“The bank has my routing number for the mortgage automatic draft, Diane,” I said. “It has for five years.”
“Eric is the owner of this property, Nora,” she said, her eyes finally meeting mine, cold and unyielding. “Whatever arrangements you two made privately do not change the fact that his sister has three children who need a yard to play in.”
She tapped her pen on her notepad, drawing a heavy circle around her measurements.
“Melissa’s children need to be in the local school district before the winter term,” she added, as if she were reading from a town charter. “It is simply a matter of family priority.”
“The school district does not pay the one thousand eight hundred dollars a month,” I said.
Diane looked back down at her pad, dismissing me with a slight shrug of her shoulders.
“My son is a Carter, and this is a Carter home,” she said. “We have already made the decision.”
The back door clicked open before I could answer. Eric walked in from the garage, carrying a heavy cardboard box of lawn fertilizer that smelled faintly of ammonia and damp soil.
He was forty-five, but he moved with the heavy, slow gait of a man who spent his days trying to remain invisible behind his high school history textbooks. He set the box on the pantry floor and immediately pulled his phone from his pocket, his thumb scrolling through some article about the Civil War.
“Eric,” I said, turning my chair toward him. “Your mother is saying I need to pack my things for Melissa.”
He kept his thumb moving across the screen, his face completely blank under the fluorescent kitchen lights, his eyes fixed on the blue glow of the glass.
“Eric, look at me,” I said, my voice cutting through the silence of the room.
