Songs for the Missing (26 page)

As a realtor he couldn’t afford to be sentimental. For the sellers, for better or worse, the past was over. They were done here, gone, taking their possessions and memories, leaving behind a useful shell. What he was selling was the future. The question he wanted buyers to contemplate—not merely to guarantee a sale, but for their own sake—was: Do you think you’ll be happy here? He didn’t have to answer the question, though sometimes by reflex he did. Now, looking at the small world of Anna DeMarco’s backyard, he thought a young family could be very happy here.

At home Fran greeted him with Lindsay’s first progress report—all A’s—and to match her good news he told her about the listing. He hadn’t meant to, as if saying it aloud might jinx his chances.

“Why does that name sound familiar?” Fran asked.

He didn’t know, and though she laid a hand to the side of her face and shook her head, she couldn’t place it.

“
I
know,” she said, brightening, over dinner. “If it’s the same person. Short, white hair in a bun, kind of rotund?”

“I never met her.”

“You did too. She used to work at the library. At the checkout. She used to call the girls Pete and Re-Pete.”

“The one with the wrist thingy?”

“That’s her—Mrs. DeMarco. Her husband worked for Crawford Container. Her daughter was the big piano prodigy.”

“That’s who I talked to.”

“She went to the Eastman School—how many times did we hear that? I don’t think she ever made it to Carnegie Hall.”

“She’s in Pittsburgh,” he said, “if that means anything.”

“What’s her name? We can Google her.”

Dolores Kern was her name, yet he hesitated, protective of his client, and she laughed. “I’m just kidding.”

He wasn’t sure that she was, if only because now he was curious too. He remembered seeing articles about the daughter in the
Star-Beacon
every time she won a competition—a gaunt, serious girl with lank dark hair—but that had been twenty years ago. The mystery of other people’s children. He thought it was a good sign he was still interested.

He’d scheduled the landscapers for early the next day, but it rained. He went over to get his interior shots anyway, and noticed, as he pulled in, that the asphalt drive had a few cracks that needed patching. The drainage around the foundation wasn’t great; he’d ask the landscapers to regrade it with a few strategically placed bags of topsoil. The porch was in good shape, though he would have preferred a nicer mailbox than the cheap black sheet metal one with two jutting tusks underneath for a rolled newspaper. Another little thing: The spring of the screen-door was rusted a powdery orange. He could take care of that himself, and made a note to swing by the Home Depot.

Even before he fit the key in the lock he had a number in mind—middling and realistic, acknowledging both the soft market and the seller’s hopes—that none of these cosmetic defects could touch. The same held true for the interior. Paint, wallpaper, carpet, even bad press-board cabinets weren’t a problem, since the buyer would replace them anyway. What could knock down the price, without argument, were the guts of the house. The condition of the exterior was no guarantee. He’d seen antique Chrysler furnaces the size of truck cabs in perfectly maintained homes, their octopuslike ductwork sheathed in the original asbestos insulation. In this case, given his own mother’s paranoia over her gas bills, he expected the heating system to be new. The wiring and plumbing would be the wild cards.

Inside, the air was heavy and stale with mildew. He’d have to open it up once the rain stopped. He turned on the lights as he went. The walls were bare, the rooms empty. No awful wallpaper, just plain eggshell that showed every flaw but set off the oak woodwork nicely. The baby blue carpeting was worn in paths, bright patches outlining where furniture had sat for decades (in a corner of the living room there was a rectangular space perfect for an upright piano). It was ugly, but underneath lay hardwood floors. The curtains were gone, exposing old blinds the color of manila envelopes, their pull-rings hanging like tiny wreaths. The fridge was propped open with its crisper drawer, a box of baking soda on the top shelf. Whoever had cleaned the place had done a good job. He was used to trespassing on the overflowing and intimate wreckage of lives suddenly disrupted, but there was almost no trace of Mrs. DeMarco, just a blaze orange sticker on the telephone in the kitchen with the numbers for the police and fire departments. He peeled it off as best as he could, rubbing at the stubborn adhesive with his thumb, making a note to bring some solvent for the last tacky smears.

