The Realtor Called Me
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