from her. I did not touch the paper. I said, “Leota, why?”

She smoothed the newspaper over the gravy boat. “The furnace man came in September. He said it was done. Eleven thousand two hundred dollars to replace it. I have been sleeping in my coat since the first of the month.”

Her eyes were very blue and very clear. “I do not want to freeze to death in Delmar’s house, Laverne. I would rather be alive somewhere else.”

She took my hand and led me down the cellar steps. The bulb at the bottom swung when she pulled the chain, and the air smelled of oil and old stone.

The floor was poured concrete, smooth and gray. In the far corner, pressed in when it was wet, were two handprints, a large one and a small one, and beside them, scratched with a nail, a D and an L and the year 1964.

“We poured that slab ourselves,” she said. “The summer we were married. He held my wrist so I would not smudge it.” She laughed a little. “I thought a man who paid cash would at least let me take the floor.”

Then I went upstairs and picked up her telephone.

Lavon Ulrich answered on the second ring at nine-forty on a Wednesday night. “Lavon,” I said, “I need a furnace in Leota Sorley’s cellar by tomorrow noon.”

There was a pause. “I have one on the rack that a job fell through on,” he said. “Give me a half hour to find my boys.”

They came at six the next morning, his two sons and a van, and by noon the furnace was running. The invoice said twenty-nine hundred dollars for parts and nothing for labor. Aldene paid it out of her coffee can and would not discuss it.

That left Friday, and the paper. Leota had signed it. I am a realtor, not a lawyer, and I was afraid that if I told her it was no good and I was wrong, she would believe herself bound.

It was Marcene Pennock who found the way. “Laverne,” she said, “a contract is something two people agree to. It is not something one man stands outside a house and reads out loud. But somebody had better be sitting on that porch.”

So we sat.

By nine on Friday morning there were eleven folding chairs on Leota’s front porch, borrowed from the Methodist basement. Eleven women in church coats sat in them with thermoses.

Aldene was there, and Marcene, and Ila Beecham. Dorcas and Clarabel, who had sold their own houses to the same man.

And in the end chair, in her good brown coat, sat Bettylou Mundt, who had not spoken a word to me since March. She had simply come and sat down.

At five minutes to ten, the white Silverado turned into the driveway. A man in a bolo tie climbed out of the passenger side holding a notary stamp. Brice Penhallow got out of the driver’s side with a folder, and then he saw the porch.