Worth Staying For

The Last House on the List

A handwritten price tag dangled from a dead stranger's reading lamp: $12, firm.

Greer Mercer adjusted it a quarter inch so the string wouldn't catch the bulb, and stepped back to judge the table. Pressed-glass dish, ninety cents. A boxed Timex with a cracked crystal, eight dollars, because somebody's grandson would want the band. A Bible with a pressed violet flattened at Psalms, free with any purchase, because nobody paid for other people's prayers and she would not make them try.

The house belonged to a Mr. Harold Petty until eleven days ago. Now it belonged to whoever showed up at nine with cash. He had lived in it forty-one years, judging by the deed and the strata of wallpaper she'd found behind the hutch—four layers, four marriages or four moods, hard to say. She had priced all of it in a single afternoon. That was the job. You walked into the leftovers of a life, you understood quickly what a thing was worth to a person who would never want it and might, if the light was kind, want a smaller version of it on their own shelf, and you let the rest go.

By two o'clock the rooms were empty enough to echo. By four the truck was loaded with the unsold remainder bound for the consignment barn, and then it was loaded with nothing, because that was the part Greer liked. The slam of the rear door on a clean steel bed. The way the suspension rose, relieved. An empty truck pointed downhill, and a packed bag riding shotgun where a person might otherwise sit. She had never once driven away from one of these houses and looked in the mirror. There was nothing in a mirror but the place you'd already left.

She was halfway to the interstate, the heater ticking, late February pressing gray against the windshield, when the phone rang from a number she didn't know.

"Mercer Estate Services," she said, because hope was a stranger and you answered it professionally.

"Miss Mercer." An old man's voice, dry as a county road. Unhurried in the way of people who have stopped being afraid of the clock. "My name is Dell Pyne. I'm an attorney out of Verbena Springs. I'm calling about the estate of Opaline Quist."

"I think you want a different Mercer." She watched a hawk ride a fence line. "I sell estates. I don't have one."

"You do now," he said. "Mrs. Quist left you a house."

The hawk dropped on something she couldn't see. Greer let a mile go by.

"I don't know an Opaline Quist."

"No," said Dell Pyne, as if she'd confirmed a thing he'd written down years ago. "I didn't expect you would. The reading is Thursday. Bring identification. The house won't run off, but the situation's got a clock on it, and you'll want to hear the terms from me before you hear them from anyone else."

She almost laughed. The situation's got a clock on it. Everybody's did. "What's it worth?"

A pause that had something close to amusement in it. "That," he said, "is precisely the wrong question, and exactly the one she said you'd ask. Thursday, Miss Mercer." He hung up before she could put a price on the silence.

She drove on. Verbena Springs wasn't anywhere she'd been. She'd have remembered the name; it sounded like a perfume sample stapled into a magazine. She told herself she was going for the signature and the listing. A free house was a free house, and she knew to the dollar what she'd do with one: appraise, stage, sell, bank the proceeds against the day she could finally buy a small ugly box of her own that no caseworker, no landlord, no decree could ever revoke. That was the whole of the want. A door with her name on the deed and no one able to make her leave it.

She did not let herself wonder why a dead woman she couldn't remember knew she would ask what a thing was worth.

—

Verbena Springs came up out of the dark like a town someone had dropped and not bothered to pick up straight.

It climbed. That was the first thing—everything climbed, switchback over switchback up a mountainside slick with February, the houses stacked so the porch of one looked into the chimney of the next. Painted ladies, the tour books would call them, those tall gabled Victorians with their gingerbread trim and their turrets, except half of them were peeling down to gray bone, and a good third wore props and braces like old men with canes. A grand bathhouse with its windows soaped over. A hand-lettered sign: ANTIQUES — WE BUY ESTATES. Competition. She catalogued it the way she catalogued everything, by what it would fetch and what it would cost to haul.

She did not look up the hill at the highest lot, where a tall house she had not yet been introduced to kept its dark turret window against the sky. She had no reason to. She didn't know it yet.

Pyne & Pyne occupied a narrow brick storefront wedged between a closed apothecary and a café called the Kettle & Keys, whose windows breathed warm and whose hand-chalked board promised pie and gossip in equal portions. A woman in the café window watched Greer park with the frank interest of someone who already knew her business better than she did. Greer pulled the truck nose-out, downhill, the way she always parked. You never knew when you'd want to be gone fast.

Dell Pyne was seventy-something and built like a folded ruler, all angles and patience, with eyes that had read too many last wishes to be surprised by anyone's. He shook her hand once, dry and exact, and waved her into a chair across a desk buried in the geology of a long career.

