Chapter 2 - The Tape on the Plaster
The side door was cedar, four inches of clear heart-pine faced with five-quarter boards that I’d planed down myself on an old Parks twenty-inch machine behind the barn. There wasn't a microchip in it. The latch was an old Yale mortise with an iron deadbolt that threw three inches into an ash timber that was tied to the foundation wall with three-quarter-inch anchor bolts.
The spare key wasn't under a stone. It wasn't in a fake plastic toad.
It was inside the heel of an old pair of Red Wing boots that had been nailed to the framing studs behind the deep freezer in eighty-nine to hold the garden trowels. I reached into the cracked cowhide, my knuckles brushing a dead mud-dauber’s nest, and pulled the brass bit out of the grease.
The tumbler turned with that slow, heavy chunk that means the metal was cut by a man who had five minutes to spare on a Saturday morning.
The kitchen smelled of burnt rosemary and that lemon-scented floor wax they sell in the spray cans—the kind that leaves a slick on the linoleum that’ll drop an old woman if she’s wearing cotton slippers.
Ethan was standing by the refrigerator with a twenty-five-foot Stanley tape extended seven feet out into the air. He was wearing those soft grey trousers that don't have a belt line—just an elastic drawstring like gym shorts, though they cost three hundred dollars in Charlottesville—and a dark blue knit shirt with three buttons at the throat.
Ashley was on her knees by the pantry door, holding a three-ring binder with little yellow tabs sticking out like dry tongues.
"Ethan," Ashley said, not looking at the door, thinking it was the boy from the carpet warehouse. "Tell him the island has to be nine feet or the waterfall marble looks like an afterthought. I’m not living with a four-foot clearance around the range. It looks like a duplex."
"The stud wall’s load-bearing, Ash," Ethan said. He had his pencil behind his right ear—a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga, unsharpened, used only for tapping against his chin. "Dad put three two-by-tens over the header because he didn't know how to calculate span tables. It’s overbuilt by two hundred percent. We can knock the center out with a sawzall in twenty minutes once the crew gets the dumpster set."
The Stanley tape snapped back into the case with a sharp, greasy whack.
I set the Miller’s sack on the butcher block. The milk gallon made a heavy, wet circle on the wax.
Ethan didn't jump. He’d spent seven years at that private day school in Lynchburg learning how not to jump when a working man walked into the room. He let the tape dangle from his index finger by the lanyard, his face shifting into that smooth, greased-leather expression he used on his mother when he wanted twenty-five hundred dollars to pay the slip fee on the boat he kept at Smith Mountain Lake.
"Dad," he said. He didn't look at the window to see how the truck had crossed the ditch. "You should have called the office from the shop. The courier was supposed to meet you at the gate with the documentation."
"Your mother was on the grass," I said.
"The gate’s on a digital schedule now, Dad. It resets at six o'clock based on the municipal delivery hours. We’re putting the property into the Highland Ridge LLC to protect the tax basis before the new county assessment hits in November. I told you that in June."
"She had her heart pills in the sack, Ethan."
Ashley stood up, her linen pants making a small hiss as her knees cleared the linoleum. She wasn't thirty yet, but she had that sharp, thin bridge to her nose that comes from three generations of people who never had to carry their own laundry down a flight of stairs. She looked at the brown water mark the milk had left on the butcher block, her eyebrows coming together like two small grey needles.
"Tom," she said, her voice dropping into that rhythmic, instructional tone they use for the hard-of-hearing at the county home. "We discussed this with the accountants three weeks ago. You were at the table. You had the blue folder."
"I was at the table," I said. "And the blue folder was about the spray rights for the orchard."
"It was an umbrella assignment," Ethan said. He reached into Ashley’s binder, his thumb sliding between two plastic sleeves with the dry snap of static electricity. "The state amended the transfer tax on agricultural trusts back in seventy-nine, but under the twenty-twenty-one revisions, if the managing member holds more than sixty percent of the operating equity, the residential parcel automatically merges with the commercial infrastructure. You signed the management reorganization when we took the SBA loan for the new cider press."
"The cider press we didn't buy," I said.
"The market shifted, Dad. The capital had to be deployed into the logistics side. The money went into the regional distribution network down in Roanoke."
