Chapter 8 - The For Sale Sign
By the middle of July, the heat in middle Tennessee had settled into that thick, humid blanket that makes the cicadas scream in the oak trees from noon until dusk.
On a Tuesday afternoon, I drove out to Windham Crest Drive.
I did not go to the house. I parked my Buick at the entrance to the subdivision, beneath the stone pillars topped with decorative iron gas lanterns, and looked down the winding, manicured asphalt.
In the front yard of number 408, right between the imported Japanese maples and the concrete curbing, stood a tall wooden post painted high-gloss white. Hanging from the arm was a sign: FOR SALE – Premier Executive Properties. Beneath it, a red rider had already been affixed: UNDER CONTRACT.
Derek had followed the blueprint to the sixteenth of an inch.
The house had sold in nine days to a corporate transfer family from Charlotte. Because the Nashville market remained competitive, the sale price had covered the primary jumbo mortgage, the outstanding property taxes, the delinquent HOA assessments, and the real estate commissions, leaving a modest net balance of $18,400.
Under the separation agreement drafted by an independent mediator in Murfreesboro, that $18,400 had been placed into an escrow holding account to settle Brianna’s third-party debt collections before the final divorce decree could be signed in the fall.
Brianna had moved back into her parents’ basement suite in Brentwood.
According to Clara Vance, who kept me updated with surgical precision from the beauty parlor, Brianna was currently working as an assistant manager at a high-end shoe salon in the Green Hills mall, earning an hourly wage plus commission, driving an eight-year-old Honda Civic that her father had purchased from an auto auction in Old Hickory.
The young mothers’ circle had quietly removed her from their social committee. The country club pool passes had been surrendered. The performance had ended, the scenery had been struck, and the stage was dark.
My phone rang through the car’s speakers as I sat watching the subdivision entrance.
It was Derek.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hello, Derek. Where are you?”
“Just leaving the warehouse,” he said. His voice was tired, but it had a clean, rhythmic resonance that had been missing for half a decade. “I picked up the keys to the new place. The one on Northfield.”
He had leased a small, two-bedroom brick duplex four blocks from the high school where Arthur and I had first met in 1974. The rent was $1,250 a month, water included. The front yard had a single silver maple tree, and the driveway was cracked concrete that he could shovel himself when the winter ice came down.
“Do you need help with the boxes?” I asked.
“Tommy Vance from the hardware store is coming over with his brother at five,” Derek said. “We’ve got the truck and a flatbed. We’ll have the furniture moved before the rain starts.”
He paused. In the background, I could hear the rhythmic clacking of his truck’s turn signal.
“Mom?”
“Yes, son.”
“I found something while I was clearing out the garage at the old place,” he said softly. “In the back of the tool bench. Under a pile of pool chemical bags.”
“What did you find?”
“Dad’s old metal toolbox,” Derek whispered. “The gray one with the dent on the corner where he dropped it off the dock at Center Hill. I thought... Brianna told me two years ago that she’d donated it to Goodwill when we moved in because it had grease on the handles.”
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
“Your father never threw a tool away in his life, Derek.”
“I know,” he said, his voice thick with an emotion that carried thirty years of memory. “I opened it up. His socket set is still in there. Every single one, oiled down in the metal tray, right where he left them.”
“Bring them to the house tonight,” I told him, looking through the windshield at the high Tennessee summer clouds drifting east toward the mountains. “We’ll wash the handles with kerosene and put them on your new bench.”
“I’ll be there at seven, Mom.”
“I’ll make some supper,” I said. “Just stew and cornbread.”
“Sounds like heaven,” he said.
I hung up, put the Buick into gear, and turned away from Windham Crest Drive.
May you like
I did not look back in the rearview mirror. The four-bedroom colonial with the tennis courts and the HOA newsletter was just lumber, drywall, and debt, receding into the haze of a summer afternoon.
Behind me lay forty months of confusion; ahead lay three miles of state highway leading back to a house on Sycamore Street where the foundation had been poured sixty years ago, deep enough to hold the freeze.