Chapter 6 - The Mechanics of the Market
The next thirty days were an exercise in bureaucratic violence. A partition sale under court order is not a gentle process; it has none of the staging, the open houses, or the polite negotiations of a standard residential real estate transaction. It is an administrative execution of brick and mortar.
The appraiser valued the Elmhurst house at four hundred and twenty thousand dollars, despite the earthquake damage to the rear foundation wall. Because the market in our county was suffering from a severe inventory shortage, a local real estate investment trust named Vanguard Holdings snapped up the note within eight days of the listing, offering cash with a seventy-two-hour closing window.
I sat in Franklin’s office on a Tuesday morning, watching the digital wire transfers clear into the escrow account.
The remaining two-thirds—two hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars—should have gone to Eleanor and Brittany. But the bank’s legal department had already attached a super-lien to the funds to recover the outstanding balance of the fraudulent home equity line of credit, which had reached one hundred and forty-six thousand dollars with interest and default penalties. After the bank took its cut and the county collected the back taxes my parents had failed to pay for two years, my mother and sister were left with less than fifty-four thousand dollars to split between them.
Fifty-four thousand dollars to replace the only home they had known for thirty years.
"They signed a lease on a three-bedroom double-wide trailer out by the county line yesterday," Simone told me over dinner that evening. She was chopping carrots at her island while Ruby sat on the floor with Simone’s golden retriever, carefully constructing a hospital out of cardboard boxes for her stuffed fox.
"Who signed it?" I asked, keeping my eyes on my wine glass.
"Brittany and Shane," Simone said, her knife hitting the cutting board with a rhythmic thwack-thwack. "Your father moved into a small apartment behind the senior center downtown. Apparently, he and Eleanor are taking a 'formal separation.' After the arraignment, when Eleanor got hit with two years of criminal probation and three hundred hours of community service for the forgery, Arthur finally realized his retirement was gone. He packed his clothes in garbage bags and left while she was still at the lawyer's office."
I looked down at Ruby. She was laughing now, her small fingers buried in the dog’s thick gold fur, her voice clear and bright as she told the animal that the fox’s shoulder was all better now. The small, anxious stutter she had developed in the days after the earthquake had vanished the moment we moved into Simone’s guest wing.
"She’s starting kindergarten next week," I murmured, more to myself than to Simone.
May you like
"She’s going to ace it," Simone said, wiping her hands on a dishtowel and sitting down beside me. "And you? What are you going to do with the hundred and thirty-two thousand, Mara? It’s enough for a massive down payment on one of those historic bungalows over by the park."
"No," I said, a new idea taking root in my mind, something that had been growing since the moment Judge Harrison brought his gavel down. "I’m not buying another house in this town, Simone. The ground here moves too much. I think it’s time we looked at the coast."
