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“We don’t usually have too much trouble with vandalism in Strawberry Sands. It’s just not that big.”
“Oh?” the realtor said with interest, looking at Clara. “You’re from around here?”
There were no realty agencies in Strawberry Sands, so most likely the realtor was from Blueberry Beach or somewhere further away. He hadn’t checked when he booked the appointment.
“I am. I’ve lived here my whole life. I went to this school.”
“That’s what you were saying. So that’s why you’re interested in it?” His brows drew down, and he looked between the two of them again, as though wondering if there was something more between them.
It made Alex want to put his arm around Clara or do something else to let the realtor know that she was not available.
That wasn’t right. Because he didn’t have any right to do that, any claim to stake, other than as her employer, and even that was skating on thin ice.
“Well then, maybe you should be the one to offer the tour.”
“I don’t know. It’s been such a long time,” Clara said as they stepped into the building. “But it still smells the same.” She breathed deeply and closed her eyes as though imagining herself back as a young child, running through the doors with her friends, smiling and laughing.
“There’s an office on the left and an office on the right. And then, you go the whole way back, and you can either turn left or right to get into either classroom. If you go straight back and through the doors, that’s the gymnasium. It’s small. Smaller than a basketball court, but that’s where we had our assemblies, and it’s where we played in the winter.”
“Interesting. I’ve never seen a school this small.”
“I guess it was more cost-effective for the state of Michigan to close all the small schools and bus the kids to a central location. I guess less overhead for staff or something. But I think we miss something whenever we take kids out of their hometown and just dump them all together. I know going to high school wasn’t nearly the great experience that going to elementary school was. In fact, my grades went down, and I stopped loving school.”
“I see. You went from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond.”
“Maybe. But it really wasn’t the loss of notoriety, it was more... You lost that friendly everybody knows everybody else kind of feeling. It was... We didn’t have turf wars or anything, but we all came from different areas, and we wanted to cling to the people that were comfortable and familiar. I suppose that’s human nature, and that’s good in a way. After all, humans do better whenever we have a family and a community behind us. The idea of diversity making us stronger is not necessarily a true statement.”
He had never heard anyone talk like that, and he wanted to call her on it. Wanted to tell her that was almost heresy, but it really wasn’t. As he thought about it more, she was right.
Humans had a tendency to split themselves into groups. Whether it was gangs in Chicago, or companies, or football teams, or whatever it was that people liked or rooted for, they felt a kinship with other folks around them who were rooting for the same thing. It was what humans did. Why not do it with the community and family? He had been preached at for so long that diversity was better, and the idea of having a deep sense of family and community was almost a foreign notion, this thing that Clara said so easily.
“This was the side for the young kids.” Clara opened the door, and they looked around.
It would make a great office. In fact, they could split it into several offices. Or they could use the two offices out front, and the bigger rooms could be...bedrooms or kitchens or... If he did enough work, he could turn this into a house. He had wanted to have an office in his home where he could stay and work.
He kept that idea tucked in the back of his head as they finished looking at the school. Since the door wasn’t locked, they thanked the realtor for his time and told him they’d be in touch.
Clara seemed loath to leave, and he couldn’t blame her. She’d been enjoying the trip down memory lane, remembering the things that she’d done as a child, her friends and fun times she had.
But as they stood, looking out the front windows at the beautiful view of the lake, he said, “I have a question for you.”
“Okay,” she said, looking at him with a bemused smile on her face.
“Should I buy this and turn it into offices and a home? Or should I buy this and turn it into all offices and buy the house we looked at first to live in?”
