Chapter 16 — WHAT HE SOLD

I did not go to the basement that night.

I went the next morning, and I want to explain why the delay, because it is the only genuinely cowardly thing left in this account.

I was afraid it would not be there.

I was seventy-one and I had built two decades on a fact and I had never once in twenty-one years opened that box to look at it, and there was a voice in me at two in the morning saying: what if you remembered it wrong. What if it was verbal. What if you have been right about this the way people are right about things they have never checked.

It was there.

Three pages, stapled, on a form from a stationer's that does not exist any more. My wife's handwriting, which is round and upright and completely unlike our daughter's.

Notarised at the Ellery Savings Bank on the fourth of February 2005 by a woman named Doris Vitale who I have known since high school and who is still alive and who lives four streets away.

And on the second page, in the section where the form invites you to write anything else you would like your family to know, my wife had used all eleven lines.

I read it standing up in the basement in my coat.

I am not going to reproduce most of it. It is hers, and some of it is to me.

But the ninth and tenth lines say this:

*Sarah will fight this. She will want them to keep going and she will be right to want that because she is seventeen. Walt, do not argue with her about it. Just do it and let her be angry at you. She can be angry at you for as long as she needs to. She can't be angry at me if I'm not here.*

My wife knew.

She sat at our kitchen table in February 2005 and she predicted the entire next twenty-one years of my life, and she chose it, and she gave it to me to carry.

*She can be angry at you for as long as she needs to.*

That is the most loving and the most expensive sentence anybody has ever written about me.

I did two things that day.

The first is that I photocopied all three pages and put the copy in a folder and did not take it to the hospital, because there was one more item on the list first and I had learned by then that this daughter of mine did not respond to being handed things. She responded to what a person actually did.

The second is that I called a realtor about 114 Delaware Avenue.

That is a six-unit building on the east side that I bought in 2003. It is the best of the three. It is the one that pays for the other two.

Tom Ferraro had said *usually they move*, and I had turned that over for six weeks, and the answer was that I was not going to move.

Not because of the house.

Because Eli had started at Ellery Middle and Mabel had a hook with a rabbit on it and Cassie Pruitt in room 4, and moving means a district and a district means starting over, and those two children had started over four times in fourteen months and I was not going to be the fifth.

So I did not move.

I put an addition on the back of the house.

A contractor named Roy Baptiste did it in nineteen days in February, which is not possible, and which he did by putting four men on it and eating the schedule, and the reason he did that is that his own daughter went into foster care in 1998 and he told me that at the end of the third day and then never mentioned it again.

It is a bedroom, eleven by twelve, with a window that faces the yard.

It cost sixty-eight thousand dollars.

I sold 114 Delaware Avenue for four hundred and ten and I want to be honest that I did not need to sell a whole building to pay for a bedroom.

I sold it because after the addition I had thirty-one thousand a year less income and two children and I was seventy-one years old, and Paula told me a judge would want to see liquid assets and not just buildings, and because I had done the arithmetic on what a ten-year-old and a six-year-old cost from now until they are twenty-two, and the number was larger than I had left.

So I am a man with two buildings now instead of three, and I sleep in a house with an addition on the back, and my income is about half what it was in 2024.

Tom Ferraro came back on the twenty-fourth of February and measured the new room and wrote down the number.

He did not say anything about it either.

But when he got to the door he stopped and said, "Mr. Harrison, I've done about six hundred of these."

"All right."

"Nobody builds a room."