Monday morning, before the sun cleared the grain elevator, I carried my old toolbox out into the front yard, set it down in the wet grass, and pulled Craig’s sign out of my lawn with a pipe wrench.
Took four minutes. He had run those posts down eighteen inches, which I will say was decent work.
I put it in the bed of my truck face down and did not do one other thing about it, because it was Monday and I had a Monday.
Ellis Ward on the corner has a water heater going out. That was first. Then Peggy Dombrowski’s storm door, which I have rehung twice. Then the church, because the furnace fan makes a noise in October that it does not make in July and I am the only one left who knows what it means.
By eleven there were four trucks in my driveway and I had not called anybody.
By two there were fourteen. Ellis had made calls. So had Peggy. Somebody brought a card table and somebody’s wife brought a ham, and there were men in my front yard at fifty-eight and sixty and seventy-one who I have wired, plumbed, roofed, or hauled out of a ditch since 1981.
Dell Fanucci does closings. He looked at that listing agreement and told me in ninety seconds that a house does not go on the market without the owner’s signature, and mine was not on it. He made two calls and it was off the internet by Wednesday. He did not charge me and I did not offer, because I have been under his mother’s kitchen sink.
Somewhere in there somebody opened the toolbox to get a nut driver, and the lid went back and there it was.
My wife did that in 1983 with a paint pen. I have opened that lid nine thousand times since and stopped seeing it years ago. It runs down the whole inside, in her hand, address after address, added to for thirty-nine years. The last three she wrote when she was very sick.
At the top of it:
Marvin’s list. Started 1983 because he will not ever tell one soul what he has done for this street and somebody in this house ought to keep count. He would hate that you are reading this, so wait until he is out of the room.
Ellis Ward read that in my yard and had to go sit in his truck a minute.
My daughter came Tuesday and stayed till Thursday. She did most of the talking and I let her, and she said the thing she should have said with the mashed potatoes going around. Four days late. Four days late still counts.
Craig has not been back in this house. He mows my side yard now on Saturdays without being asked and without ringing the bell, which is the only apology that man has in him, and I have decided to take it.
The sign is still face down in my truck bed. I keep meaning to run it to the scrap yard.
A man can look at a house and see equity. Everybody who came to that yard on Monday was looking at the same house and seeing about forty years of somebody showing up with a toolbox.