I pulled wallpaper.
There were five layers of it in the front room. And under the very last layer, somebody had written a column of numbers on the bare plaster in pencil. Somebody adding up sums a long time ago.
I pulled wallpaper until my thumbs split open. Then I taped them up and went to my shift at the diner. And I came back.
I was still working both jobs. The house had taken every dollar we had.
Wire costs money. So does a new well pump. And a septic man. And a dumpster.
There was one night in May when I sat down on an overturned five-gallon bucket in what was going to be the kitchen. Just to rest my feet for one minute.
I woke up an hour later with my cheek pressed against the plaster wall. And Nate’s work jacket over my shoulders.
He hadn’t woken me up.
He was up on the ladder six feet away, still working. With his headlamp turned down low.
The county inspector came out the first week of June.
He was a quiet man named Larry. He went through the whole house with a flashlight and didn’t say ten words. At the end he signed the inspection card and stuck it in the front window.
“Who’d you say did this?” he asked Nate.
“I did.”
“Hm,” Larry said. “You want a job?”
The power company set the meter that Friday.
Nate threw the main breaker.
And I stood in the kitchen and flipped the switch.
And one bare light bulb came on. Hanging over the spot where a kitchen table ought to go.
That same week, my phone rang at my desk at the hospital.
“Emily. This is Opal.”
Opal is Nate’s grandmother. Ron’s mother.
She was eighty-eight years old. She lived in the senior apartments behind the Methodist church. She did her own laundry. And she read the county paper front to back every single day with a magnifying glass. Legal notices included.
I’d always been a little afraid of Opal. She was a small, upright woman who didn’t chatter.
“Opal? Is everything all right?”
“The paper finally printed the trustee’s sales,” she said. “It says Schafer, Nathan and Emily, bought a house and two and three-tenths acres on the north road.”
There was a pause.
“Is that the Miller place?”
I looked around the billing office like somebody might be listening.
“Yes ma’am. We haven’t told anyone yet. We wanted to get it fit to see first.”
She didn’t say anything for so long I thought the line had dropped.
“Come get me Sunday after church,” she said. “And don’t tell Ronald.”
“Opal, it’s not safe yet. The porch is bad. There’s plaster down everywhere.”
“I have walked on worse,” she said.
And she hung up.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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