Chapter 2 - The House on Lynen Street
The rain started at dawn, coming down in that steady, gray Carolina sheet that turns the red clay along the curbs to the consistency of lard.
At six-fifteen, the furnace in the cellar kicked on with its customary metallic shudder—a rattle that sounded like a loose bolt inside a metal drum. The house on Lynen Street had been built in 1948 for a foreman at the Cannon Mills finishing plant. It had six-inch baseboards that had been painted white so many times the corners were round as eggs, a hipped roof covered in twenty-year-old three-tab shingles, and a front porch that pitched slightly toward the hydrangeas because the center pier had settled two inches during the wet spring of 1998.
Baker Landworks had bought the whole block of Lynen Street in 2017 at an estate auction for seventy-two thousand dollars. Warren had torn down the four houses on the north side to make an equipment staging yard, surrounded by eight-foot chain link with green privacy slats.
Our house had survived because Warren needed a place to put Daniel when Daniel left his first job at an engineering firm in Charlotte to "learn the field side" of the family business.
"It’s an asset holding," Warren had announced over a prime-rib dinner at his house the Sunday after our wedding. "The family company holds the title. Daniel and Rosalie pay the maintenance carrying costs. Fourteen hundred a month. It keeps the depreciation on our books, and it keeps Daniel from throwing three thousand dollars a month into some Charlotte apartment developer’s pocket."
There was never a lease. When I asked about one six weeks after moving in, Daniel had looked at me as if I had suggested we ask his mother for a receipt after Christmas breakfast.
"My dad doesn't do paper with his kids, Rose," he had said, untying his work boots on the porch. "It’s family. We’re in the company. If the furnace blows, the company crew fixes it. If the roof leaks, the roofers come out. You’re thinking like a lawyer again."
"I am a lawyer, Daniel," I had answered.
"You were a judge advocate," he had corrected, smiling that easy, sun-bleached smile that had made me sit through three seasons of Appalachian State home football games in the wind. "Now you’re home."
I stood at the stove this morning, turning four pieces of bacon in the cast-iron skillet that had belonged to my grandmother Hollis.
The stairs creaked.
Daniel came into the kitchen wearing his gray Baker Landworks polo shirt—the one with the green excavator embroidered over the pocket—and clean khakis. His hair was still damp from the shower, combed back with the part low on the left side, the way his mother liked it for church.
He didn't look at the yellow pine table.
He didn't look at the gray footlocker, which I had closed and latched but left resting on the chair by the door.
He walked to the coffee pot, poured a mug, and stood with his hip against the laminate counter, watching the rain strike the window above the sink.
"Mabel still asleep?" he asked.
"She’s asleep," I said, laying the bacon onto a plate lined with a brown paper bag. "She went down hard around nine. The sugar wore off."
"Party went well," he said. His voice was light, cautious, like a man testing the thickness of ice over a pond before putting his second boot down. "The pony was a hit. Dad said he hasn't seen the neighborhood kids turn out like that since Celeste was little."
"Your father had me served with a summons while Mabel was blowing out the candles, Daniel."
The coffee spoon in his hand tapped the rim of his mug twice. Tink. Tink.
"Rose, look," he began, not turning around. "He didn't pick the time. The process server was an independent guy. Dad just told the law firm to file the paperwork so we could clear the title before the quarter ends. He didn't know the guy was going to walk through the gate right then."
I set the skillet on the cold back burner.
"Your father waved him over from his lawn chair, Daniel. He pointed at me while I was cutting the cake. He told the man, 'That’s her right there in the apron.'"
Daniel took a sip of his coffee. His shoulders rose toward his ears—that tight, defensive posture that had become his standard uniform since his father made him vice president of operations two years ago.
"The company needs the road frontage, Rose," he said, turning around now, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, reasonable tone he used when explaining why a subcontractor hadn't been paid on the thirty-day cycle. "You know the county’s running the water line down Ridge Road next spring. If Landworks doesn't control the access point from the highway, the whole four-hundred-acre tract behind your mother’s place is landlocked. We can't develop the residential phase without that twelve-acre strip."
"The twelve-acre strip is my mother's home," I said.
