Where We Belong (49 page)

Rachel called at nine-thirty that night.

My mom brought me the phone. Held her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “It’s for you. It’s the queen.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her that. It really bugs me.”

She said nothing. Just handed me the phone.

“Rachel?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. Like it hurt. Like that one word could shatter everything. “I’m sorry if it’s late to call. I hope I’m not waking anyone up at your house.”

I looked down at Sophie, sleeping curled up on the rug.

“No one’s asleep except Sophie. And you didn’t wake her. Why didn’t you just come up?”

“I’m home. I’m not downstairs.”

“Oh, no.”

“It’s all right. Paul and I will work it out. At least, I think we will. I think we’ve known each other too long to let anything come between us. It’s you and Paul I’m worried about.”

I looked over at my mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table, her back artificially straight. Obviously listening. I had no way to get to any privacy. It wasn’t worth hobbling outside. I gave up and let her hear.

“There is no me and Paul. He doesn’t want to be friends anymore. And I guess that’s up to him.”

“Oh, dear. I was afraid of this. He may come around in time.”

“I don’t think so. He might be civil to me at some point. But I think our friend days are over.”

“I’ll keep talking to him about it. Maybe I can help.”

“That would be nice. But I’m not holding my breath or anything.”

“And if you had it to do over?”

“Excuse me?”

“Coming down to see me. And telling me. What if you had it to do over?”

“I’d do it again.”

“Even knowing it would cost you your living space and your friend.”

“I just feel like…” Then I stalled. I knew what I felt like. But not quite how to wrap words around it. I tried again. “I feel like a love like that… one that’s still the same after fifty years… I just don’t think it should go to waste.”

“I’m going to tell him you said that,” she said.

When I got off the phone, my mom was staring at me.

“I’ve got plenty of time for a long story,” she said.

I sighed. “I went back to Paul’s old house and told Rachel how he felt about her. Which he had no idea I was going to do. But now he knows I did, and he’s plenty pissed.”

A long silence. I looked up at her after a while.

“Oh,” I said. “You look plenty pissed, too.”

I thought, Well, it’s official. Everybody hates me. Except Rachel.

“You did that… knowing if it didn’t work, it would make a God-awful mess, and if it did work, it would get us tossed out of here?”

I nodded.

“And you just told her you’d do the same thing again.”

“Way not to eavesdrop.”

“I don’t understand that, Angie. I swear, I just don’t understand you at all.”

“I know you don’t. Believe me. I know. But some of my favorite parts of me are the parts you don’t understand. I don’t mean to be hurtful. I’m not saying it in an angry way. I wish we fit together better, too. But I’m not going to change the best of me just because you don’t get it.”

I waited for an answer, but it never came.

After a while, I gave up and stopped waiting.

The following morning, I slipped a note under Paul’s back door. Despite the fact that there was walking and stair climbing involved. I just did it, anyway.

It said, “Will you please leave your newspapers on the back porch when you’re done reading them? Because I want to look at the want ads for rentals.”

He never answered the note. But after that, there was always a newspaper on the back porch by eight o’clock in the morning.

It was ten or eleven days later. I was sitting at the breakfast table with my mom. Sophie was flapping her hands in the air, but silently, ignoring her breakfast. I was reading the want ads, holding the paper with one hand, eating cereal with the other. It was only about seven-thirty. The paper had shown up on Paul’s back porch early.

“Any good rentals?” my mom asked.

She asked every morning, unless I read the paper after she was gone. I wondered why she didn’t just trust me to tell her if I found something. It was a form of nervous small talk that made me uncomfortable.

“Well, that depends,” I said. “In our price range?”

“What’s the point of hearing about it if it’s not?”

“Then, no. No good rentals.”

“You
are
reading ‘For Rent.’ Not ‘For Sale.’ Right?”

“I’m reading both.”

