The Last House on Meridian

My name's Axel Donovan, I'm twenty-eight years old, and at the moment you're reading this I was probably elbow-deep in a box marked "kitchen????" which is exactly how helpful my labeling system was. Candace, my wife, is thirty. We've been married five years, and for three of those years we lived wherever her hospital wanted her, because she's a nurse and nurses get shipped around like cargo. So when I got the offer from the law firm, the deal was simple. My job picks the town now. Her turn's over.

Fair enough, honestly. She paid her dues.

What nobody warned me about was the housing market in this town. God, the housing market. We'd put offers on four houses in six weeks and lost all four. Every single one. And not lost by a little, either. Lost by five grand, ten grand, once by a house that sold before our offer even landed. I started calling it my retirement plan, losing money on houses we never owned.

"Do you think it's one agent?" Candy asked me one night over pizza, sitting on the floor because our table was already wrapped in bubble wrap.

"What do you mean?"

"Every house we lose. Is it the market, or is it one person?"

I remember laughing at that. I actually laughed. Big mistake, because I would spend the next month learning she was dead right.

* * *

The firm was in one of those low-rise office parks out by the highway, beige buildings with beige signs, the kind of place where you can never remember which entrance is yours. I'd been a paralegal there for about three weeks when Dee Sutter called me into her office. Dee's fifty-two, senior partner, been running the place since before I owned a suit that fit. She hired me off a referral and never let me forget it.

"Sit," she said, and pointed a pen at the chair like it owed her money.

I sat.

"You house hunting?" she asked.

"Trying. Losing."

"Mm." She opened her folder drawer, pulled out a manila folder thick enough to stop a door, and slid it across the desk. "Then you should see this. Property on Meridian Street. Owner's in a contested estate thing, we're handling bits of it. It hits the market next week."

I looked at the folder and then at her. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're losing, you said so yourself, and because I like winning." She leaned back in her chair. "But there's a catch, Donovan, and the catch has a name."

"Which is?"

"Elias Suess. Realtor. Forty-five years old, been selling houses in this county for twenty years, and he does not like losing either." Dee tapped the folder with the pen. "He's been outbidding my clients all spring. Including yours, I'd bet. Check the listing history on your last four offers. I bet you find his name as the buyer's agent on three."

I checked that night. His name was on three of the four. Three. I sat in the rental kitchen surrounded by boxes with my phone glowing in my face and just said a bad word out loud to nobody.

Candy poked her head around a stack of boxes. "What?"

"Elias Suess."

Her face did something weird when I said that name. I didn't catch it at the time. I want you to know that, because it matters later, the fact that I didn't catch it. She just said, "Huh. Why?" and went back to taping boxes, and I was too busy being mad to think about it.

The thing about the rental house was that it was chaos. Boxes everywhere, furniture in the wrong rooms, the bed in the living room because the movers couldn't get the frame up the stairs. It smelled like cardboard and dust and somebody else's air freshener. We'd been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for two weeks and every night Candy would say tomorrow we set up the bedroom and every night we'd fall asleep on the floor instead. It's amazing what you get used to.

* * *

Dee's warning kept rattling around in my head, so a few days later I asked her about him again. She actually put her pen down, which for Dee was like a national address.

"Suess works like this," she said. "He finds out what the other bidder can afford. Then he bids one increment above it. Not more, one increment. He's got relationships with every listing agent in the county, half of them owe him favors, and he uses the listing agent's ear to whisper about how strong his buyers are. Strong lender, clean close, quick dates. Your offer could be better and the seller still picks his, because his paperwork smells like money."

"That's legal?"

"Everything he does is legal. That's what makes him good." She gave me one of her looks over her glasses. "The house on Meridian, though. The estate situation means the seller's motivated and the timeline's messy. If you get in early, with a clean letter and a fast close date, you've got a real shot. But you've got to move before Suess sniffs it out."

"When does it list?"

"Tuesday."

"And today is..."

"Friday. Do the math, Donovan."

I did the math. I did the math all the way home, and Candy could tell, because I walked in the door talking.

"So there's this house," I started, and she held up both hands.

"If it has more than three bedrooms I don't want to hear about it unless we're getting it."

"It's on Meridian. It's not even listed yet. Dee says we can get a jump on it."

Candy came around the boxes and looked at me, and for a second there was that weird face again, quick, a door opening and shutting. "Meridian Street? The one with the big yard by the corner?"

"Is there a big yard by the corner? I haven't even seen pictures."

"There's one house on that street everybody used to point at. Is it a two-story with the wraparound porch?"

"I don't know, I have a folder, not a postcard."

She laughed and pushed a box out of the way so she could actually stand in the kitchen. "Okay. Okay, yes. Let's do it. I'm so tired of that mattress, Axel. I want a house. I want a real bed. I want to stop eating pizza on the floor like raccoons."

"Raccoons have better posture."

"Raccoons have better kitchen setups than we do right now."

So Friday night and Saturday we built the offer. I mean we really built it, like a project. My lender friend Scott, who I've known since college and who owed me for a moving favor, agreed to write the strongest pre-approval letter of his career. We offered at asking, which in this market felt like bringing a knife to a gunfight, but Dee said clean beats big in an estate sale. We wrote a letter to the sellers, actual humans, about starting over and wanting to stay. Candy wrote it. She's better with words than me when I'm not being funny on purpose.