"You drove straight through," he observed. "There's coffee next door if you want to be a person first."

"I'd rather be done." She set her bag against the chair leg, within reach. "You said a house. I assume there's a lien, a tax bill, and a reason nobody local snapped it up. Tell me the number and where I sign to be allowed to fix the number."

He looked at her a while. "She said you'd be like this, too." He drew a thin folder from the stack as if it had been waiting on top the whole time. "Opaline Quist. Eighty-four. Ran a house up the hill called Quist House—everyone calls it the Lantern. She died in January. She left it to you."

"Then it's mine, and I'll list it Monday."

"It's half yours," Dell said.

The heater in the corner ticked. Greer kept her face the way she kept it at sales, the face that said I have already subtracted the sentimental value and you should too.

"Half."

"Joint and undivided. To you, and to a man named Ezra Barlow." He let the name sit on the desk between them like a thing she'd have to price. "Neither of you can sell the property. Not the house, not the land, not"—he turned a page—"'so much as a doorknob,' her words, until the two of you have lived in it together and restored it. Six months. February to August. There are inspections. There are conditions. There is," he added, with the ghost of a Pyne smile, "a great deal of her in it."

Greer had been left things before, in a manner of speaking. She'd been left at fourteen and at fifteen and at nineteen and a fistful of times in between, by people who'd run out of room or patience or funding. She knew the precise weight of a sentence that began as a gift and ended as a leash.

"I don't know Ezra Barlow."

"He says the same about you." Dell folded his hands. "He also doesn't want to sell. Wants to keep it till he dies, last I checked. So you'll find you agree on nothing, which is, I suspect, the point."

"It's a house." She heard her own voice flatten the way it did when something got too close. "It's just a house. You're describing a marriage to a stranger over a leaking roof. There isn't a clause on earth I can't break with a lawyer of my own."

"There is," Dell said gently. "You're sitting across from him. I drafted it. I've watched it hold against meaner challenges than you'll bring." He pushed a glass of water toward her she hadn't asked for. "She didn't do this to trap you, Miss Mercer, whatever it feels like. She did it because she ran the numbers same as you would, and decided you were both worth the gamble. She left you something to read about it."

He took out a single envelope. Cream paper gone soft at the corners, her name across the front in a slanted, certain hand. Not Greer Mercer. Just Greer, as if the woman had known her well enough to drop the surname, which no one ever had.

While he worked the flap with a thumbnail, Greer's hand found her coat pocket without instruction.

The key was there, the way it was always there. Small, brass, worn bright along one edge from fifteen years of being turned over by a thumb that had nothing else to hold. She'd carried it since she was nineteen and could not, if pressed, have told anyone where she got it. A motel, she'd always assumed. A locker, a friend's back door, some forgettable threshold on a forgettable night in the worst year of a bad decade. She'd meant to throw it out a hundred times. She never did. It rode in whatever pocket she was wearing, the one possession she owned that opened nothing she knew of, and her thumb moved over it now, around and around, the way another person might pray.

Dell unfolded the letter. Read it the way you'd read a verdict to someone you respected.

"'Greer,'" he read. "'You don't remember me. That's all right—I didn't make myself memorable on purpose, and you had reasons not to look back. But I remember you. I remembered you the whole time. I remember you both.'"

The key went still under Greer's thumb.

"'People think a will is for the giving away of things,'" Dell read. "'Mostly it is. I've priced out my life same as you'd do it—the good chairs, the bad silver, the house that's worth less than its roof. But there's one thing in it that won't go on a tag, and I've spent fifty years failing to give it away because you can't sell it and you can't gift it. You can only build it, on purpose, with another stubborn fool who needs it as bad as you do.'"

Greer was aware of her bag against the chair leg. Of the truck outside, nose downhill, empty. Of how few seconds it would take to stand up and be a hundred miles from this.

"'So I'm not giving you a house,'" the dead woman said, through the old lawyer's careful voice. "'I'm giving you six months and a reason to stay in one place long enough to find out what you're made of. Stay. Find out why I chose you. The door's open—it always was. The rest of it's in the next letters, when you've earned the right to be confused by them.'"

Dell set the page down. "There are more," he said, to her unspoken question. "Several. She left them with me to hand over at—particular moments. I'm not to give them early. I tried to argue her out of that part. I lost."