The basement was his destination, there was no sense stalling. He found the door and swiped at the light switch and the bottom of the stairs appeared. As he descended, the air grew cooler, laden with the cavelike smell of mold. The walls were stone and mortar, the floor concrete, painted battleship gray. A bulbous and chromed old fridge stood in the near corner, and beside the brick chimney, attached to it by shiny galvanized ductwork, a hot water heater and modern two-stage furnace. On the front panel was the number of a good local HVAC contractor; from a chain depended a frosted plastic sleeve containing its service records. He was surprised to find it was fitted with central air—a luxury his mother protested she didn’t need.

Central air meant at least 100 amp service, which he confirmed at the breaker box. He did a quick check of the pipes above him in the joists and found a typical mix of copper and PVC, proof of recent work. The mouse baits didn’t bother him (he’d just chuck them) and the sump pump in the far corner was standard for homes of the era. He went upstairs thinking he might have lowballed himself on the price.

He moved from room to room, taking time to get the best pictures, given the gray light. In the master bath there were plastic grip bars beside the toilet and in the shower (he’d remove them before he showed the house), and the door in the hall bath was scratched badly below the knob by a dog that wanted out, but all in all the place was solid.

As much as he looked for one, there was no catch. He’d lucked out. It happened. There was no logic to it, and no irony, only this odd timing that kept him from being happy, or from showing the excitement he felt—the same charge he got when he was new to the game, the poker player’s thrill at picking up his cards and fanning out a pat hand.

In the midst of this premature celebration, he almost forgot the garage. It hadn’t been redone, and as he approached it, key in hand, he feared it would be stuffed with all the junk from the house. The sectioned door creaked up, resisting him, to reveal a pair of dented metal trash cans that could have been his mother’s. They were far too heavy for an elderly woman to drag to the curb, but there was no wheeled caddy either, and again he flashed on her solitary life here, and his mother’s in their old house, and Wozniak’s grandmother while he was overseas, and wondered if it was inevitable that Fran would end up alone.

Back at the office they all wanted the lowdown. They weren’t being patronizing, they were just bored. Things were slow, and like a losing team they needed to feed off every little success.

“It’s not the Taj Mahal,” he said, “but I think I can work with it.”

At the end of the day he called the daughter and told her he’d looked over the place. With disinterest he ticked off the property’s faults along with its selling points as if they were equal, and recapped the sorry state of the market. She waited, not once interrupting, interested only in the price. He recommended they start at 89,9—eight thousand higher than his original number.

“I was hoping for a hundred,” she said. “I see on your website you’ve got houses on State Street listed for 124 and 119.”

The internet made everyone an expert; it drove him crazy.

“Those are three-family apartment houses. The zoning and taxes are completely different. For a one-family three-bedroom, we’re scraping the ceiling, mostly because of what great shape the place is in.”

He was only being honest, but some proud part of him wanted to tweak her, and he had to disguise it behind an upbeat tone of voice. Over the years he’d learned to deliver unhappy facts as if they were good news.

“Let’s start at 95 then,” the woman said, as if that was a compromise.

“I’m not sure the market will support that.”

“We can always lower the price.”

“Eighty-nine nine we have an outside shot at. Ninety-five is pushing it. This isn’t Pittsburgh.”

“Believe me, Mr. Larsen, I understand that better than anybody. Let’s try 95. If we have to lower the price, we lower the price.”

It was hard if not impossible for sellers to understand they were in this together—that he now had a stake in their house and was doing everything in their combined best interest. It was the buyers who would end up paying, yet in the beginning it was the sellers who distrusted him, probably because they felt they were losing something valuable, and that he was profiting from it.

“My worry, Mrs. Kern, is that the market will do it for us, and that by then 89, 9 could be pushing it.”

She thanked him for his concern as if it were misplaced and that any further argument would be futile. She was an only child, there were no other survivors he could appeal to. Beyond that, she was his client. Right or wrong, she would have her way.

“My wife reminded me the other day,” he said when they’d finished their business. “We knew your mother from the library. She used to joke around with our girls.”

“Thank you for remembering her.”

