We ate a great many eggs those two years.
Nate sold his bass boat.
He didn’t ask me first. He didn’t make a big speech about it.
One Saturday the boat was sitting in our yard on its trailer. The next Saturday, there was a rectangle of dead grass where the trailer used to sit. And thirty-six hundred dollars more in our savings account.
He loved that boat.
And we went to every single Sunday dinner at Ron and Judy’s that my shift schedule allowed. And we didn’t tell anybody what we were doing.
That was Nate’s rule. I came to agree with it.
If we told them we were saving for a house, it would sound like a hint. It would sound like a bill sent two years late.
And neither one of us wanted one single dollar that had to be asked for.
Kim bought a little ranch house on Maple Street with a fenced backyard. Jeff and his wife put their money down on a place in the new subdivision. Stacy kept hers in the bank until she finished nursing school.
We went to both housewarming parties.
I brought a casserole to each one. And I meant every noodle of it.
At Jeff’s housewarming, Judy came up and squeezed my arm.
“You two will be next,” she said. “You’re so good with money.”
“We’re working on it,” I said.
The second spring, in March, I was eating my sandwich at my desk at the hospital with the county newspaper open to the legal notices.
That’s where a billing clerk’s eye goes, whether she wants it to or not.
The county trustee was auctioning off its surplus property list. Those are the properties where nobody paid the taxes. And nobody redeemed them. Year after year. Until the county ended up holding them.
Most of the list was empty lots and a burned-out filling station.
One line was a house and two point three acres on the county road north of town.
Everybody knew it as the Miller place.
Old Dale Miller had died in that house. His children lived in Arizona and Oregon and had stopped answering the tax bills. The house had been standing empty for six years.
You could see it from the blacktop as you drove by. A tall white farmhouse going gray. With a front porch that sagged in the middle like a tired horse.
I drove Nate out there that evening.
You weren’t allowed to go inside before a county sale. You bought what you could see from the yard. You bought it as it stood.
The weeds came up to my hip. There was an old cistern with a concrete lid. And right beside it, one stubborn clump of something red, just breaking ground.
Nate walked all the way around the house once. Slowly.
He got down on his belly and went under the porch with a flashlight. He stood back by the road and looked at the roofline for a long time with his head tilted. The way he sights down a driveshaft.
“Ridge is straight,” he said. “Foundation’s limestone, and it hasn’t moved. The porch is shot. And I bet the wiring’s older than Dad.”
He rubbed his jaw.
“Good bones, Em.”
“What would it go for?”
“What have we got?”
“Forty-two thousand and some change.”
“Then that’s what it’d go for,” he said. “Or it goes to somebody else.”
The sale was on a Thursday morning in April. Ten o’clock. On the courthouse steps.
They’ve held the county sales on those steps for as long as anybody can remember.
The auctioneer was a man named Dobbs. Sixty or so. Tan windbreaker. A clipboard. And a voice that carried all the way across the square to the bank.
There were maybe twenty people. Most of them were there for the empty lots.
A landlord from over in the next county was standing near the front in a quilted vest with his hands in his pockets. I knew he was a landlord by his boots. They’d never been in a field.
I’d taken a vacation day from the hospital. Nate came straight from a job with grease up to his elbows.
The terms were printed on a sheet. Payment in full on the day of the sale. Certified funds. No warranty of any kind. A county deed, mailed when it was recorded.
I had a cashier’s check in my purse for forty thousand dollars.
And underneath it, a bank envelope with two thousand dollars in cash. Because the rest of what we had was tip money. And I’d never gotten it all turned into anything bigger than twenties.
Dobbs read off the parcel number.
“House and two and three-tenths acres. Known locally as the Miller farm. Who’ll give me twenty thousand?”
The quilted vest lifted one finger.
“Twenty-five,” Nate said.
It went up by thousands. Thirty. Thirty-five.
At thirty-eight, the man in the vest stopped lifting his finger. He started saying the numbers out loud. I took that to mean he was thinking hard about each one.
“Forty,” Nate said.
“Forty-one,” said the vest.
Nate looked at me.
I’d told him forty-two was the bottom of the jar. Past forty-two, there was nothing. Not a furnace filter. Not a gallon of paint.
“Forty-one five,” Nate said.
Dobbs looked at the vest.
The vest looked down at his sheet.
And I watched that man decide that a sagging porch wasn’t worth five hundred dollars more to him.
He shook his head.
“Sold,” Dobbs said. “Forty-one thousand five hundred. Your name, sir?”
“Schafer,” Nate said. “Nathan and Emily. Both names.”
Inside at the county clerk’s counter, I handed over the cashier’s check.
Then I counted out fifteen hundred dollars from the bank envelope. Mostly twenties. With a layer of fives and ones at the bottom that still smelled a little bit like the fryer.
The deputy clerk counted it twice without one single remark. Bless her. And she wrote me a receipt.
“The deed will come in the mail in six or eight weeks,” she said. “But the sheriff’s office had the keys from when they boarded up the back door.”
She slid a manila envelope across the counter.
“Nobody’s going to mind if you start mowing.”
It was a ring of seven old keys. Two of them were skeleton keys. Not one of them was marked.
We drove out there with the windows rolled down.
We stood at the foot of those porch steps holding that ring of keys between us. Nate’s hand was shaking. So was mine.
“Capable,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said.
And then we both started laughing so hard I had to sit down on the bottom porch step.
It held.
We still didn’t tell anybody.
By then it wasn’t a rule so much as a habit. And there was a little pride in it too. I’ll own that.
I wanted to hand them a finished thing. I wanted to say, come to dinner. And give them an address.
It was a long, long way from finished.
The fourth key opened the front door.
Inside, it smelled like mice and wet plaster and somebody’s old pipe tobacco. There was a calendar from a seed company still hanging on the kitchen wall. Turned to a July six years gone.
The wallpaper in the front room was coming down in long sheets all by itself.
The fuse box was in the cellar stairwell. Sixty amps for the whole house.
When Nate unscrewed the first fuse, there was a penny jammed in behind it.
“Well,” he said. “That’s one way.”
Behind the plaster walls, it was all knob-and-tube wiring. Cloth-covered wire run through little porcelain knobs. Eighty or ninety years old. Brittle as a cracker.
Nate did two years in the electrical program at the vocational school before he ever switched over to diesel.
He went down to the county office and pulled a homeowner’s permit. He bought a brand-new two-hundred-amp panel with the first paycheck after the sale.
And then he rewired that entire house at night.
He’d come off his shift at five o’clock. Eat whatever I’d packed in a cooler for him. And work until eleven with a headlamp on. Because of course there was no power in the house at all. Just one temporary pole out in the yard.
Room by room.
He drilled the old wall studs. They were true two-by-fours, oak, hard as iron. He pulled new cable through them and stapled it neat as a seam.
I never once saw him hurry a staple.