"It’s an old farmhouse with a cracked foundation and six acres of cedar scrub," he said, stepping toward the table, though his eyes carefully avoided the white envelope resting beside the sugar bowl. "You haven't spent two nights out there since the funeral. You go out on Sundays, you pull some weeds, you walk through the orchard, and then you come back here. The taxes are four thousand a year. The roof on the barn is sagging. Dad’s offering a hundred and fifty thousand in cash. That’s seventy-five thousand clear after capital gains. We could wipe out the mini-van loan. We could put twenty thousand into Mabel’s college fund."
"The property was appraised by Miller & Associates in October for four hundred and eighty thousand dollars, Daniel."
He stopped two feet from me.
"That’s a speculative appraisal," he said quickly, the words coming out with the fluency of a speech he had rehearsed in the truck on the way back from a site visit. "That’s based on commercial rezoning. It’s not zoned commercial. It’s zoned Agricultural-Residential. To get the commercial variance, you need six months of city council hearings, traffic impact studies, drainage surveys—Dad’s got the contacts to get that through. You don't. Left on your own, it’s worth a hundred and fifty thousand on the open market all day long."
"Is that what your father told you when you signed my name to the option?"
The kitchen went dead still, save for the rain against the glass.
Daniel’s mouth opened slightly. The color left his ears, draining down into his throat until his neck looked white against the gray polo collar.
"Rose," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "I didn't... I didn't think it was going to be an issue. You were in Kuwait. The bank was reviewing Landworks’ credit facility for the spring equipment purchase. Dad needed to show the underwriters that the company had site control over the Ridge Road access point. He said it was an internal option. Just a placeholder to put in the loan binder. He said we’d sit down and do the real paperwork when you got off orders."
"You signed my name as my attorney-in-fact," I said, walking to the footlocker. I didn't open it; I rested my flat palm on the cold metal lid. "Where did you get the power of attorney you gave to Marjorie Pruitt?"
"From the filing cabinet in the study," he said. He had stopped looking at my face; he was looking at the third button of my denim shirt. "The one you left with the tax returns."
"Did you read it?"
"I knew what it was," he muttered. "You said you were leaving me the power to run the house while you were gone."
"Did you read Section Four, Daniel?"
He was silent. A drop of rain hit the sill outside with a sharp plink.
"Section Four explicitly excluded real property," I said, my voice level, the tone I had used with twenty-two-year-old lieutenants who thought an administrative inventory form was a suggestion. "It excluded the Ridge Road place by parcel identification number, by book and page, and by its common name. It was recorded in the courthouse sixty days before I boarded the C-17 at Pope Field. It was public record."
Daniel set his coffee mug down on the table. The base hit the pine with a hollow wood-sound.
"Rose, he’s my father," he said, the anger finally leaking through his reasonable veneer, thin and sharp as vinegar. "He built this business from three dump trucks and an old backhoe. Everything we have—this house, my job, the kids’ health insurance—comes through that office. If I told him no about a paper for the bank, he would have cut my draw by half. He would have brought Greg in from the Charlotte office to run operations."
"So you gave him my mother’s land to keep your father from shouting at you."
"I didn't give him anything!" he shouted, his face reddening. "It was an option! It’s still inside the family! What difference does it make whose name is on the deed if the company develops it? We’re the heirs to Landworks, Rose! You, me, Mabel, Theo! When Dad steps down, it all comes to us anyway!"
"Has your father ever stepped down from anything in his life, Daniel?"
The grandfather clock in the hall struck the quarter-hour.
From the top of the stairs came the small, shuffling sound of Mabel’s slippers—the pink ones with the rabbit ears that my mother had bought her two weeks before the cancer took her lungs.
"Mommy?" the small voice called down the stairwell. "Is there more cake?"
Daniel turned his back on me, walked to the sink, and gripped the edge of the porcelain with both hands, his head hanging between his shoulders.
May you like
"Don't do this, Rose," he whispered without looking back. "Just let Robert Pritchard handle the conveyance. Dad’ll give us the hundred and fifty. He’ll probably throw in another twenty-five for the kids. If you fight him on this, he won't stop until he’s taken everything. You don't know him the way I do."
"No, Daniel," I said, stepping toward the stairs as Mabel’s feet reached the bottom landing. "You’re wrong. You know what he sounds like when he’s angry. I know what he looks like when he’s under oath."
