The Moving Truck That Wasnt Mine

The first thing I noticed that morning was the truck.

Not my truck. Not the little rented box van I had reserved for that afternoon, the one I had circled on the calendar in red like a woman circling her own birthday. This was a big white moving truck, the kind with a company name painted down the side, and it was sitting in the gravel drive of my house with its back doors thrown wide open.

Men in gray shirts were carrying boxes up the porch steps I had spent two Saturdays sanding and painting myself. They walked across the new boards like they belonged there. Behind them the house stood the way it always stood in my head on the nights I could not sleep, quiet and square and honest, a two story white frame house on Sabin Street with black shutters and a porch that ran the whole front of it.

Across the road, Merle Tomlin had his flag out on the pole by his mailbox, the way he did every single day. A school bus groaned around the corner by the water tower. Somebody two houses down was running a mower. It was an ordinary Tuesday in an ordinary town, and everything looked as calm as a glass of water.

Except for what was happening inside my house.

I sat in my car at the curb with both hands on the wheel and I could not make myself move.

Six years

Six years.

That was how long it took me to buy that house. Six years of estimating jobs by the light of my kitchen bulb, six years of measuring other people’s kitchens and other people’s bathrooms and writing bids on other people’s dreams. I work for a general contractor. I am the one who prices the work, orders the material, catches the mistake before it costs the boss ten thousand dollars. I am good at it. For six years I got up before the crews did and I stayed after they left, and I said no to almost everything a person my age is supposed to say yes to.

No to the cruise the girls from church took. No to the newer car. No to the vacation, the second one, the third one. I drove a Corolla with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and I packed my own lunch every day in a soft cooler that smelled like every sandwich I had ever put in it. I did all of that for one reason. I wanted one thing in this world that had my name on it and nobody else’s. A door I could lock behind me. A porch that was mine.