Dog days

There hasn't been much of a change in the last few days: Nobody has stopped by. I haven't heard anything from the realtor, either, which is fine. I'm still cleaning up and throwing things out. With the mower out of commission, the yard doesn't look all that great either.

Everybody has been very encouraging.

"My parents have had their house up since April. They've only had like two people come look at it."

"It took two years for us to sell our house."

"I just gave up. I think I'll probably die there."

The competition around Pinch is fierce. I counted no less than a dozen signs advertising different houses for sale by different realtors. One or two people have forgone professional help and have slapped up a $2 "House for Sale" sign they got from the hardware store.

I don't know how many people have quietly listed their places on Craigslist, through the trading paper or have posted Polaroids in gas station restrooms with phone numbers --it could be twice that many.

I keep telling myself it's too early to get discouraged, it's too soon to feel rejected. I have to be patient. I am patient. It's one of the few virtues I think I have --I know how to wait.

I have to wonder why everyone is leaving town, though.

As far as places go, Pinch is quiet, though I think it's like a lot of small towns --graying and thinning out. When I first took my kid to cub scouts, the thing that really stood out were the number of older parents who'd brought kids to the meeting. There were an awful lot of 6 and 7-year-olds living with their grandparents or their great-aunt because their Mom and Dad were doing three or four years for running a meth lab.

A couple of blocks over, there's a retired truck driver trying to raise a grandson. I met him a few weeks after I moved into the house --a nice enough fella, who drove around in a big truck and every once in a while went out to ride motorcycles with his nephew.

He was somewhere around 70-years-old and living alone when he got a call in the middle of the night from the sheriff.

"Donnie, you've got to come right now."

His son, he told me, was sitting in the back of one cruiser. His grandson, Terry, was in the next one.

"He told me I had to take him home right then," Donnie said.

"He was so little," the old man whispered, still horrified that his grandson had been placed in the back of locked police car.

And so Donnie took Terry home, as old as he was, and as inexperienced as he was with raising children.

"I spent my whole life working," he told me. "I didn't think I could handle this."

So, he reached out to a woman named Martha he'd met at church, an old widow who needed help with the mortgage and was struggling in her later years. She took them in, gave the boy a room and had been like a grandmother to him.

They'd constructed a family of a sort.

"No sex," Donnie told me one weekend, after he'd accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior --a last minute conversion if ever I heard one.

"We tried, you know?" He told me, while we watched a fishing show, one rainy afternoon in his living room. The boys were in the back playing a video game. "I couldn't satisfy her and she couldn't satisfy me." He shrugged. "Nothing we could do. I ain't what she wants and she ain't what I want, but that's alright. We do alright. We ain't in love, but we make this work."

Martha just shrugged and smiled her big, artificial smile.

"Don't mind him," she said. "He's been like that since he got baptized."

They lived together. She had her room and he slept in a recliner in the living room, probably.

I saw them more when I first moved there and less since. A little over a year ago, I met Donnie's son and then Terry's mom.

They arrived separately and did not travel together, as far as I could tell.

They seemed like nice people, asked me if their son had been any trouble and said I should call if ever Terry was a bother. I could call Martha. She'd send somebody down.

I lied and said he was never trouble, but I meant it when I told them, "He's welcome here."


I can't remember the last time I saw any of them --since last Fall maybe, at least Christmas. I haven't seen Donnie's truck and there have been none of Martha's grand kids walking around looking for Terry, who sometimes wanders off when he takes a notion to.

Maybe they moved on, too.