Boy, my memory is just plain going. Maybe not. Seems to me you have to remember something before you can forget it. So maybe my remembering is going. Things go in one ear and out the other leaving no traces on those brain synapses.
In any case, the house sat unmoving on the market all through the summer. I never thought about changing realtors. I guess Suzi and I bonded. She dropped by the Delridge house the day we were all there cleaning up. She kept saying awfully nice things about our parents, until I said, well, frankly, we boys did not feel all that positively towards them. And finally she had to say that she really hadn’t liked the way Joan had treated WB in her presence. She didn’t go into details, but she didn’t need to.
Also, she told me that last year on almost the same day as the one we were sitting there at that table in the Delridge Kitchen, she and her husband had been topping a hill and were struck head on by a drunk driver. Her husband was killed instantly, and she was in the hospital a long time. You couldn’t tell to look at it, she said, but they had remade her whole face. If I wanted, she said, I could tap her cheek and feel metal or maybe it was plastic. In any case, I didn’t tap. And she seemed to know her job very well, and be damned if I was going to start complaining to a woman, now a single mother, trying to make do after the sudden death of her husband and the remaking of her face.So I followed her lead and didn’t say anything as the house sat and didn’t move at 620K.
Carol and I belong to a club where we go to work out. All the members there drive lexuses or Mercedes, or BMWs or some form of those monstrous SUVs. My 84 Volvo with the paint coming off is always the oldest and rattiest car in the lot. But I got to talking to a real estate guy in the locker room. He was a real nice guy. I haven’t seen him for a while but every time I saw him over the summer and into the fall he would ask about the Delridge house.
As we were coming up on November, he said one day that he didn’t think the market had bottomed out yet, and that maybe we should withdraw the Delridge House from the market for a while and then put it back on at the start of the new year at a reduced price, maybe 600K. That way the listing would catch the eye of the realtors again and at the lower price it might move. This made sense to me so I called Suzi and suggested the move. She wasn’t sure about withdrawing it but she did think, the way things looked, that the price should be dropped.
So we dropped it—I forget to what exactly—maybe 590K or 600K, and within two weeks Suzi called saying she had a buyer. Turns out a person had been interested in the house for some time but hadn’t been up to the 620K, but she would be up to 585K, plus some of the fees normally paid by the buyer not the seller. So we took it with one contingency. Escrow had to close before January 1; then we would still be able to claim WB’s capital gains exemption and save ourselves an additional loss of 25K or thereabouts.