"How's this?" she asked, handing me the laptop. "Dear seller, we know this house held a family a long time."

"Read the rest."

"We're not investors, we're not flippers, we're a nurse and a paralegal who keep losing houses to a guy named..." She squinted at the screen. "Should I name Suess? No. Don't name him. Naming him makes us sound bitter."

"We are bitter."

"We are bitter. But the sellers don't need to know that."

Sunday we drove past Meridian Street, slow, like creeps, and I saw it. Two-story, wraparound porch, big corner yard with one crooked maple tree. It was, and I don't say this lightly, perfect. Candy actually grabbed my arm through the window.

"Oh my God, that's the house. That's the one everyone pointed at."

"It's the one?"

"It's the one."

We sat there in the car looking at it like a couple of weirdos, and I remember thinking, this is it, this time we win. I even said it out loud. "This time we win."

Here's the part I'll get wrong if I'm not careful, because honestly my memory of the next two days is one long headache. We submitted Monday morning, first thing, before the listing even went live, through Dee's contact. Clean letter, fast close, asking price. Tuesday the listing went up and by Tuesday night there was a competing offer, and you already know whose name was on it. Elias Suess, buyer's agent. One increment above us.

I found out Wednesday at the office. Dee called me in, put her pen down again, and said, "Donovan, do you want me to handle this one personally?"

"What does that mean?"

"It means Suess just found out you're mine, and now it's not a house sale anymore. It's a hobby for him."

That should have scared me. What it did instead, and I can't explain this even now, was make me grin like an idiot.

"Then let's play it," I said.

So Wednesday night I went home with that grin still stapled to my face, and Candy could read me like a sign. "We lost again, didn't we? Suess again?"

"One increment. One. Who does that? Who sits there refreshing like it's a video game?"

She sat down on a box labeled BATHROOM, MISC, which was full of kitchen stuff, because that's how packing went. "So what's the move?"

"Dee wants to play it. The estate thing gives us angles. There's a showing Thursday, some kind of agent walkthrough, and Dee says we can tag along as the interested party. Face time with the seller's guy."

"Can I come? I want to see my house."

"Your house. I like that. Yes, come. Wear something that says we're stable and boring."

Thursday she came straight from a shift, scrubs under her jacket, hair still doing that thing after twelve hours where it just gives up. The showing was at five, and the little cul-de-sac of realtors' cars was already there. And I'm sure you can guess whose car. Big silver thing, license plate I half expected to say WINNING.

We got out and Candy stopped on the sidewalk. "Huh."

"What?"

"Nothing. I just thought I recognized the car, that's all."

"From where? We've never been to a showing this guy didn't crash."

"I don't know, Axel. A car. It's a car."

Inside the Meridian house was even better than the porch suggested. Hardwood, big windows, that maple right outside the kitchen like a painting somebody hung crooked on purpose. Candy walked through it with her hand on the wall the whole time, like she was already living there.

Then the front door opened and in came Elias Suess. I knew him from his headshot, which I'd now studied more than my own driver's license. Bigger in person. Tanned in January. That jacket.

And here's the part I still chew on. He saw Candy before he saw me. And his face did something. Not much. Just a flicker, quick, like a card player who's just realized which game he walked into. Then he was all teeth.

"Suess," he said, hand out to me. "You must be the Donovan offer. Heard a lot about you."

"From who, your mirror?"

He laughed like it was a good joke. His handshake was one of those crushing ones. Then he turned to Candy and said, "And this is your wife?"

"Candace," she said. Just that. Flat. She didn't offer a hand, and she did the smallest step back, and I watched Suess clock that step like he was measuring a room.

"Candace," he repeated. "Pretty name."

"Thanks. It's the house we're here about," she said.

"Sure, sure. Lovely place. Won't last the weekend." And then, to me, all friendly, "Tell you what. You two seem like nice folks. Why don't you let me carry this one? I can probably get you back your deposit from the last three."

I didn't say anything. Candy said, "We're fine, thanks."

The walkthrough went on and I barely remember the rooms, because my whole brain was busy. Because on the way out, in the yard, while I was pretending to inspect the maple, Candy said the thing. Offhand. Like telling me what she wanted on a pizza.

"He's from that conference. Columbus, the nursing one, must be two years ago now. I knew I'd seen that car somewhere. He was there with some property seminar, all the booths were between us."

I stood there with my hand on a crooked tree. "The conference? Which conference? You went to a hundred conferences."

"The nursing one, the spring one. It doesn't matter. Small world, right?"

"Small world," I said, and my stomach was doing something ugly that had nothing to do with houses.

Because here's what I know about my wife. Candy tells you everything. What she ate, what the charge nurse said, what some patient's grandson was wearing. She narrates airports. She has narrated parking garages to me. And in five years of marriage, five years, this woman never once mentioned that she knew the name Elias Suess well enough to recognize his car.

"You knew him," I said. "Before. You knew his face."

"I knew of him, Axel. He was a booth guy at a conference. Everyone knows booth guys. They hand out calendars."

"Candy."

"What?"

"You did the door-open thing."

"I did not do the door-open thing."

"You did! You do a thing, you do this little..." I tried to imitate her face and mostly looked constipated. "And you did it twice now. Once when I said Meridian, once when you saw him."

She crossed her arms. "Can we not do this in the yard