THE WORDS THAT WAITED

Water In The Wall

"Now I'm going to be honest with you," Charlie Pruitt said, "because I'd rather be honest on Tuesday than sorry in November," and Nora understood that she was about to be told the thing she had already found out for herself in the rain.

Charlie had arrived at nine in a raincoat the color of a traffic cone. She was fifty-something and enormously capable and had sold, by her own accounting, "just about every house on this street twice," and she had known Nora's mother from the flower committee, and she had said so four times.

They started in the kitchen. Nora had not slept well. Aunt Della had been in the house until nearly ten the night before, and had brought a squash casserole and a manila folder, and had been so glad, so glad, and Nora had eaten a plate of it standing at the counter with her coat still on because sitting down felt like an admission.

"Cabinets are original," Charlie said. "That's good. People will pay for that now, which they did not use to. Countertop's a crime but that's a weekend."

"Nineteen fifty-four," Nora said. "The ell. My grandfather put it on."

"See, and you know that, and that's worth money too. People like a story." Charlie wrote something. "Roof?"

"Twelve years, maybe fourteen. Architectural shingle. There's a lift at the north valley I want somebody to look at."

Charlie stopped writing and looked at her over the folder. "You do this for a living."

"Restoration. Mostly institutional. Churches, a courthouse, some mill conversions."

"Well, Lord," Charlie said. "That's going to make this easier or a whole lot harder and I don't know which yet."

Harder, as it turned out.

They did the upstairs. They did the basement, which was a Carolina basement, half-height and orange with clay dust, and Charlie went down four steps and no further, and Nora went the whole way with her phone light because she already knew what she was going down there to confirm.

She came back up with her jeans filthy at the knees.

"South sill's gone," she said.

Charlie's pen stopped.

"How gone."

"Soft the whole run between the chimney and the southwest corner. About fourteen feet. It'll be the flashing at the porch roof — somebody's had water coming in behind that porch for a long time and it ran down inside the wall. Nobody would have seen it. You wouldn't see it from inside and you can't see it from outside unless you put your hand on it."

"And you put your hand on it."

"I put my hand on it yesterday in the rain," Nora said, "because that's the corner I'd check."

Charlie put the folder down on the kitchen counter, which was the crime, and looked at her with an expression Nora recognized from every client meeting she had ever been in, the one that came right before somebody asked what it would cost.

"Now tell me what that means for me."

"It means the house doesn't list."

"Nora."

"You can list it. Somebody will make an offer, and their inspector will find it in eleven minutes because it's the first place he'll look on a house this age, and they'll come back at you for twenty-five thousand off or they'll walk, and you'll have a house that's been on the market and fallen out of contract, which is worse than a house that hasn't been listed." She heard how she sounded. She was standing in her mother's kitchen using her project voice. She did not stop. "And there's a disclosure question that I now can't answer no to, so it doesn't matter anyway. It has to be fixed before it goes up."

Charlie was quiet for a second. Outside, a truck went by on Prescott with a bad belt.

"How long's a thing like that take?"

"If it's only the sill and the band joist, three weeks. If it's into the studs, five. If it's into the framing at the corner —" Nora shrugged. "You don't know till you open it."

"And you're here how long?"

"Ten days."

Charlie made a small sound that was not quite a laugh and was not unkind.

"Sugar," she said, "I hate to be the one."

Nora sat on the back steps afterward with a cup of coffee she'd made in her mother's percolator, because there was no other kind of coffee maker in the house, and did the arithmetic that she had been refusing to do since yesterday afternoon.

Three weeks minimum. She could not be here three weeks. She could be here ten days and then go back and come down on weekends, which was six hours of driving for two days of standing over somebody's work, or she could hire it out entirely and manage it by photograph, which was a thing she told her own clients never to do.

Or she could let the house be sold rotten and take twenty-five thousand less, which — and this was the part she was going to have to sit with — she could afford to do. That was the truth. She made a good living. Twenty-five thousand dollars was not nothing, but it was not the reason.

The reason was that she was not going to let this house go to strangers with water in the wall. She had spent four years of her professional life writing letters to vestries and county commissions about exactly this, about deferred maintenance and moral obligation and what we owe a building that has held people, and she was not going to sell her mother's house with a fourteen-foot section of rotten sill and a smile.

Her mother had lived over that corner for forty-one years. Her mother had had a chair in that room.

She drank the coffee. It was terrible. Her mother had made it exactly this way every day of Nora's childhood.

When Charlie came back out to the car Nora was waiting by the driver's door with her arms crossed.

"I need a name," she said. "Somebody who does sill replacement on a house this age and doesn't jack it wrong and c***k the plaster in every room upstairs. I'll call around Greenville if I have to."

Charlie Pruitt got her keys out of her raincoat pocket and looked at Nora for what felt like a long time and was probably a second and a half.

"You're not going to have to call Greenville," she said.