I had set Aldene’s pound cake on the blue casserole dish, because it seemed the right dish. I had also put out one extra chair near the door. Nobody asked about the chair.
At ten o’clock exactly, there was a knock at the back door.
He had come alone. No vest. He wore a plain blue jacket with the collar up against the cold, and he looked like what he was, a tired man of forty-six who had not slept well in a month.
A manila folder was under his arm. It was thick.
He stood in the doorway and looked at ten women in their church coats. I could see him counting, and I could see him recognize every face. Nobody spoke.
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“You may sit,” said Aldene. She nodded at the chair by the door. “Nobody here stands for anyone.”
He sat. He set the folder on the table in front of Bettylou Mundt, who was the only one who had not looked away. His hands were not entirely steady.
“I brought everything, Mrs. Mundt. You told me to bring everything.”
She looked at the folder a long moment. Then she opened it. The first sheet was a page of yellow legal paper covered in numbers in a small, neat hand.
She read the number at the top out loud. “Eighty-four thousand six hundred dollars.”
She looked up. She was eighty-two years old and weighed about a hundred pounds, and she said, without raising her voice at all, “That is eighty-four thousand six hundred dollars more than you offered me for Orrin’s house, Mr. Penhallow. I want you to tell me why you thought it was worth forty-one.”
The refrigerator hummed. Nobody breathed.
He did not answer for a long time. Then he said, “I did not think it was worth forty-one.”
“Then why did you offer it?”
He laid both hands flat on the table. “Because it is what a woman will take. It is not what her house is worth. It is what she will take. That is the only number I have ever asked.”
Nobody said anything. He took a breath.
“My mother’s name was Maudie. In 2011 she had a little yellow house on Pearl Avenue in Joplin that she and my father paid off in 1994. She was a widow, sixty-three. In May of that year the tornado took the roof and the back wall. The foundation stood. A week later a man came to her door with a clipboard.”
His voice stayed level. “He was kind. He had a good haircut. He said he was so sorry for her loss and he could take the place off her hands by Friday. He paid her twenty-nine thousand dollars for a lot with a standing foundation in a neighborhood that was going to be rebuilt. I was thirty-one. I read the paper out loud to her at her kitchen table, and I told her it was fair.”
He swallowed. “I told her it was fair because the man was kind, and the paper said market conditions, and I did not know what a house was worth. She believed me. I was her son.”
Aldene had her glasses off and was holding them in her lap.
“She lived in a rented trailer for four years after that. She died in it, with a space heater. What I remember is that near the end she apologized to me. She said she was sorry she had not been able to leave me anything.”