The husband shook my hand and said, “Thank you.”
And I told him to take good care of it.
Walking out of that building into the Charlotte morning with a cashier’s check in my jacket pocket, I thought about Lorraine.
About the house in Henderson where we’d raised our daughter, where we’d had arguments and made up from them, where we’d sat on the back porch in the evenings watching the light change.
About how a house is just a structure, and what makes it a home is what people choose to do inside it.
I thought about the pots on the front steps, the chips I’d filled and repainted on a Sunday afternoon, about how nobody asked me to do that.
I just did it because I was there and it needed doing.
And I was, at some level I hadn’t examined carefully enough, grateful for the chance.
Gratitude is not the same as weakness.
I know that now.
I drove north a week later.
I’ve been renting a furnished house near Lake Norman for 2 months now, which means I wake up with a view of water through the bedroom window and the nearest neighbor is far enough away that I can sit on the deck in the morning with my coffee and hear nothing but birds.
My daughter has called 11 times.
I’ve answered three of those calls because she is my daughter and I am not made of stone.
And because those three conversations, brief and careful as they were, are the beginning of something that might eventually become a different kind of relationship, a real one, maybe built on something other than convenience.
My son-in-law’s called twice.
I haven’t answered those.
The young couple sent me a card.
I don’t know how they got my address. Probably through the agent, but it arrived last week.
A simple card with a photograph of the front of the house printed on it.
Somebody had put new flowers in the pots by the front steps.
Good ones, wellchosen, the kind Lorraine would have picked.
Inside the card they’d written, “We hope you know how much this means to us. We already love it here.”
I set the card on the window sill by the kitchen table where I could see it while I had my morning coffee.
Some mornings that’s the first thing I look at.
It turns out that’s enough.
I’ve been sitting with the story long enough now that I can look at it without flinching.
That took a while.