“She was always so proud of you. Everyone in town was.”

She laughed, just a stuck cough. “That was a long time ago.”

“Do you still play, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“I don’t anymore, but it’s kind of you to remember.”

She’d indulged him, and he wanted to keep going and ask why she’d given it up—how, really, she could walk away from that talent. If they were riding in a car together to view a house, he would have found an offhand, joshing way to extract it from her, but the phone was too direct. He didn’t want to be rude.

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, as he said to everyone, “I appreciate it.”

“One of the last conversations I had with my mother was about her. She prayed for her, even when she was in the hospital.”

“That was good of her.”

“She was a good person. Better than I’ll ever be.”

She was the one being kind, trading this intimacy, but when he got off he thought it was unfair of her—as if he were still anonymous and not the object of mindless curiosity. Maybe that was why she no longer played: She hated being in the paper and having everyone treat her like a freak. He could have told her he knew how she felt.

The next day was sunny, one of those crisp October afternoons with a blue sky like summer. The landscapers came, and he got a nice shot for the website. Just before quitting time he officially posted it, and drove over on his way home to plant the Edgewater sign by the front walk. It was a part of the job he loved—like baiting a hook—though at 95 the place would sit for a while.

He wasn’t surprised that the first few queries it drew were from other brokers, or that they were surprised to find him on the other end of the line. Everyone said they were glad he was back, as if he’d survived a lingering illness. He assured them that he was too, and that it was good to be working—not entirely a lie, because sometimes it was. He liked being in the office, doing nothing more than drinking his coffee and eating his bagel and filling in the morning’s crossword, or choosing which listings to show clients from out of town. He was aware that his fleeting pleasure at these moments was disproportionate and fragile, based on a willed forgetfulness. In a larger sense, much of his daily life as he knew it no longer mattered, yet he clung to it.

His intuition proved true. No one was interested in Mrs. DeMarco’s at 95, and as interest rates rose and the market softened further, the daughter refused to budge. Every Friday he sent the landscapers to rake the leaves and clean the gutters, figuring the weekends would bring out the Lookee-Lous.

The weekend before Halloween, after prolonged and frustrating deliberations with Mrs. Kern, he scheduled an open house for Sunday between one and three, as he would for any sluggish property, paying an extra twenty dollars for a featured ad in Thursday’s insert. Almost immediately he was sorry. He could make church, but to get everything ready he’d have to skip coffee hour and the haunted hayride. Fran said that was fine, as if he didn’t need her permission, but still it felt wrong. Since they’d been back at work, they dedicated their weekends to Kim, as if they might find her by looking part-time. Last weekend he’d spent half of Saturday taking the boat out of the water. This seemed like he was giving up completely.

If Fran had asked him not to—one word from her and he would have held off. Instead, Saturday night she made cookies for him to tempt the buyers, a ritual that dated back to the girls’ early years. They loved open houses, chasing each other shrieking through the strange rooms, high on chocolate, while Fran helped him showcase a den or kitchen. He knew the business but relied on her eye for design. He still did: Anytime he rearranged a cluttered table or banished a lamp to a closet, he was exercising her taste. They were a team, and if she had any misgivings about tomorrow he would have agreed it was too soon and scrapped the whole thing. Now he’d have to go through with it.

In church he worried, but once he was there everything was fine. The OPEN HOUSE sign was in place, the yard free of leaves. He parked the Taurus by the garage, covering one of the worst cracks. The day was clear and cool, and he raised the blinds so light poured in the windows, then set the thermostat to seventy. He ran hot water in all the sinks, and in the tub and shower. He flushed both toilets, up and down, and listened to them refill. He was wearing his best suit as if it were a formal occasion—ridiculous, yet it felt right. Today he needed every advantage.

At five to one he did a last walkaround, pinching lint from the stair carpet. He made sure he had enough business cards and squared the pile of listings beside the plate of cookies. The specs were the least of it. He was ready for any question. By now it was no exaggeration to say he knew the house better than its owner, and he could honestly vouch that it was a good house. The price was too high, maybe, but someone would be very happy here. He stood in the front door, waiting for them.