Inheritance
A IS FOR APPLE. Two of them in the yard, stunted and blackened. We peer at them in the January chill, trying to determine if they’ll flower and fruit come spring. Or maybe they’re cherries. They’re knobby trees, all elbows. It’s hard to tell.
B IS FOR BEDROOM. We’re getting two of them: one master and one little one that would be perfect for a little one. In the meantime, it will be my office. No pressure, jokes the realtor.
C IS FOR CHERRIES. It turns out they are cherries after all.
But C is also for choices. We have them: we could have lived farther out, way out, in a bigger house, or closer in toward the city center in a condo or crappier house. Instead, we’ve settled in the middle, a block away from a strip of used car lots and a block away from a lovely park, teetering between them on some bizarre socioeconomic fulcrum: just right.
D IS FOR DEAL-BREAKER. When the seller accepted our offer on this little bungalow, with its double lot and peeling yellow paint, we checked our list. It had been hanging up for eight months: our requirements for a future home, scrawled in Magic Marker on butcher paper and tacked to the door. On the list were three categories: must-haves, would-likes, and deal-breakers. A decent kitchen was a must-have. A yard with trees, a would-like. There were only a few deal-breakers: not on a super busy street and not too far out from city center.
We realize, now that we’ve made an actual offer on an actual house, that we had no idea what we were doing when we made that list. It was formed of gut feelings and quotes from TV shows and things we’d heard our parents say. But when you’re a lifelong renter, how can you know what to ask for? How can you know what will break the deal, or whether you yourself—your person, your credit score—will break it first? Not every deal-breaker, I guess I’m saying, is a choice.
Like the cloud, but for your money. It floats, suspended, somewhere unknowable and unreachable and neutral, until closing. Like a lawsuit, homebuying is full of legal terms. I have a master’s degree, but I have difficulty understanding all the jargon. I joke to my realtor that if she can give me the basics in ghazal floats in my mind, suspended, meaningless, like a mask detached from the face it’s supposed to cover.