The For Sale Sign In My Yard

I saw the sign before I saw the truck.

It stood in the grass at the edge of my own driveway, a white metal post with a red and white placard wired to the top, the kind that catches your eye from the road on purpose. RICK SATTERFIELD REALTY, it said, and under that, in smaller letters, CALL FOR A PRIVATE SHOWING. There was a phone number. There was a little photo of a man in a blue blazer, smiling like he had never once stood in anybody’s yard uninvited.

It was stuck in the exact strip of lawn my father had broken up with a hand mattock in 1958, the summer before I was born, because my mother wanted a stretch of real grass between the porch and the gravel, something soft for bare feet. I had mowed that strip every week of every summer for forty years. I knew the two low spots in it where the ground still settled a little after a hard rain, from an old cistern that used to sit there before Dad filled it in.

I had the egg basket on my arm. I had just come up from the chicken house, where I keep eleven layers and one rooster who thinks he runs the operation, and I was thinking about nothing more complicated than whether I had enough eggs to take a dozen over to Ruthie Oster, who was recovering from a hip replacement and still couldn’t stand at her own stove long enough to crack them.

Then I came around the lilac bush and there was the sign, standing in my mother’s good grass like it had grown there overnight.

I did not drop the basket. I want that on the record, because I have pictured myself dropping it a hundred times since, eggs everywhere, a scene worth telling. That is not what happened. What happened is I stood there for what felt like a long time and was probably forty seconds, and I read the sign three times like it might say something different the fourth.

Then I went inside and I called my sister.

Pam picked up on the third ring, the way she always does, like she has already decided how much of her day she is willing to give you before she says hello.

“Jo,” she said. “I was just about to call you.”

“There’s a For Sale sign in my yard,” I said.

I did not raise my voice. I want that on the record too. Fifty nine years old and I have never once in my adult life raised my voice at my sister, not when she skipped Daddy’s eightieth birthday for a work trip, not when she sent flowers to Mama’s funeral instead of coming four days early like I asked, and I was not going to start over a piece of sheet metal.

“I know,” Pam said. “Rick was supposed to call you first. I told him to call you first.”