What Bish Wanted Signed
I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with the notice and my laptop and I did what I do, which is pull the file.
Fourteenth of March, eleven years ago. A mortgage and security agreement between Red Quarry Motorcycle Club, a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation, and Calvin J.
Doyle and Vera A. Doyle, husband and wife, encumbering the property at Herron Avenue in the Sixth Ward, in the principal amount of one hundred forty thousand dollars, given as security for a construction loan for the improvement of the property at Nineteenth Street known as the club premises.
Two signatures at the bottom. Notarized. Witnessed.
One of them was mine.
I sat with that for a long time. The furnace cycled. Out the window over the sink the sky above Polish Hill did that thing it does an hour before dawn where it stops being black and starts being a color you cannot name and would not choose.
I remembered signing it.
That is the part I have never said out loud to anyone except my mother, and I said it to her badly.
I remembered the afternoon. It was March and we refinanced the house that spring because the roof needed doing and Jonah needed braces and the rate had come down, and the title agent had a folding table set up in her office off Liberty and there were forty-one pages and I had come straight off a site, still in my boots, and Cal said, it is the refi packet, sign where the tabs are, and I signed where the tabs were.
I did not read it.
Me. The woman who reads the 1927 shop drawings. The woman who will not let a contractor tell her the deck is eight inches without a core sample. I signed forty-one pages I did not read because my husband put a pen in my hand and I trusted the structure.
That is the whole thing, if you want it in one line. Every failure in my life has the same shape. I know how to inspect anything in the world except the one thing I am standing on.
At seven I called out sick for the first time in four years.
At nine I drove to Nineteenth Street.
In daylight the clubhouse is smaller than it is at night.
It is a long brick shop building from about 1918 with a saw tooth roof and steel sash windows Cal reglazed one at a time over a winter, and the sign on the front with the red letters is a good sign because Cal cut the letters himself out of quarter inch plate.
The lot was gravel and mud and three bikes and Bish Alvarado’s dually.
Bish let me in. He did not act surprised, which told me he had been called.
The main room at nine in the morning smells like last night. He walked me back past the pool table to the office at the bottom of the stairs, and I made myself look at those stairs on the way by, on purpose, the way you make yourself look at a thing so it cannot get any bigger.
“Coffee,” he said. It was not a question. He poured it into a mug that said Cleveland on it, which is a joke in this city, and he sat down behind the desk and folded his hands.
Bish has been president for sixteen years. He was a millwright at Edgar Thomson for twenty-two before that, and he has a way of speaking to a woman that is not condescending exactly, more like a man reading from a script written in 1974 that he has updated as best he can.
“You saw the notice,” he said.
“I did.”
“That was a mailing error. The county does an eleven year audit on nonprofit encumbrances and it kicks out a courtesy notice. Nothing changed. That paper has been sitting the same way since the year we put the roof on.”
“You are telling me it is old news.”
“I am telling you it is not news at all.”
“Bish,” I said, “there is a hundred and forty thousand dollar lien on my house held by a motorcycle club and I found out about it from an envelope.”
He had the grace to look at the desk.
“Cal never told you.”
“Cal never told me a lot of things. Apparently it is a policy.”
He let that sit. Then he said, “You understand what that money did.”
“It built this.”
“It built this,” he agreed. “Nobody would lend to us. Not a bank in this county. A club of guys, half of us laid off out of the mill, buying a shell with a collapsed roof in a neighborhood the city had written off. You know who lent to us? A credit union in Homestead, on the condition that somebody put up real property. Cal put up his house. Not because I asked. I did not ask. He came to me with the paper already drawn.”
“Of course he did.”
“That building fed eleven families the winter the mill jobs went,” Bish said.
“There is a food bank runs out of the back Thursdays. There is a kid in here at fifteen right now who would otherwise be somewhere I do not want to think about. I am not saying that buys anything. I am saying you should know what your name is on.”
I put the mug down.
“Bish, do you know what I do for a living.”
“You inspect bridges.”
“I write ratings,” I said. “A rating is a number between zero and nine that tells you what condition a thing is in. And the whole discipline exists because human beings will look at a beautiful, useful, beloved structure that eleven families depend on and they will find nine excellent reasons why the number should be higher than what the steel actually says. Every reason you just gave me is true. None of them changes the finding.”
He looked at me a while.
“There is a second thing,” he said.
“There always is.”
He opened the drawer and took out a document in a blue backing sheet and turned it around on the desk and slid it toward me, and I did not touch it.
“The credit union sold the note,” he said.
“Two years ago. New holder wants the collateral cleaned up. It is a subordination agreement. It moves your house behind the building in the priority order. Which is what we all thought it was in the first place, and it is better for you, not worse. Your lawyer will tell you the same.”
“When did you find out they wanted this signed.”
“November.”
“November,” I said.
“Cal was going to bring it to you.”
And I started to laugh. I could not stop it. It came up out of me in that office with the smell of stale beer and the sound of a compressor kicking on somewhere in the shop, and Bish Alvarado sat there with his hands folded and let me do it.
“He was going to bring me a document in November,” I said, when I could.
“He was going to bring me two documents in November. He did not bring me either one. Do you know what that tells me, Bish? It tells me that in my husband’s head there is a list of things he is going to tell Vera when the moment is right, and that list is now several years long, and every item on it is something that would have cost him a room. ”
Bish said, carefully, “That is between the two of you.”
“No,” I said. “That is the part I want you to hear, because you keep saying it and it is not true. It is not between the two of us. You have a plaque on the wall out there. It says loyalty over everything. And for twenty-two months the men in this building were loyal to my husband while he was doing what he was doing, and to a woman whose husband you buried, and every one of you was kind to me at Christmas.” I stood up.
“So do not tell me what is between the two of us. This building has been in my marriage the whole time. It just did not have to sign anything.”
He stood too, because he is that generation, and he said, “Vera.”
“I am not signing that.”
“It is better for you.”
“It might be,” I said. “I do not know yet. That is the point. Nobody is ever going to put a pen in my hand again and tell me where the tabs are.”
I got as far as the door.
“Vera,” Bish said. “For what it is worth. He is a good man who did a rotten thing.”
I turned around.
“Everything I condemn was built by good men,” I said.