The House on Kirby Lane

The realtor called me on a Tuesday, which is the only day of the week Anita Petrillo ever calls anyone, because Tuesdays at Coastal Bay Realty are when her junior agents turn in their weekly listings report and she gets to see, in colour-coded columns, exactly which properties have been sitting on the MLS long enough to embarrass her. Fourteen Kirby Lane had been sitting for nine months. I knew this before she said so, because I keep a file.

"Marce," she said, in the tone she uses when she already knows I'm going to say yes. "I have a situation."

"You always have a situation, Anita. That's why God made me."

"It's the bungalow in Beaufort. The Lindeman listing. I've had two inspectors through there and they both say the house is sound. I've dropped the price twice. The last showing, a very nice couple from Greensboro walked out of the upstairs hallway in under six minutes and wouldn't return my calls."

"Six minutes is polite."

"It's the principle, Marce."

I wrote Kirby — 14 — Beaufort — Lindeman on the yellow pad I keep next to the phone, underlined it twice, and Dee, on the other side of our office, mouthed basement? at me over the rim of her reading glasses. I shook my head. Dee won't go in basements. She'll do attics, crawl spaces, the half-rotten carriage houses of old tobacco money out past New Bern; she'll sit in a nursery at three in the morning with a cold coffeeand a digital recorder and not flinch when the mobile above the crib starts to turn by itself. But basements, she says, are where the work gets personal, and she wants no part of that. Dee does the paperwork. Dee keeps the LLC in good standing with the North Carolina Secretary of State. Dee files my quarterlies. In exchange, Dee does not go below grade.

"Standard rate," I said to Anita. "Retainer up front, expenses, and I need you to email me the disclosure and whatever's in your showing notes. The real ones, not the edited ones."

"Thursday?"

"Thursday's fine."

She hung up with the terse satisfaction of a woman who has crossed something off a list. I sat looking at the yellow pad and then at Dee, who had already opened our client-intake template and was typing LINDEMAN / 14 Kirby Ln / Beaufort NC into the heading without being asked. Dee is the reason Halloran & Associates still exists. I am the reason it has any interesting stories to tell.

The drive from our office in Morehead City to Beaufort is a short one — fifteen minutes if the bridge is being cooperative, thirty if it isn't — but I took the long way that Thursday, down Live Oak and out along the waterfront, because I like to come into a job the way the job came into the world: slowly, from the water. Coastal North Carolina in April has a particular quality of light that I've never been able to describe to anyone who hasn't lived here. The sky does a thing. The Atlantic sits off to the east like an animal that has eaten recently, and the salt in the air gets into the wood of every old house from Wilmington to the Outer Banks and, over time, into the grain of the people who live in them. I rolled the window down, put one arm on the door, and drove.

Beaufort is a town that has been careful with itself. The