"Into the German car," Linda said from the doorway.
She had her hand on the casing. She hadn't taken off her muddy galoshes. She was standing right on the oak transition strip I’d planed down out of that lightning-struck white oak from the lower pond, leaving two grey, wet heels on the polyurethane.
Ashley looked at those heels like someone had dropped two dead rats on her counter.
"Linda," Ashley said, her teeth showing white and square behind her gloss. "We’re trying to keep this professional. It’s an estate transition. Every family in the county does it this way when the principal reaches seventy. If you don't restructure, the inheritance tax takes forty percent of the acreage behind the church."
"The church ground’s deeded," I told her. "My grandfather gave that deed to the trustees in nineteen-thirty-six on a piece of sheepskin with a two-cent revenue stamp on the corner. There isn't an inheritance tax on the kingdom of God, Ashley."
"There is on the house, Tom," Ethan said.
He laid the paper down. It was legal-sized, twenty-four-pound bond with that blue-black ink that looks like it came out of an old mimeograph, but the header was from the circuit court in Bedford:
ORDER OF VOLUNTARY CONVEYANCE AND MERGER OF REAL PROPERTY.
PARCEL 44-A (BARN, RESIDENCE, AND LOWER PASTURE).
GRANTEE: HIGHLAND RIDGE ASSET MANAGEMENT CORP.
ETHAN T. MILLER, MANAGING DIRECTOR.
"You’ve got until November thirtieth on the residential portion," Ethan said. He reached for his pencil again, tapping the brass ferrule against the margin of the paper. "We’re not monsters, Dad. We rented the two-bedroom unit over at the golf village for you. Ground floor. No steps for Mom’s hip. The maintenance fee covers the leaf-blowing and the snow-plow right up to the storm door."
"The golf village," Linda whispered. Her fingers went to the wooden buttons on her wool coat, twisting the top one until the thread pulled two inches out of the cloth. "Where they put Mrs. Gidley before she died?"
"It’s an active-adult community, Mom," Ethan snapped, his voice finally showing that thin, tinny edge of an only child who has been crossed three times in twenty minutes. "You can’t keep four acres of lawn mowed. Dad was on the roof with a leaf blower last November with his knee in a brace. The neighbors are talking about the look of the place."
"What neighbors?" I asked.
"The people who bought the forty acres on the ridge," Ashley said, her eyes flashing toward the window where the lights of the new three-story cedar house showed through the bare oak branches. "The executive vice-president from the hospital system. They don't want to look down from their breakfast terrace and see an eighty-four Ford tractor with two flat tires sitting by an open corn crib, Tom. It’s an eyesore. It drags down the comps for the whole ridge."
I looked down at the paper. At the bottom, on the line marked Grantor, there was a signature that looked like mine.
It had the long cross on the T that I’d picked up from my father, and the little backward hook on the m that comes from signing weight tickets on cattle scales with an old pencil that’s got the lead broken on one side.
"Ethan," I said.
"It’s all recorded, Dad. Recorded at three this afternoon. The clerk gave me the certified copy with the red seal."
"You remember ninety-six?" I asked.
He stopped the pencil mid-tap.
"Ninety-six," I repeated. "The year the ice storm brought the high-line down across the creek and we didn't have power for twenty-one days between Thanksgiving and the New Year."
"I was seven, Dad. What does ninety-six have to do with the corporate filing?"
"You had the croup," Linda said from the doorway. Her voice wasn't shaking now. It had reached that strange, flat bottom that women get to when they realize the well is dry and the children are still thirsty. "Your throat closed up so tight you were making that whistling noise like an owl in a chimney. The road was six feet deep in green pine branches and telegraph wire. Tom carried you four miles down the creek bed to the highway on his shoulders with his hands tucked into his armpits to keep the skin from freezing to your snowsuit."
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"And that was thirty years ago, Mom," Ethan said, not looking at her. "The world doesn't run on snowshoes anymore. It runs on title insurance and tax efficiency."
"No," I told him, picking up the two-percent milk and setting it back inside the brown paper bag so it wouldn't drip on my mother's clean floorboards. "It runs on diesel and blood. And you haven't got enough of either one to hold this hill."
