lives of people who need help. That’s why I got into this field in the first place.”
“And you need that house, don’t you?”
“And I
really
need that house.”
Nathaniel understood that having a house like the one in Dolores Woods—a house, he had to admit, that was unlike any they could ever have afforded in Massachusetts—was important to Julia in a way it would never be to him.
After seeing the house with Elizabeth they left instructions for her and returned to their high-rise apartment in Boston to await the results of the foreclosure auction. Nathaniel knew that Julia had decided the house would be theirs by some miracle of fate, although he privately hoped that in the end they would be outbid, and the difficult logistics of finding somewhere to live in a city fifteen hundred miles distant would put a stop to the plans that were already, in every other respect, so far advanced.
When Elizabeth phoned to tell them “the good news” that not only had they “won” the auction, but that the final price was well below their “target,” Nathaniel understood, despite his many misgivings, that they were going to be significantly better off financially than they had ever been at any previous point in their lives together. Even with the downturn in the market they sold the apartment in Boston at a substantial profit and the mortgage payments on the new house are less than half what they were paying on the Back Bay apartment. Although still paying off student loans, their taxes would be lower, the cost of living lower, everything about their new life was going to be cheap, while both their salaries were increasing by more than a third. Judged by any objective measures, they were far luckier than most of their friends and contemporaries.
T he sun is going down earlier each evening, summer quitting itself, but still I can see the white man at the bus stop from a block away. It’s only when he boards that I realize he’s in uniform. For a moment I think the vest he wears says KKK and my heart rumbles, but then my eyes come together and I see the first K is an E and all the man is doing is checking tickets. Under those three capital letters is an unfamiliar phrase: Revenue Protection. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been riding buses much lately, but it used to be enough to pay the driver and get off at your stop. I fish the ticket from my purse and the Revenue Protection man looks at it and then at me as if the little white slip should somehow correspond to the shape and features of my face. He puts it back in my hand without saying anything and goes on to the next person. Everyone has a ticket. I wonder what would happen if someone didn’t, if he’d whip out a smart black fine book or slap a pair of silver cuffs around offending wrists. He gets off at the next stop, crosses the street, waiting for a bus headed back into town.
How many times I’ve driven this road, watched it change over the last decades, but if I were my young self again I would see nothing familiar about any of it, not the phrases or faces or the houses where there used to be fields surrounding our own. Just before the last stop I press the yellow strip of tape running along the window and as I get off I thank the driver. The man doesn’t even look at me, as if I were an apparition, as though I might never have existed at all. I trudge along the hot sidewalk where buffalo grass used to grow, past a brick wall where I remember split-rail fences. I come to our land, to that place where the forest reaches all the way to Poplar Road, and the cottonwoods in their thick-trunked waltz bow down and say
here you are, Louise, here you come
. I remember when this stretch of road was still dirt and Donald and I stood at the edge of the property watching the men and cement trucks, knowing it was the end of the way we and our people had lived upon this land my grandparents inherited, land my Freeman forebears tenanted before a stroke of most unlikely
“And you need that house, don’t you?”
“And I
really
need that house.”
Nathaniel understood that having a house like the one in Dolores Woods—a house, he had to admit, that was unlike any they could ever have afforded in Massachusetts—was important to Julia in a way it would never be to him.
After seeing the house with Elizabeth they left instructions for her and returned to their high-rise apartment in Boston to await the results of the foreclosure auction. Nathaniel knew that Julia had decided the house would be theirs by some miracle of fate, although he privately hoped that in the end they would be outbid, and the difficult logistics of finding somewhere to live in a city fifteen hundred miles distant would put a stop to the plans that were already, in every other respect, so far advanced.
When Elizabeth phoned to tell them “the good news” that not only had they “won” the auction, but that the final price was well below their “target,” Nathaniel understood, despite his many misgivings, that they were going to be significantly better off financially than they had ever been at any previous point in their lives together. Even with the downturn in the market they sold the apartment in Boston at a substantial profit and the mortgage payments on the new house are less than half what they were paying on the Back Bay apartment. Although still paying off student loans, their taxes would be lower, the cost of living lower, everything about their new life was going to be cheap, while both their salaries were increasing by more than a third. Judged by any objective measures, they were far luckier than most of their friends and contemporaries.
T he sun is going down earlier each evening, summer quitting itself, but still I can see the white man at the bus stop from a block away. It’s only when he boards that I realize he’s in uniform. For a moment I think the vest he wears says KKK and my heart rumbles, but then my eyes come together and I see the first K is an E and all the man is doing is checking tickets. Under those three capital letters is an unfamiliar phrase: Revenue Protection. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been riding buses much lately, but it used to be enough to pay the driver and get off at your stop. I fish the ticket from my purse and the Revenue Protection man looks at it and then at me as if the little white slip should somehow correspond to the shape and features of my face. He puts it back in my hand without saying anything and goes on to the next person. Everyone has a ticket. I wonder what would happen if someone didn’t, if he’d whip out a smart black fine book or slap a pair of silver cuffs around offending wrists. He gets off at the next stop, crosses the street, waiting for a bus headed back into town.
How many times I’ve driven this road, watched it change over the last decades, but if I were my young self again I would see nothing familiar about any of it, not the phrases or faces or the houses where there used to be fields surrounding our own. Just before the last stop I press the yellow strip of tape running along the window and as I get off I thank the driver. The man doesn’t even look at me, as if I were an apparition, as though I might never have existed at all. I trudge along the hot sidewalk where buffalo grass used to grow, past a brick wall where I remember split-rail fences. I come to our land, to that place where the forest reaches all the way to Poplar Road, and the cottonwoods in their thick-trunked waltz bow down and say
here you are, Louise, here you come
. I remember when this stretch of road was still dirt and Donald and I stood at the edge of the property watching the men and cement trucks, knowing it was the end of the way we and our people had lived upon this land my grandparents inherited, land my Freeman forebears tenanted before a stroke of most unlikely
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