"Of course there are more." Greer's voice came out level, which cost her. "She's running this from the ground. That's a hell of a trick." She made herself unwrap her fingers from the key, set both hands flat on her knees where she could see them. It's just a house. It's just a strange old woman's joke, and the joke is on a person who has driven away from four hundred houses and isn't about to start arriving at one. "And if I say no? If I leave tonight?"

"Then the house goes to the county," Dell said, "and the county sells it to a man named Royce Kessler, who'll have the whole hill flattened to a parking structure by autumn, and the spring under it capped, and the spring is the only reason there's a town here at all." He shrugged, an old man declining to threaten her. "Or you stay, and you fight him to a draw, and you find out what she meant. I'm only the man who reads the letters. The deciding's yours."

Greer opened her mouth to say the thing she always said. That she didn't do staying. That she was the one who left, that she'd built an entire careful life out of being the one who left, because the alternative was standing in a doorway watching someone else's taillights, and she had done enough of that for one lifetime, thank you, she'd done it eleven times before she could vote—

The door behind her banged open on a gust of cold and cedar and somebody too big for the frame.

A man came through it backward, hauling a length of carved porch column against his chest with both arms, the way you'd carry a person out of a fire. Six feet of fluted painted wood, the capital chipped, the paint blistered. He had sawdust in his hair and a smear of something pale across one forearm and an apology already half-formed on his face for the racket—until he turned and saw her, and the truck through the window with its nose pointed down the mountain, and her bag packed at her feet ready to go.

His whole open face closed like a door in weather.

"You must be," he said, "the woman who wants to sell my house."

Easy, Old Girl

He had laid the spirit level on the parlor windowsill the night before, more out of habit than purpose, the way another man might set down his keys. Now, in the gray that came before the sun got over the ridge, Ezra crouched and looked at it the way you'd look at a thermometer in a sick child's mouth.

The bubble had drifted. Not centered, not even pretending. It sat hard against the downhill line and stayed there, small and yellow-green and certain, like it had somewhere better to be.

"Yeah," he said to the room. "I know. You think I can't feel it through my boots?"

He could. He'd felt it the second he walked in two nights ago — that long, slow tilt under everything, the floor giving the particular lean of a deck in a swell. Houses settled. All of them did, an inch a century, the way old people stooped. This wasn't that. This was a house being pulled. Something downhill had its hand on her hem and was tugging, patient, and she was leaning into it without knowing why, the way you lean toward a warm thing in the cold.

He didn't know yet what the warm thing was. He would. For now he just put his palm flat on the sill and said, low, "Easy, old girl. I've got you. We'll find out what's wrong with you and we'll fix it. We always do."

She answered the way they all did — a tick somewhere deep in the joists, a settling, a breath let out of old wood. He chose to take it as agreement.

Dawn came up slow and went around the house room by room, and Ezra went with it.

He didn't remember the place. That was the part he kept turning over like a stone in his pocket. He'd been here — Dell had said so, gentle and flat, the way you'd tell a man a thing about himself he ought to already know — but the years had taken it, the way they'd taken most of the bad stretch, scrubbed it down to a smear of cold and hunger and shame and one porch he could not, for the life of him, place. Seventeen years. A man forgets seventeen years if he works at it, and he had worked at it.

So he walked the house as a stranger and let his hands do the remembering, because his hands had never forgotten a thing in their lives.

The front hall went up two stories into shadow, a staircase curling along the wall like a question nobody had answered. The wallpaper was a ruin — cabbage roses gone the brown of old tea, peeling in long tongues, and behind it, here and there where it had let go, the pale ghost of plaster scrawled over with something he didn't stop to read. The runner had rotted to a stain. Three balusters were gone and one was a broom handle somebody had jammed in and painted to match, badly, with love. He put his weight on the bottom tread and it held, and he went up.

The second floor was where the house started telling on its owner.

A door at the end of the corridor opened onto nothing — onto air, a four-foot drop to the lean-to roof below, framed and trimmed and hung and never given a room to lead to. Just a door, finished down to its brass, opening onto morning. He stood and looked at it a while. Somebody had meant to build out there. Had measured, had bought the hinges, had hung the door first the way you do when you're sure, when you've already decided the room is coming — and then hadn't built the room.

Down the hall a staircase climbed eight risers and stopped at a wall. Plaster, lath, nothing behind it but the chimney. Eight steps up to a flat blank wall, the treads worn in the middle like people had used them, gone up and come down, up and down, on their way to a place that was never finished.

"What were you doing," he said, not really to the house now. To her. To the woman he couldn't remember, who'd kept starting rooms and never closing them. "What were you waiting to be sure of?"

