The sale was on a Thursday morning in April. Ten o’clock. On the courthouse steps.
They’ve held the county sales on those steps for as long as anybody can remember.
The auctioneer was a man named Dobbs. Sixty or so. Tan windbreaker. A clipboard. And a voice that carried all the way across the square to the bank.
There were maybe twenty people. Most of them were there for the empty lots.
A landlord from over in the next county was standing near the front in a quilted vest with his hands in his pockets. I knew he was a landlord by his boots. They’d never been in a field.
I’d taken a vacation day from the hospital. Nate came straight from a job with grease up to his elbows.
The terms were printed on a sheet. Payment in full on the day of the sale. Certified funds. No warranty of any kind. A county deed, mailed when it was recorded.
I had a cashier’s check in my purse for forty thousand dollars.
And underneath it, a bank envelope with two thousand dollars in cash. Because the rest of what we had was tip money. And I’d never gotten it all turned into anything bigger than twenties.
Dobbs read off the parcel number.
“House and two and three-tenths acres. Known locally as the Miller farm. Who’ll give me twenty thousand?”
The quilted vest lifted one finger.
“Twenty-five,” Nate said.
It went up by thousands. Thirty. Thirty-five.
At thirty-eight, the man in the vest stopped lifting his finger. He started saying the numbers out loud. I took that to mean he was thinking hard about each one.
“Forty,” Nate said.
“Forty-one,” said the vest.
Nate looked at me.
I’d told him forty-two was the bottom of the jar. Past forty-two, there was nothing. Not a furnace filter. Not a gallon of paint.
“Forty-one five,” Nate said.
Dobbs looked at the vest.
The vest looked down at his sheet.
And I watched that man decide that a sagging porch wasn’t worth five hundred dollars more to him.
He shook his head.
“Sold,” Dobbs said. “Forty-one thousand five hundred. Your name, sir?”
“Schafer,” Nate said. “Nathan and Emily. Both names.”
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