A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [126]
Shortly after two o’clock on Monday afternoon Sandy Brickman from Davis Realty got out of her dented Maverick. She tottered up the gravel driveway in her high heels. I had seen her scowling as she removed her keys from the ignition. She tried not to show her disdain for the house, which was visibly tilting to the south, and the outbuildings which long ago should have been burned to the ground. We had no grapevine wreaths stuck with dried flowers at our door. There were no lawn ornaments, no little black Sambos in cast iron, in our burned-out stubble. The place might have looked habitable if the grass hadn’t been white. It might have seemed a find if the shutters in the front weren’t hanging from one hinge, if the paint hadn’t chipped off and fallen like snow to the ground. Our home suggested ruin. Sandy Brickman, with her real estate radar, knew it before she’d even set foot on the gravel drive.
She had too much lipstick smeared on her mouth. She had bad skin, the pockmarked, greasy variety that reminded me of the girls in high school who used to give themselves away to any willing customer. Out of all the surreal characters in our dream summer Sandy Brickman took the cake. She was incongruent in our landscape, as if she’d been set on our driveway as a gag. She stretched her hand out well before she was within seven feet of me. I called to her. I knew I didn’t want to get too close. “If we walk up to the plateau we can get an overview,” I said. She clasped my hand. She was sweating inside her pink suit. She looked directly into my eyes as if she had a method of measuring what I would settle for. Her rings dug into my skin and no doubt we exchanged something communicable in that shake. She thought that might be a good idea, to start off with the big picture. “The house—well,” she snorted.
My urchin children, who hadn’t had their hair combed, or a decent lunch, not to mention breakfast, trailed behind us.
“We didn’t see our mom yesterday,” Claire said, running up ahead and then facing Sandy and walking backwards.
“That’s too bad,” Sandy said.
I had made a point of calling a realtor in a distant city. Our potboiler was localized and had not, as far as I knew, been heralded more than once on the news at the beginning. There was a fair chance Sandy knew nothing of our misfortunes. She would jump to her own conclusions. She might think that I was the ex-husband who had kidnaped his children. She might take a more kindly view, might assume that my wife had died in a crash, that we had gone to a seance to try to make contact.
Sandy Brickman and I talked zoning. We talked arable land. We talked mound systems and septic systems and sewer. We talked county planning and town ordinances. Another one of my mother’s famous sayings that has stuck is this one: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” I had the terrific urge to take Sandy by the shoulders and yell in her face.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I said quietly. “My twin sister is dying of leukemia. None of us have insurance. We’ve been trying to raise funds for bone marrow treatment by having dances and collection cups in the supermarkets. I’m sure you can imagine what kind of money we’re talking.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Sandy said.
“Selling this place is a shot in the dark, I realize, but it’s all I have left now for cash.”
I had wanted to spend my life caring for land, being a steward, and raising food. When we moved in, and I walked down to the barn for the first time, I couldn’t imagine needing anything more. I had my own barn, a wife, a child. The barn had stanchions, a haymow, a milkhouse. It had stalls