One of the neighbor kids slid out his back door. His glance hit Willa and bounced off quickly as he cut through the maze of cars in his yard and headed out to the alley. He and his brother worked on the vehicles mostly at night, sliding tools back and forth under portable utility lights. Their quiet banter and intermittent Spanish expletives of frustration or success drifted through Willa’s bedroom windows as the night music of a new town. She had no hard feelings toward the vehicle boneyard, or these handsome boys and their friends, who all wore athletic shorts and plastic bath shoes as if life began in a locker room. The wrong here was a death sentence falling on her house while that one stood by, nonchalant, with its swaybacked roofline and vinyl siding peeling off in leprous shreds. Willa’s house was brick. Not straw or sticks, not a thing to get blown away in a puff.
The silence had extended beyond her turn to speak. Mr. Petrofaccio courteously examined the two mammoth trees that shaded this yard and half the block. Willa had admired the pair of giants out her kitchen window and assumed they were as old as the house, but hadn’t credited them with a better life expectancy.
“I have no idea why someone would do that,” he finally offered. “Put up an addition with no foundation. No reputable contractor would do that.”
It did seem to be sitting directly on the ground, now that she looked, with the bottom courses of bricks relaxing out of rank into wobbly rows. A carapace of rusted tin roofing stretched over the gabled third floor and the two-story addition cobbled on the back, apparently in haste. Two tall chimneys leaned in opposite directions. Cracks zigzagged lightningwise down the brick walls. How had she not seen all this? Willa was the one who raised her anxiety shield against every family medical checkup or late-night ring of the phone, expecting the worst so life couldn’t blindside them. But she’d looked up contractors that morning with no real foreboding. Probably assuming her family had already used up its quota of misfortune.
“I can’t hire you to tear down my house and start over.” Willa ran her hands through her hair at the temples, and felt idiotic. Both-hands-on-the-temples was a nervous habit she’d been trying to break for about twenty years, since her kids told her it made her look like The Scream. She shoved her fists into the pockets of her khaki shorts. “We were thinking we’d fix it up, sell it, and get something closer to Philadelphia. We don’t need this much room. Nobody needs this much room.”
On the moral side of things, Mr. Petrofaccio gave no opinion.
“But you’re saying we would have to repair it first to put it on the market. And I’ve noticed about every fourth house in this town has a For Sale sign. They’re all in better shape than this one, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Twenty five percent, that would be a high estimate. Ten percent is about right.”
“And are they selling?” “They are not.” “So that’s also a reason not to tear down the house.” She realized her logic in this moment was not watertight. “Okay, you know what? The main thing is we live here. We’ve got my husband’s disabled father with us right now. And our daughter.”
“Also a baby in the picture, am I right? I saw baby items, a crib and all. When I was inspecting the ruptures in the ductwork on the third floor.”
Her jaw dropped, a little.