We Buy Houses
by Chloe N. Clark
My parents had been planning to move for as long as I could remember. They were always talking about picking everything up and speeding across the state, across the country, across oceans. But, they never did. Falling into the routines they’d built for themselves, the small comforts that make a life bearable. So, when they called me up that summer and said they’d sold the house, I laughed when they told me.
But, they’d been serious. They had a month to wrap up loose ends in town, pack up everything I’d ever known, and then make the move to a city four hours north. “We’re finally gonna live by water,” my Dad said as if he’d been wanting to live by water his entire existence. “And closer to you, honey,” my Mom said as if she wanted me to know for sure that it wasn’t just the lake’s siren call making them move.
I didn’t work over the summers, or didn’t work in one place, one of the few benefits of my adjunct teaching lifestyle, and so they wanted me to come help them move and to say goodbye to the house. I had the time and there was nothing holding me to the city for the months, so I said yes.
So two weeks later, I passed the welcome sign welcoming me in the small town I’d grown up in. Elton. A name no one could recognize but would know the kind of town it was. All rural towns share a certain something, don’t they?
When I was little, my friends and I would bike between each other’s houses. Everybody was only a couple of miles apart, so whoever arrived at the closest house to them would grab the person there and then they’d bike together to the next house in the chain, and on down the line until we had our little pack. We’d bike to the Kwik Trip to get slushies and long johns filled to bursting with sweet cream. Then we’d bike to the dam to watch for ducks and eat our snacks, making up stories as we went. We were prisoners escaped from the minimum security place at the edge of town, we were knights on a quest, we were secret spies on a mission. Here, my friend Josie would say, “aren’t all spies secret?”
I pulled into the gas station, planning on grabbing a snack before heading to my parents’ house. More for nostalgia than hunger. Walking inside, I passed a bright yellow sign posted on the corner of the sidewalk simply read “We Buy Houses” in black marker with a phone number scrawled underneath.
The attendant behind the counter waved hello when I walked in. I waved back on my beeline to the donuts. I grabbed a long John and chocolate milk. The slushies finally too sweet for me.
“How’s your day going, dear?” the attendant asked as she rang me up.
“Peachy. Yours?”
“Quiet,” she said. I looked around and realized it was maybe the first time I’d ever been in the gas station when no one else was there. For a small town, there was always someone. Usually kids gathering fortitude for their play sessions, or middle-aged men grabbing a six pack after work.
“Been a slow day?”
“Slow months, hon. Lot of people moving out of town, nobody moving back in.” She shrugged. “Don’t mind the quiet, though.”
When I reached my parents, donut already covertly devoured, it was starting on evening. The farm looked like it always did—creamy yellow two story, clothes hanging on the line out front, a kiddy pool filled with water for the night critters. Seeing it with the sun setting behind it hit me in the stomach. It was the last time I’d be coming home.
When I had first left home, to college across the state line, I’d make the treks home every break and it was always the best feeling when I’d hit the road our house was on. Suddenly everything in my brain turned down a notch, as if time itself was slowing for me. No matter how stressful school had been, how many finals had felt like they had crushed me, no matter the boyfriends who were jerks, no matter the weight of the world, I could go home again.
I shook the feeling away as I saw my parents coming out to greet me. A house is not a home, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t quite believe it.
At dinner, that night, I asked my parents why they’d decided to sell.
“Oh, well, you probably saw the signs. They’re all over town,” my mom said.
“Like metaphorical signs?” I thought of the empty fields I’d passed, unplanted and untilled, where it should’ve been short nubs of green corn stalks already. Of the empty gas station.
My parents both laughed. “No, literal. The ones saying ‘we buy houses.’”
“Oh, oh yeah.” I flashed on the neon yellow. “You sold to someone who put up a sign?”
“Well, not exactly. They come around, too. They’re buying up all over around here. I think a corporation or something,” my mom said.
My dad, though, shook his head. “Nah, they seem government. Just not saying it. Pricey suits, but they don’t quite fit right.”
“The government is handwriting garage sale signs and posting them around town?” I asked.
My mom rolled her eyes as my dad said, “well, stranger things and all.”
My mom said, “Seriously, though, they made an incredible offer and you know we’ve always been meaning to move. Felt like kismet.”
That night, lying in bed in my childhood bedroom I listened to the sounds of the house. The creaks and groans of the old wood beams, the rattling death knells of the refrigerator that should have been replaced years before. These sounds had once been so familiar to me, but here they were keeping me up. I turned on the bedside lamp, looked at the detritus of things I’d left behind me: old stuffed animals, posters of my favorite bands and TV stars, pictures. On the bedside table was a picture of me and my band of childhood best friends. Our arms around each other. I picked it up and looked at each of them: Josie, Elle, me, Alexa, and then someone was missing.
I’d seen the photo a million times, could picture it if I closed my eyes. There should have been a fifth person. A boy our ages. But, as I pictured him, I realized I couldn’t remember his name. He’d been my closest friend other than Josie from the time I was five. He lived just two miles down the road. What was his name and why I couldn’t I remember it? I knew he should’ve been in the photo. Had always been in the photo. But he wasn’t. In fact, the framing was even slightly different than I remembered as if to account for the smaller group of subjects. I wondered if my parents were playing some strange and completely unlike them prank on me.
