Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the Account
The foreclosure auction of the house on East Main Street was held on the third Saturday in November.
It was thirty-eight degrees, the wind blowing from the northeast with that wet, spitting salt-sleet that coats the telephone wires in gray ice and makes the seagulls sit huddled on the pilings with their beaks tucked into their breast feathers.
A yellow legal notice was taped to the front door, its edges fluttering in the draft:
NOTICE OF MORTGAGEE'S SALE OF REAL ESTATE
TOWN OF GLOUCESTER — BOOK 412, PAGE 88
There were only six people on the lawn: the auctioneer, a man named Henderson with a portable megaphone and a sheepskin coat; two representatives from Coastal Heritage Bank in charcoal topcoats; Douglas Hall; Tyler; and me.
My mother did not attend.
She was currently residing in the medium-security wing of the Western Massachusetts Correctional Center in Chicopee, having been denied bail after the grand jury returned an eleven-count indictment for corporate fraud, elder financial exploitation, and aggravated battery.
Her public defender had attempted an insanity defense based on "prolonged grief-induced cognitive distortion," but the Commonwealth had produced forty-six text messages sent between Beverly and her bank manager in which she had calculated the exact date on which my father’s life insurance policy would lapse if the loan payments were not made.
The auctioneer raised his megaphone.
"We have an opening bid of three hundred and twenty thousand dollars from the primary lienholder," Henderson barked, his voice echoing off the shingles of the garage. "Three-twenty. Looking for three-twenty-five. Do I hear three-twenty-five?"
Douglas Hall raised his finger.
"Three hundred and twenty-five thousand," Hall said.
Henderson looked at the bank attorneys. They shook their heads once, their hands tucked deep into their pockets against the sleet.
"Three-twenty-five once," Henderson droned. "Three-twenty-five twice. Sold to Vance Marine Properties, LLC, for three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars."
The gavel—a small wooden block Henderson tapped against the hood of his sedan—sounded with a dry, sharp clack.
It was over in four minutes.
The bank representatives handed Douglas Hall the carbonized assignment vouchers, shook his hand with the mechanical indifference of men who had three more sales to conduct before lunch in Peabody, and climbed into their Audi.
Tyler walked over to where I was standing beside my father’s green pickup truck.
He was wearing his old work clothes again.
He had spent the last two weeks living in a twelve-by-sixty mobile home at a trailer park in Essex, working fourteen-hour shifts for an industrial refrigeration company in Danvers, his entire life compressed into three cardboard boxes and a set of manifold gauges.
He had filed for an annulment on the grounds of fraud forty-eight hours after Kendall signed the plea agreement. Kendall had not contested it; she had signed the papers from her desk in the laundry room of the burn clinic in Lynn, using a blue institutional ballpoint pen that was chained to the counter.
Tyler looked at the green truck.
The dark green paint on the hood was peeling in long, scalloped flakes, showing the red primer beneath like old scabs, but the engine was running. It had that deep, rhythmic, heavy eight-cylinder idle that only old carbureted Fords have—a sound that vibrated through the steering column and made the brass key tag on the dash click against the heater controls: tack... tack... tack.
“She’s a good truck, Claire,” Tyler said, his hands shoved into his Carhartt pockets.
“Dad bought her in nineteen-eighty-four,” I said. “He put two hundred and forty thousand miles on her between here and the fish piers in New Bedford. He always said that if you change the transmission fluid every thirty thousand miles and don't let the salt sit on the leaf springs, an iron block will outlive three sets of owners.”
Tyler reached into his jacket and pulled out a clean, white envelope.
“What is that?” I asked.
“The rent money,” Tyler said. “For the cottage behind the shop. Douglas told me you were looking for someone to live on the property through the winter to keep the pipes from freezing and watch the boat hoist.”
I looked at the envelope.
Inside were four hundred dollars—four crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills, the corners sharp, smelling of the bank drawer.
“The rent is three hundred, Tyler,” I said.
“The extra hundred is for the power,” he said, his voice flat and steady. “I have three space heaters running in the tool bay to keep the spray rigs from cracking if the temperature drops below twenty. I don't take charity, Claire. You know that.”
I took the envelope. I didn't say thank you. That would have ruined the contract.
“The keys to the cottage are on the peg behind the drill press,” I told him. “The hot water heater is on a forty-amp breaker in the corner. If it trips, you have to reset it with a wooden stick; the box is old and the ground wire is thin.”
He nodded once—a short, sharp bob of his chin that settled the matter between two people who understood how to maintain an engine.
“How is the eye, Claire?” he asked softly.
I took off my polarized glasses.
The scar was still there. It would always be there—a thin, translucent crescent of fibrous white tissue across the lower half of the iris that caught the light like the interior of an abalone shell. But the redness was gone. The inflammation had subsided, leaving the eye clear, dark, and functional.
I could see his face.
I could see the small grease smudges on his jawline, the gray threads in his brown hair at the temples, and the faint, cold mist of his breath rising into the sleet.
“I can see forty percent at twenty feet,” I said. “The doctor says with a scleral lens next spring, it’ll be seventy. Enough to read the projections on the center screen.”
“Are you going back to Boston?”
“On Monday,” I said. “I have a reinsurance audit for a tanker fleet in Portland. Five million dollars in hull exposure. They need someone who knows how to look at the weld certifications.”
Tyler stepped back from the truck.
He looked at the house on East Main Street—the house where my mother had sat at the kitchen table with her red measuring cup and her table salt, the house where Kendall had practiced her smiles before the vanity mirror, the house that had finally been weighed, measured, and assigned its proper value on the county books.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, pointing toward the garrison colonial.
“Douglas has a contract with the North Shore Women’s Shelter,” I said. “They’re taking the lease for one dollar a year. They need three bedrooms for mothers who have had to leave their furniture behind in the middle of the night.”
I opened the driver’s door of the green Ford.
May you like
The cab smelled of eighty years of Gloucester history: old tobacco, neoprene waders, WD-40, and the orange pumice hand cleaner my father had used to wash the grease from his cuticles before he sat down to supper.
I climbed up onto the cracked vinyl bench seat, pulled the heavy door shut with a solid, iron chunk, and dropped the column shifter into reverse.