He found three more. A bedroom with one wall still studs, insulation gone gray, a window seat built and cushioned in a room with no fourth wall. A bathroom plumbed and tiled to the chair rail and abandoned. Each one started with such care. Each one stopped like a held breath.

A man who'd never finished a house of his own had no business with the ache that put in his chest. He went down to the porch to get away from it, and that was where the house caught him.

The porch wrapped the whole south face, sagging at the far corner where a post had rotted off its pier. He came down the steps to look at the underside of the decking, the way he always did, and he stopped with his hand on a joist and went very still.

The boards were his.

He knew them the way you'd know your own handwriting in a stranger's house. Quartersawn white oak, ripped narrow, the ends cut at a five-degree back-bevel he'd taught himself one bad winter so water would shed instead of sit — a thing nobody did, a thing only he did, a private little vanity of a man who'd had nothing else to be proud of. Six of them, lapped and laid and never fastened down. Just resting there. Set in place by somebody who'd meant to come back the next day with the nails and the day had never come.

He crouched and put his fingers in the gap and lifted one and it came up loose in his hand, light, dry, waiting seventeen years to be nailed. Underneath, in pencil, in a hand younger and angrier than the one he wrote with now, it said: back tomorrow.

He hadn't come back tomorrow. He'd come back this week, with sawdust still in his hair, seventeen tomorrows late.

Something in him that had been loose his whole life went quiet and set, the way mortar sets, with a small chemical heat. He laid the board back exactly where it had been. He stood up. He looked at the rotted post and the leaning house and the spring he couldn't see yet doing its slow steady work, and he made the decision he would spend the next six months pretending he was still capable of unmaking.

He was going to finish it. All of it. Every door that opened onto nothing, every stair that climbed to a wall. He was going to nail down the boards he'd left.

And he was never, ever going to sell.

That was the state he was in — sentimental, resolved, with his hand still smelling of seventeen-year-old oak — when the truck came up the switchback and a woman got out and stood in the yard looking at his house like a butcher looking at a cow.

He knew it was her before she opened her mouth. Dell had warned him. The other half's coming up to see what she inherited, the old man had said, and there'd been something behind his glasses Ezra hadn't liked. Try not to fall in love or out of it in the first ten minutes.

She was tall and spare and put together in dark colors that didn't wrinkle, the kind of clothes you wear when you might be sleeping somewhere different tomorrow. She had a clipboard. God help him, an actual clipboard. She tipped her head back and ran her eyes up the front of the house — the turret, the slate, the gingerbread bargeboard he'd already mentally re-carved — and he watched her do a thing he'd seen a hundred contractors do and never once a person, which was to look at a house and see a number.

"You'd be Mercer," he said, coming up the steps to the porch so he stood above her. It felt important to stand above her.

"And you'd be the carpenter." She didn't offer a hand. She was looking past him through the open front door into the hall, and her face did something small and professional and awful. "Is that the original chandelier?"

"It's hers."

"It's brass and Bohemian crystal and it's a forty-pound focal piece, which in this market is eighteen hundred low, twenty-six hundred if I clean it and stage it under good light." She said it the way other people said good morning. "The newel post is nicer than the chandelier, honestly. Quartersawn oak, hand-carved, you can't fake that patina. That's a real thing." She finally looked at him. Her eyes were the gray of the dawn he'd just watched, and tired under it, and not unkind, which was somehow worse. "Most of what's in here is sad and brown and worth what people will pay to feel something for an afternoon. But the bones are good. The bones'll bring money."

"The bones," he said.

"You take the bones for the bones." She made a note. "I can have an outfit clear the whole thing in three days. We split it, we sign, we sell the lot to whatever it sells to, and we're both home by spring."

He had restored eleven houses for other people. He had watched four of them sold out from under the families he'd done it for, watched chandeliers like that one come down into bubble wrap, watched a stranger's bones get brought to money. He had a rule about not raising his voice in another person's house. He stood on the porch of the first house anyone had ever, in any legal sense, called his, and he found he had no rules left at all.

"You priced the chandelier," he said. "You've been here four minutes and you priced the chandelier."

"It's a forty-dollar lamp's worth of feeling and twenty-six hundred dollars of crystal. I price things. It's what I'm good at." She tucked the clipboard under her arm. "It's just a house, Mr. Barlow."

"It's not." He heard the crack in it and didn't care. "It's not just a house, and I'm not selling it, and you can put the truck back the way it came."

She looked at him a long moment with an expression he'd see a great deal of in the months ahead and not understand for most of them — not contempt, which he could've fought. Something closer to envy worn as pity. You poor man, it said. You think wanting a thing is the same as keeping it.

