from Crazy Were We in the Head

She was waiting for me on the back porch. She had good news. With luck, she said, she might be able to sell the place. There were still a few Californians moving in. She herself had recently moved there from California—in fact, she was practically a California native, having lived there five years, which was apparently long enough to go through a couple of husbands and three religions. One of the husbands was a drug dealer who abused her and the other was a screenwriter who blamed her for standing in the way of getting his big break. I’d never heard of the religions, though one of them sounded as if it could have been started byUncle Edgar. I was about to ask, but it was cold standing outside, so I moved the conversation on to the topic of an asking price.

I began by suggesting a figure in the low hundreds.

She frowned and pointed out that the house was over seventy years old and needed a new basement and a new roof, and it could also stand a paint job. She said unless we’d be willing to make a lot of repairs, we’d be lucky to get eighty. She’d have to advertise it as a fixer-upper and people these days aren’t interested in fixing things up.

I remarked that they seem to be more interested in tearing things down. She gave me an odd look.

I pointed out that the house was close to everything: schools, churches, Boswell’s.

​She pointed out that every house in Inverness was close to everything else.