I stood on my own front porch with two bags of groceries cutting into my fingers, typing a four digit code into a keypad I had programmed myself, and watching a small red light blink back at me like it didn’t know who I was.
I typed it again. Slower this time, the way you do when you think your hands must be the problem and not the world.
Red light.
That was the moment, if you want to know the exact moment, that thirty six years of my life and every dollar Harold and I ever saved came down to a strip of plastic with a red bulb in it, telling me I did not belong in the house with my name on the deed.
My name is Patricia Wells. I am sixty nine years old, a widow, and until last Thursday I believed I understood my son. I was wrong about that, and I was wrong about his wife, and I was wrong about how much a person can smile at you while taking something that was never theirs. But I was not wrong about one thing, and it turned out to be the only thing that mattered. I knew where the papers were.
The House We Built
Harold and I got married the summer I turned twenty three, in a little Methodist church with box fans running in every window because the air conditioning had given out the week before and the deacon said the Lord would provide, but apparently not for the compressor. We didn’t have money for a honeymoon. We had a used Ford, two folding chairs, and a wedding gift from my aunt Ruthie that was a jar of coins she’d been saving since I was in diapers.
For thirty one years Harold worked at the county co-op, first loading feed sacks and later running the parts counter, and I taught third grade at the elementary school two towns over. We were not the kind of people who had things happen to us. We were the kind of people who made things happen, slowly, on purpose, the way you’d build a fence one post at a time.
The beach house came out of a coffee can.
I mean that almost literally. We started what Harold called the “someday fund” back when Marcus was still in diapers, and for years it lived in an actual Folgers can on the top shelf of the pantry before we finally got embarrassed enough to open a real savings account. Every extra five dollars went in. Every Christmas bonus. The money from the summer Harold worked weekends at his cousin’s marina instead of resting like his back wanted him to. We packed our lunches instead of buying them. We drove that same Ford until the floorboard had a hole in it that I covered with a rubber mat. We did not go to Europe. We did not remodel the kitchen. We put every spare cent toward a little patch of sand on the Florida panhandle that we had visited exactly once, on our fifteenth anniversary, and never stopped talking about.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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