The decision stayed the same.
My cousin’s house is on the east side of Portland, up a hill where you can see the city lights from the back deck in the evening.
We spent the days the way men our age spend good days. Cooking things slowly, watching baseball, talking about people we’d known and places we’d been, occasionally saying nothing for long stretches in a way that didn’t require explanation.
I’d forgotten what rest actually felt like.
Not sleep, but rest.
The difference between recovering from exhaustion and not being exhausted in the first place.
I checked in with the real estate agent every few days.
There were three serious inquiries in the first week.
By the end of the second week, there was an offer, a couple in their early 30s, firsttime home buyers, nurses at the same hospital, looking to put down roots.
The agent said they’d been house hunting for almost a year.
She said they cried a little when the offer was accepted.
I accepted it the same afternoon.
I came back to Charlotte on a Sunday morning, 22 days after I had left.
I’d arranged to stay at a hotel near the airport, something quiet and clean, nothing expensive.
I wasn’t ready for anything more complicated than that.
They found me in the hotel parking lot Monday afternoon.
I still don’t know exactly how.
I’d only told two people where I was, my attorney and the real estate agent, and both of them are professionals.
But Charlotte is not a large city, and I suppose if you call enough people, you eventually get somewhere.
Or maybe they saw my truck.
My daughter looked like she hadn’t been sleeping.
Her husband stayed half a step behind her, which I noticed.
The same arrangement as the driveway three weeks earlier, the same distance.
She started talking before she’d fully crossed the parking lot.
Everything she said was true in the narical sense and meaningless in every way that mattered.
That they’d been under stress.
That they hadn’t handled the conversation well.
That they’d been thinking about my feelings and realized they’d made a mistake, that the house felt different now, and could we please just talk?