The House With the Lien On It
We got home from Grant Street at half past twelve and there was nothing to do.
That is the thing nobody tells you about the end of an emergency.
For six weeks I had woken up every morning into a problem with an address, and at eleven forty on the second of April the problem stopped existing, and my husband and I stood in our own kitchen in the middle of a Wednesday with the discharge paperwork on the table and nothing whatsoever to do.
He made sandwiches. I let him.
We ate them standing up at the counter like two people in a break room.
“I kissed Owen Ferreira,” I said.
He put the sandwich down.
“On Saturday,” I said. “On his boat, under the Fortieth Street. He is the dive inspector on the pier work and I have been having an omelet with him on Thursdays since February and I have not lied to you about it and I have not told you about it, and those are two different things and I know exactly which one I have been doing.”
Cal stood at the counter with his hands on the edge of it.
“Okay,” he said.
“Do not say okay.”
“What would you like me to say.”
“Something,” I said. “Something with a temperature.”
He looked at the sandwich for a while.
“I would like to break something,” he said, “and I have not got the standing.”
“That is the most honest thing you have said in six weeks.”
“It is not the whole thing.”
“Say the whole thing.”
“The whole thing is that I have been sleeping in a room off my own kitchen for five weeks hoping you would come down the stairs,” Cal said, “and now I know you were on a boat, and there is a part of me that wants to put my fist through that wall, and there is a bigger part that is glad, because for two years I did that to you and you have been walking around this house since February like a person who has had a limb taken off, and now at least there is one hour of it you got back.”
“That is a very generous position.”
“It is not generous. It is arithmetic. Twenty-two months and one Saturday.”
“Do not do that,” I said. “Do not sit there and be fair about it. You have been fair for six weeks. You have been so fair, Cal, you have painted a hallway and given me a ring of keys and sold two acres and put your patch on a bar in front of twenty-three men, and every single thing you have done has been correct.”
“You are saying that like it is an accusation.”
“It is,” I said, and my voice went up for the first time since February, and it came out of a place I did not know was still occupied. “It is an accusation. Because now I have to be a person who was paid.”
He straightened up off the counter.
“What?”
“Three hundred and ten thousand dollars,” I said.
“A patch you had since you were twenty-two. A club, a building, a business, and Jonah standing in the front yard asking who he is supposed to be. That is what this cost, and every bit of it went across the table to me, and if I stay in this house now then I have taken it.”
“You have not …”
“I am the note holder,” I said. “Do you understand what I am saying to you? I have watched what a lien does to people for six weeks. I have watched twenty-three men sit in a room and let a house get eaten because somebody was holding paper on them. And now I am the one holding it. I would be holding it for the rest of my life. Every argument about the dishwasher, every Christmas, every time you come home late from a job in Beaver County and I do not hear the truck when I expect it, there it is on the table. Three hundred and ten thousand dollars and a patch. I would never have to say it out loud, not once, and it would be in every room of this house forever.”
He stood very still.
“You think I would feel that,” he said.
“I think I would feel it,” I said. “That is the part you cannot fix. I am not afraid you will resent me. I am afraid of what I will become. I have been an inspector since I was twenty-four years old and it is the only competence I have ever fully trusted, and Cal, I have been rating you since February. Every day. I have a running condition assessment on my own husband, and it has gotten better, it has actually gotten better, you have gone from a two to something like a five, and do you hear what I am saying to you?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know how to love a structure I am inspecting.”
The furnace came on. It was April and the furnace came on, because it is a house from 1912 and the north side has never once been warm.
“So what do you want,” Cal said.
And that was the question, and I had known it was coming since the title company, and I had an answer ready and I heard myself say it and I have thought about that sentence every day since.
“I want you to go,” I said.
He did not argue.
That is the thing I did not expect and could not have prepared for.
Nineteen years, and every single time I have ever asked that man to do something he has agreed with me and then done it in his own time, in March, in eleven days, tomorrow.
And I stood in my kitchen on the second of April and asked him to leave my house and he said, “All right,” and he went upstairs and got the duffel out of the closet.
It took him nineteen minutes.
I know because I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched the clock on the stove, which is a thing I have decided not to explain to myself.
He came down with the duffel and his toolbag and the photograph from Presque Isle, which he had taken off the wall of a trailer in Struthers’s inventory the week before because it was not in the bill of sale.
At the door he stopped.
“I am not going to fight you on this,” he said, “and I want you to know why, because I know what it is going to look like at two in the morning. It is going to look like I left easy.”
“Cal.”
“You told me in February that you needed me to be a man who can walk out of a room.” He had the duffel over his shoulder. “You did not mean this room. I know you did not mean this room. But I am not going to be a man who can only do it when it suits him.”
“Where will you go.”
“Rennie has a place over the garage in Etna. There is a demo outfit in Sharpsburg that has wanted me on the rigging side for four years and I have said no four times because I had a yard.” He almost smiled. “I do not have a yard.”
“That is not funny.”
“No.”
He opened the storm door with the closer neither of us has fixed since 2006, and it banged, and he turned around on the porch.
“Vera,” he said. “For the record. I did not do any of it to be paid, and I am not going to say that again, and you are going to have to decide on your own whether you believe it, because there is nothing left that I can do to prove it. That is what I have got. That is the end of what I have got.”
He went down the steps and got in the truck and drove up Herron, and I stood in the doorway of a house with no lien on it and watched my husband’s taillights go up the hill and turn, and the thing I felt, standing there, was the thing I had been waiting six weeks to feel and had been unable to produce on demand at any point when it would have done anybody any good.
It came about forty seconds too late to be any use to either of us.