“You’re wasting your time, kiddo. We couldn’t even afford that rundown place, and we’ll never find anything that cheap again. Not around here. Face it. We’re going back to the city. That’s where you can live cheap, and that’s where Sophie will be if we want to go see her.”

Before she even finished her speech, my eyes locked on a listing.

“Here’s a place as cheap as that other one. Oh. Wait. It’s the same place.”

I read the whole listing, and it couldn’t possibly have been a coincidence. It was even the same real estate agent.

“Maybe it’s a mistake,” I said. “Maybe they ran the ad again by mistake.”

“Or maybe the sale fell through. But I’m not sure what difference it makes, kiddo, since we still have no credit. And now you don’t even have that professional loan expert in your back pocket anymore.”

“Oh. Right.” I ate three bites of cereal, chomping down too hard on my own molars. Then I said, “Come by the real estate office with me. We’ll leave a little early for your work. I’ll drive you.”

“Can you even walk on that ankle now?”

“Yeah. Pretty much. I can limp on it.”

“I doubt they’d be open that early.”

“Oh. Right. Lunch hour, then. I’ll come get you.”

“To what end, kiddo?”

“I just want to know what happened. Why it’s in the paper again. And I can’t go in by myself. I don’t think she’d take me very seriously if it was just me. I need a grownup.”

She sipped her coffee, and I could see wheels turning.

“Make a deal with you,” she said. “I’ll go into that real estate office with you today if you’ll set a deadline to give up on finding a place here and moving back to the city. Two weeks, say.”

I hated that a lot. Because it was a bad gamble. Just the type I knew I was supposed to avoid. I was taking something flimsy and betting everything on it.

“Fine,” I said. “Deal.”

It was a small office, all open space, with only four desks. Two of them had people behind them. A man I didn’t know. And the lady I did.

She looked up at us. Squinted. I wished she didn’t always look so put together. I wished she could have been someone less intimidating to my mom.

“I know you, don’t I?” she asked, looking at me.

“I was… we were interested in that property, that rundown house with the little orchard. I came in to see you with Paul Inverness. Remember?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she got to her feet. And shook hands with my mom. Not with me. I thought that was weird. “And this is your mother?”

“Right,” I said. “That property was back in the paper this morning.”

“Yes, the sale fell through.”

“Fell through? What happened?”

“I can’t give specifics about a prospective buyer’s situation.”

“Okay. Sure. I just… I mean, I don’t even know what that would mean. What does it mean when a person tries to buy a house and it falls through? What can fall through about it?”

“Oh. In general.” She sat back down again. Like she’d already decided this wasn’t worth much energy. “Occasionally a buyer will just change his or her mind, but usually it’s dollars-and-cents. Buyers may think they can come up with the down payment, or that their loan will be approved. But sometimes their thinking is too optimistic.”

I just stood there like a statue. Even though I knew I should talk. Because I’d just learned something that changed my worldview. That buyer I saw, who looked like he could write a check for the place. He wasn’t as different from us as I’d thought. Here I was, thinking everybody had it together, and everybody looked down on us. And a bunch of them were just wearing that on the outside. Just being too optimistic.

The real estate lady got tired of waiting.

“If you think your grandfather is still interested, have him come see me.”

“Right,” I said.

My mom and I walked out into the bright summer sun.

“Now what did that accomplish?” she asked me as we stood, blinking, on the sidewalk.

“No idea.” Which was true. Housing-wise, I had no idea. But I’d gotten something else. Something I’d never expected. “Did you hear what she said?”

“What about it?”

She signaled that we should walk and talk. We headed for the car. I was going slow on that ankle. I could barely keep up with her.

“That thing about how people are too optimistic.”

“Yeah? So?”

“Real estate people see that all the time. All kinds of people try to buy houses when they may not have enough money or credit.”

“I’m not quite sure where you’re heading with this.”

“You thought it was just us. Admit it. You thought every person who walks into a real estate office or a bank is a qualified buyer. You thought they’d treat us like the only case they ever saw of somebody who might not be able to pull it off.”

No answer.