Then my Aunt Rosa who I hadn’t seen since I was nine, and who my mother referred to with a small voice and tight mouth as“that woman,”died in a hospital in Albuquerque and left me a cabin in Colorado in a will my mother didn’t know about until the lawyer called.
By the second day, my mother knew.
By the third, Marcus knew.
Marcus Hale is an associate of my mother’s.He develops things. He likes to say it like that,“develops things,”with a small quotation-mark smile. He’s been to my parents’ house for dinner six times in the last four years, twice without his wife. His business cards have raised lettering. His shoes cost more than the room they were standing in. He started calling the Albuquerque executor about Aunt Rosa’s land before she was in the ground. He began calling me directly the day after the funeral.
For three days, I kept the lawyer’s letter zipped inside the inner pocket of a coat I never wore. I read it standing up in the kitchen of my Sacramento apartment, a kitchen in which I had never once cooked anything I wanted to eat. I read it sitting on the bathroom floor with the fan running. I read it at three in the morning with my forehead pressed to the cold glass of the window above the sink.
Knowing what was mine while my mother and Marcus treated it like theirs was the most significant thing I owned.
A whole house.Mine.A house that nobody had picked out for me, decorated for me, talked me down from, or tucked into a tasteful shade of greige on my behalf. A house I could paint magenta. A house I could burn pancakes in. A house I couldhumin, loudly, with the windows open, and nobody would shush me.
I wanted it the way a starving woman wants bread.
My mother said,“It will be uninhabitable, sweetheart.You’lllose money.”
Marcus said,“I can have it under contract by Memorial Day, Tess. Above market.”
My mother said,“Take a sensible weekend, look at it, sell it, and come home.”
Marcus said,“Don’t waste your spring on ateardown.”
My mother said, “Tess,pleasebe reasonable.”
Marcus said,Tess.Just that. Just my name in his mouth, in the soft, clipped way he says it, like a man placing a hand quietly on a doorknob he assumes is unlocked.
I sold my couchon Marketplace, my carto a man who paidin twenties. I bought a box truck, packed everything I owned, and drove for two days with my stand mixer ridingshotgunlike a little KitchenAid co-pilot.
And here I am.
Standing in an inch of fresh April snow, on a cabin porch that has more give than my college mattress, looking up at the most beautiful, terrifying, forgotten little placeI’veever seen.
“Hi,”I say to the cabin.“Hello, sweetheart. Yes, I see you.”
A long ribbon of dirty snow slides off the eaves and lands with a wetthumpsix inches from my feet, splattering my jeans to the knee.
“Okay,”I tell the cabin.“Loud and clear.”
The cabin punishes my optimism as the third porch step from the bottom gives way beneath my left boot when I turn back toward the truck for another load.
I yelp. My left legdisappears up tomid-shin. My right knee hits the second step. The basket of yarn I was holding spills, and my favorite butter-yellow skein rolls off the porch, bouncing onto the snow like a tiny, delighted dog.
“Oh, you bastard,”I tell the porch lovingly.
I plant both palms on the unbroken plank above me, using it to lever myself out of the hole.
My new phone, a cheap, basic model with a private number only known by a lawyer in Albuquerque, is in my pocket. Two bars. No internet. The lawyer’s office is closed until Monday. And Mr. Eddie Burns, thehandymanAunt Rosa hired to keep a loose eye on the cabin after she moved into the hospice last fall, left me a voicemail three days ago.Icalled him at the start of the week to ask if he could come up here today, walk me through the property, and tell me which windows leaked and where the well pump shutoff waslocated.
His message, when it came back, was extremely polite. He was sorry. He was no longer accepting clients on thisparticular ridge.Due to personal preference.
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to.
In small-town code,personal preferencemeans, “I don’t go up there anymore.”
I extract my leg. My boot is intact, but my pride is in pieces. The yellow yarn stopped rolling ten feet down the slope, and is perched on top of a tuft of grass like it’s posing for a postcard.
I hop off the porch using only the unbroken steps because Ilearn from my mistakes, and I’m halfway through retrieving the yarn when I look up.