"You should talk to the lawyer," she said, "before you decide what you're selling."

The lawyer was already coming up the walk.

Dell Pyne came at his own pace, which was the pace of a man who'd buried everyone who ever rushed him, a binder the size of a paving stone hugged to his chest. Behind him, laboring up the last of the switchback in a hatchback that had given up on its muffler, came Mari Okafor from the café, and she had a casserole dish held out in front of her in two oven-mitted hands like an offering to a difficult god.

"You're both here," Dell said, pleased and grim. "Good. Saves me a trip." He came up onto the porch and set the binder on the dusty hall table just inside the door, and the dust jumped, and he opened it to a tabbed page with a thumb that knew exactly where to go. "Opal left this place to the two of you. Jointly. Which the two of you have apparently already discovered is a problem."

"He won't sell," said Greer.

"She won't stay," said Ezra.

"Neither of you," Dell said, "can do a single solitary thing." He turned the binder so they could both read it and tapped the paragraph with one square nail. "Not sell. Not split. Not so much as carry that chandelier off the porch. Not until the two of you have lived in this house — together, both of you, under this roof — and restored it. To standard. For six full months." He let that sit. "February to August. She was specific. She was always specific."

The silence had a lot in it.

"That's not enforceable," Greer said, but there was a crack in it now too, the first he'd heard.

"Dell wrote it," said Mari, edging past them with the casserole, entirely at home, setting it on the table beside the binder and lifting the lid so the smell of it — chicken and rosemary and something underneath that was just warm — filled the cold hall. "Dell doesn't write things that aren't enforceable. Eat. Both of you. You look like the inside of a church." She straightened and looked around the ruined grand hall with damp eyes and an enormous grin. "Oh, she'd be thrilled. Two strays, fighting on her porch. She'd have sat right there on the stairs and watched."

Over the front door, where the morning had finally crawled high enough to light it, the paint had ghosted through a century of overpaint, three words rising pale out of the lintel like a thing the house was trying to say with its last strength: COME IN, IT'S OPEN.

Greer was looking at it. Ezra watched her look at it, and watched her not say anything, and filed that away without knowing what it was.

Dell handed each of them a sealed envelope from the front of the binder, thick cream paper, their names in a slanting old hand. "She left letters," he said. "I'm to give them out when the time comes. This isn't the time. Don't open them." He looked at the two of them, the carpenter and the liquidator, the stayer and the leaver, standing six feet apart in the wreck of a house that was leaning, second by second, toward a spring none of them could see. "I'll be back Thursday."

When they'd gone — Dell first, Mari last, calling something back about the casserole dish — Ezra went to shut the front door against the cold and found it wouldn't quite close. Something in the jamb. He worked it loose with two fingers.

A business card, wedged at the latch where you couldn't miss it. Heavy stock, deep red, a single bird stamped in foil.

CARDINAL RESORTS. Royce Kessler. Acquisitions & Development. And under it, in pen, in a hand as confident as a closing argument: When you're ready to be reasonable.

He held it a moment. Then he put it in his shirt pocket without a word, because some things you don't say out loud in a house that's listening.

Behind him, Greer had picked up her bag. She'd had it in the truck — of course she had — and now she carried it back up the steps and set it down just inside the front door, squared to the threshold, the handle turned toward the porch and the porch toward the road and the road toward downhill and away. She didn't say she was leaving. She didn't say she was staying. She set the bag down pointed at the door the way another person might hang a coat, and she went to go look at the chandelier some more.

Ezra watched her do it. He understood it better than she'd have liked — a person who slept with one foot out of the bed her whole life, telling a house she could leave it any time she wanted, so it couldn't be the one to leave her first.

The dark was coming on already, early, February-fast, the ridge eating the last of the light.

He didn't argue with the bag. He didn't move it. He went instead to the hall table and lifted Opal's lamp off it — brass, oil, the glass chimney sooted at the top from fifty years of nights — and he carried it up the curling staircase, past the broom-handle baluster, to the little room in the turret where the oriel window looked out over the whole dark switchbacked town. He found the matches in the cabinet under the sill, where some part of him had known they'd be. He trimmed the wick. He lit it.

The flame caught and steadied and threw its small gold square out across the rooftops, the way it had every night for fifty years and not at all for the last few, and the house seemed to settle around the light, to lean a degree less, to breathe.

Greer's voice came up the stairwell, dry as a struck match. "What are you doing?"

"In case anybody's coming," Ezra said, and set the lamp in the window.