Chapter 6 - The Anatomy of an Inventory
The house on Maple Street in Doylestown smelled of seventy years of boiled cabbage, lemon Pledge, and the bitter, metallic tang of an old oil burner that had had three replacement pumps since nineteen-eighty-one.
It was an asphalt-shingled cape with three dormers that looked out over an overgrown half-acre of crabgrass, rusted cyclone fencing, and four massive silver maples that dropped gallons of sticky sap onto the tin roof of the detached garage every July.
On Tuesday morning, seventy-two hours after the birthday party, Liam and I stood in the driveway with a man named Marcus King.
Marcus was sixty-one, the chief commercial real estate referee for the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas. He wore a rumpled seersucker jacket over an open-collared blue shirt, carried an aluminum clip-board with three carbonized legal pads, and had two pairs of reading glasses hanging from a nylon lanyard around his neck. He had known Liam’s father, Arthur Vance, since they were both fifteen and played American Legion ball on the diamond behind the courthouse.
"It’s clean, Liam," Marcus said, tapping the corner of the clipboard against his thigh as he looked at the rusted garage doors. "The bank’s appraisal came in at two hundred and ten thousand on Friday. That’s land value, mostly. The structure needs thirty thousand in electrical work just to clear the borough occupancy code, and the roof over the back porch has three broken rafters where the snow sat two winters back."
Liam had his hands in the pockets of his clean work jeans. His knuckles were raw where he had scrubbed the green dye out of his skin with pumice soap on Sunday night, but his face had lost that gray, hollow look that had haunted him for six months.
"What about the draw, Marcus?" Liam asked.
Marcus sighed, reaching for his bifocals. He flipped through the yellow carbon sheets on his board until he reached the certified transcript from the sheriff’s preliminary conference.
"Connor was in Judge Higgins’s chambers yesterday morning at eight-thirty," Marcus said, his voice dropping into that dry, professional monotone that court officers use when they are discussing something ugly that happened inside a family. "He brought an attorney from a firm in King of Prussia. A young kid with five hundred dollars' worth of hair gel who tried to argue that the seventy-four thousand was an informal family advancement against Connor’s testamentary share."
"And Higgins?"
"Higgins has been on the bench for twenty-eight years, Liam," Marcus said, looking over his glasses with a faint, bitter twitch of his thin lips. "He asked the kid to produce the signed ledger entry from Arthur’s estate books. The kid produced that photocopy with the notary stamp from the Route Thirty-One check-cashing shop."
Marcus let out a short, sharp snort through his nose.
"Higgins looked at the notary seal for three seconds, called the notary’s employer on his speakerphone right from the bench, and informed the young man that if the signature wasn't ratified under oath by the individual who witnessed Arthur’s mark within forty-eight hours, he was referring the entire file to the district attorney’s special investigations unit for third-degree felony forgery."
"Did the notary ratify?" I asked.
Marcus looked at me. "The notary’s sister is Paige Vance’s maid of honor, Claire. The girl quit her job at the check-cashing place on Monday afternoon and took a bus to her aunt’s house in Delaware. Connor signed the voluntary surrender agreement at two o'clock yesterday."
Liam turned toward the house.
Through the front picture window, between the yellowed sheer curtains, we could see the outline of two men in gray cotton work shirts hauling a heavy sofa toward the front door.
Evelyn was moving.
She had not called Liam. She had not called me.
She had spent forty-eight hours on the phone with her sister in New Jersey, packing forty years of decorative ceramic plates, floral porcelain tea sets, and the Sears-Roebuck dining room suite into cardboard boxes she had scavenged from the recycling bins behind the supermarket.
The front door opened.
Connor came down the concrete steps carrying an eight-foot rolled Persian runner—or what he thought was an Persian runner, but was actually a Sears machine-woven acrylic rug that Arthur had bought at the Oxford Valley Mall in nineteen-eighty-four for three hundred dollars.
He had lost weight in three days.
His pink polo shirt had been replaced by a dirty gray gym tee that had grease stains around the collar, his hair uncombed, his face that pasty, grayish-yellow color that people get when their credit cards have been blocked by three different commercial processors simultaneously.
He saw Liam standing by Marcus King’s car.
He stopped on the second step, the heavy roll of rug slipping six inches from his arm, his hands catching it awkwardly against his hip.
"You came to watch?" Connor spat. His voice was thin, cracked, like an old dry-wall saw cutting through plaster. "You came to see the sheriff put our mother out on the street?"
Liam walked three steps toward the walkway.
He didn't have his hands in his pockets now. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, looking at his younger brother with that calm, level, terrifyingly unhurried gaze that had silenced our backyard on Saturday afternoon.
"I didn't call the sheriff, Connor," Liam said. "Marcus is here because the court appointed him receiver to protect the estate from waste."
"You burned the check!" Connor yelled, his face turning that dark, ugly plum color again, though his eyes darted nervously toward Marcus’s clipboard. "You had the money to clear the lien! You had forty-one thousand dollars in the credit union! You could have stopped this with one phone call, Liam! You let them take Mom’s house to spite Paige!"
"No, Connor," Liam said.
He spoke so quietly that a mourning dove on the garage roof didn't even take flight.
"I didn't burn the check to spite Paige," Liam told him. "I let the bank take the house because for thirty years, Dad and I carried your debts so you could look like an important man in a rented suit. And every time we paid a bill, you grew a little meaner. You grew a little more arrogant. Until you brought a woman into our lives who thought she could kick an eight-year-old child’s work into the dirt and walk away with an 'oops.'"
He pointed toward the street.
Parked at the curb was not the white Audi.
It was an eight-year-old Hyundai Elantra with a dent in the passenger door and two different brands of tires on the front axle—a loaner from the used-car lot where Connor’s brother-in-law worked the financing desk.
"Where is the Audi, Connor?" Liam asked.
Connor’s teeth clicked together. He didn't answer.
"The repossession crew from Wells Fargo took it from your driveway in Perkasie at six o'clock this morning, didn't they?" Liam asked. "Because the lease was secured by the equity in this parcel. When the foreclosure lis pendens was filed on Friday, the cross-default clause triggered automatically."
Connor let the rolled rug drop.
It hit the concrete path with a dull, dusty whump, sending a small cloud of twenty-year-old carpet lint into the morning air.
He stepped down off the steps until he was two feet from his brother, his hands shaking, his chest heaving under the dirty gym shirt.
"I have nothing, Liam," he whispered, his voice cracking into that raw, pathetic whine that he had used when he was twelve and had lost his bicycle in the canal. "Do you understand that? The firm fired me yesterday afternoon. The regional director said that an associate with an active felony referral from a common pleas judge is an unacceptable compliance risk. Paige is staying at her mother’s. She won't even let me inside the condo."
Liam looked at his brother’s face.
I watched my husband’s eyes.
I watched for the old softness—the soft, maternal guilt that Evelyn had beaten into his shoulders for three decades, the instinct that had made him work eighty hours a week in freezing trenches so his little brother wouldn't have to explain why his car was four years old.
The softness was gone.
The fire in the Lancaster sugar kettle had burned it down to the gray, bare iron.
"You have two hands, Connor," Liam said, his voice flat as bluestone. "And the municipal water authority is hiring entry-level utility laborers for the night shift on the sewer mains. It pays nineteen dollars an hour. You have to buy your own rubber boots, but they provide the shovel."
He turned on his heel.
May you like
He walked back to where Marcus King was standing with the clipboard, signed the third carbon sheet with Marcus’s blue ballpoint pen, and laid the keys to the shop padlocks on the aluminum board.
"The inventory is complete, Marcus," Liam said. "Let the bank sell the lot."
