Closing

Greetings from my new home of Stepford, Connecticut, where all of us homemakers are happy as clams as long as we’re oiled regularly and plugged in to charge at night!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have several days of sheer drudgery to write about, first.

I was in a bad mood, a week ago Tuesday. Well, not bad. I wasn’t snappy, or crabby, or taking out my frustrations on the nearest available husband who’d come home the day before. I was just drawn thin, and very tired. Ever since the house had sold in April, I’d been on a rampage—packing up crap that needed to be packed, ruthlessly throwing out anything that it even vaguely pained me to think about transporting across the country, donating anything that was reusable to the Salvation Army or some other charitable cause. Any charitable cause that would take the crap. They could’ve been representing the most evangelical Christians or Satan’s Minions or the freakin’ Lollipop Guild for all I cared. So long as they were willing to take a single metal table leg, a bunch of old towels, and a pair of 30-year-old duck boots, I was good to go.

Craig had arrived home from Connecticut, very late Sunday night. He was pretty helpful about pretending to help with my mania, and smiled cheerfully and ambled around while I yelled out things like, The file cabinet has to go to the curb!, or, I can’t tell you what to do! Just pick up stuff! GET IT TO THE CURB!, or, Oh my god, where the effity eff did all those CANDLES come from?! TAKE THEM TO THE CURB! But he was downstairs in the basement when the doorbell rang. I answered it carrying the unlikely combination of a bathmat, a fluorescent light tube, and a tub of Clorox bathroom wipes.

A short, ferret-faced man stood outside. His hands were on his hips, and he stared at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to come up with a snappy greeting, so I just raised my left eyebrow and waited. I honestly thought he was going to solicit me for spare pop bottles, which is what they did with alarming frequency in my old neighborhood. (Who is drinking that many carbonated beverages?)

But no, instead he huffed out, “I am the agent for the other side, and I demand to know your intentions!”

My eyebrow remained raised for another few moments while I processed that one. At first I thought he was playing secret agents, the way some kids play cops and robbers. But that made no sense. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Are you the owner? Cause look. I needa know what the hell is going on here,” he growled, hands still on his hips. I flipped the lock on the screen door. Because, you know, a flimsy little metal latch and a thin layer of plastic screening is the best protection from crazy people lunging at you. ”What are your intentions?”

Only then did it really occur to me that this guy was the real estate agent for the couple buying our house. Mind you, he hadn’t introduced himself to me by name. He hadn’t given me a business card, which would have been nice. He’d just marched up and told me what he needa know. “Well,” I said, in that tone I fly in directly from the Arctic Circle when I’m affronted. “Tomorrow we are closing. Thursday, the movers come to pack our belongings. Friday, they move us out.”

“Well, how’m I supposeda know that?” he barked. “No one told me.”

“Our agent has known our plans for weeks,” I said. “We made the moving arrangements the week after we got the offer from your clients.”

“Well I didn’t know.”

“Did you call our agent?” I asked, deadly calm.

“No.”

“Perhaps, sir, if you had,” I said, “we could have avoided this unseemly confrontation.” If you ever need to judge my level of upset, just listen to how I’m speaking. If I drop my usual mush-mouth routine and suddenly sound like Mr. Darcy addressing the Bennet sisters as if they were dancing a quadrille on his very last nerve, I’m likely seething.

“My clients wanteda close on the twenty-fifth!” he growled at me. “And they thought you were gonna be out on the first.”

“We never made any plans to close on the twenty-fifth,” I told him. “The purchase agreement has always stated that closing would be on the first, and that we would have three days after to vacate. My agent could have told you that at any point.”

“Well are you planning to pay the per diem?!”

I was pretty sure that the per diem had been written into the agreement, but I wasn’t going to commit to anything on my sketchy memory and then find out the whole thing had been a gotcha! setup. “If that’s what the agreement says.”

“Is that what the agreement says?”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to know when closing is, or how long the agreement says we have to vacate, or whether there’s a per diem,” I said. My hackles were thoroughly ruffled, by now. I mean, hadn’t he been the one who’d actually drawn up the agreement on behalf of his clients? “I advise you consult the agreement in order to find out its exact terms.”

“So what are your intentions, then?” he wanted to know.

I thought we’d covered that bit by now. “Please contact my agent if you have further questions.”

“Look, I’m just trying to look out for my clients here.”

“Please contact my agent if you have further questions,” I repeated.

Then I shut the door in his face. And watched as he huffed off to his car to call our agent. Which is what he really should’ve done in the first place.

I’m not really one of those people who thrives on confrontation; it makes my nerves jangle for hours after. Days, even. Heck, it’s been a week and I’m still not shaking it off. Though I was aware I’d stood up for myself pretty well in this case—though I still wasn’t exactly sure for what I was standing up or why I’d had to do it—I still have the automatic instinct that not rolling over and being the politest sweetest most helpful young feller is wrong and ungrateful, and as if I’m letting someone down, somehow.

But I had trash to accumulate, and stuff to wipe with Clorox, so I went about my business and it was only fifteen minutes later, when Craig emerged from the basement after pretending to do something or another, that I thought to get indignant and tell him a story that began, “You will never believe . . . !”

At the closing the next morning the hairs on my neck were still raised enough that I seriously considered demanding that I not be seated in the presence of that man, but he wasn’t even there, to start. Only the couple buying the house were present, and they were both as cute as a couple of extremely cute buttons, so it was difficult to maintain my usual icy hauteur (even though they kind of freaked me out a little by introducing themselves to me with the words, “WE READ YOUR BLOG!” and I was all like, oh crap, which one, the boring one, or the secret documents I prepare for Wikileaks?).

Their agent arrived about a half-hour late, after just about everything was signed, and played Angry Birds at the other end of the table on his phone the entire time. Only once did he speak up, and that was when the buyer was insisting that she’d gotten some kind of mortgage payment insurance that didn’t seem to be reflected in the papers. The mortgage person went through all the documents, looking for anything that might verify her claim, and wasn’t finding anything. The agent spoke up. “She just doesn’t understand what she’s talking about,” he said, in the most condescending tone imaginable, to the mortgage woman. “Don’t worry about it.”

And I was like, dang, if he’d been my agent and spoken about me like that, I’d have fired him on the spot. The mortgage woman, to her credit, got up from the table and made a couple of phone calls, only to come back and announced that the buyer had indeed been correct about having that particular kind of insurance, but it simply wasn’t reflected in the paperwork. The agent didn’t apologize. But secretly, I was all, BOOM! In yo’ FACE, Angry Birds loser!

Because dude. Would it really have killed you to have given me a card when you introduced yourself?