No one was awake to ask. I went to look at the photos on my wall. The pics of Josie and I at junior prom. Just us. The pics of the friend group on a Halloween when we were twelve. He wasn’t there, though I remembered him dressing up as a ninja turtle.
I laid back down on the bed, closed my eyes, pretended I must have been dreaming and finally fell into sleep. I imagined everything would be back to how I remembered in the morning.
It wasn’t. My mom was downstairs making breakfast, flipping perfect pancakes. A skill that was clearly not genetic.
“Mom, do you remember the boy I was friends with when I was little? What was his name?”
She slid a pancake from flipper to plate and handed it to me with a slight frown. “A boy? Your group was all girls.”
“No, he lived a little bit down the road. He was my good good friend.”
My mom shook her head, already back to pancakes. “The number of times I’d be feeding the bunch of you, I’d remember a boy.”
Then she paused, a sudden thought. “Oh, maybe once or twice, Josie’s cousin would play with you all! Scott! Is that who you’re thinking of?”
But it wasn’t Scott. Scott who would groan about playing “girl games,” Scott who only wore football jerseys. “No, not him. Another boy. Who lived near us.”
She shook her head again, certain. “Nope. Not that you ever brought around.”
But I could picture him. A mop of dark hair, dental ad perfect smile. I texted Josie to ask her. Her reply came a moment later Yuck, we never hung out with boys.
I read somewhere that people going crazy don’t think they’re going crazy. Maybe I had Mandela effected myself somehow. Wouldn’t I still be friends with him, if we were so close?
After pancakes, we worked on packing the attic. Rooms used the least would be packed first, my mom had prepared us a plan of attack. The last rooms would be kitchen and my parents bedroom. After a few hours, and my endless sneezing from attic dust, she told me to go take a walk and get fresh air.
I knew just where I wanted to walk to. The two-ish miles went quickly, past fields and other farms owned by people who I’d known my entire life. On the corner of the road, I passed another neon yellow sign “We Buy Houses.” His house should have been roughly a mile from where Josie’s parents lived. Three houses down in country distance. Where it should have been, there was nothing. Not just an empty field or space where a house might have been. It was as if the road ended sooner than I remembered.
I looked across the road to see if I’d just mis-remembered which side it had been on, but across was Mr. Harper’s house. Same as it had always been. I saw moving trucks in his driveway. How many houses had been sold? I turned around, unwilling to keep fixating on this half-remembered boy. He was already fading in my memory. Just a smile, a mop of hair, but his other features no longer distinct. I must’ve somehow dreamed him up, though it had felt so real.
As I walked back, Josie’s mom was watering plants in their front yard so I walked up to say hello.
She grinned, delighted. “Hey, sweetie! You up visiting your parents?”
She dropped her water pitcher and came to give me an open armed hug, avoiding touching me with her dirty gardening gloves.
“Helping them move, yeah. How are you, Mrs. Raines?”
She frowned. “Move? They get caught up in that, too?”
I nodded, put on my best Godfather voice, “they said it was an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
But she didn’t laugh. Her frown deepened. “I don’t like it. Those people have been pestering us non-stop. The amount of money they’re promising, it raises an eyebrow, I tell you.”
I shrugged. “Everything went through okay for my parents. They got a place up north.”
She shook her head. “The people they send? All talk and sugar, but there’s something wrong there. The last time, they said they’d only ask us one more time. And I was like, thank heavens.”
She rubbed her arms, even with her dirty gloves, as if she’d gotten hit by a cold breeze. “But how are you, dear?”
I shrugged, again. “Good, good.”
She smiled, “you never were one to complain. Josie complains. You were always just a smile and a shrug.”
She hugged me again. “I’ll let you get back to helping your folks. But stop by again before you go, we can have lunch.”
At home, we ate a simple lunch of egg salad sandwiches and juice. I told my parents about seeing Mrs. Raines.
“Beverly and Jim are absolutely against selling. When it first started up, they talked our ear off about it. I didn’t have the nerve to tell them we sold,” my mom said.
“What will they do with the houses?” I asked.
“Dunno. I imagine they’re putting up a development or something.”
I thought about the house being torn down, the leveling of the land. All those families who’d live here since it was built. All those memories excised.
“Maybe it’ll be a mall?”
“Or another prison,” my dad said.
With the attic done, we moved on to the basement. My parents had never kept much down there, it was mostly a storm cellar. So it went quickly. I had thought that two weeks wouldn’t be enough time to pack everything, tidy things away, but it seemed as if it would actually be more than enough. My parents had always been efficient people. They added water to jam jars to make salad dressing, turned old dresses into quilts, never had more than they needed. Packing up their lives felt like just another chance to downsize.
After a few days, we’d accumulated enough boxes and bags of donations that my mom asked me to drive to the next town over and drop them off at the Lady of Grace thrift store. The next town over was the closest we had to a city for about 100 miles. It was quadruple the size of Elton and had all the grocery stores and a Walmart and everything else that people might need. As a child, it had always been a treat to go to, as if the whole world opened up around me.
The older woman running the donations count at Lady of Grace saw me lugging in bags and boxes and asked, “another one leaving Elton?”
I nodded, “my parents are, yeah. You been seeing a lot of donations?”
She nodded, laughed. “Whole town’s moving away it seems.”
I stopped at the Moo Station on my way home to grab a twist cone, and ate it sitting out front. I was sweaty from carrying boxes, and had always liked watching cars drive by. I liked to imagine the lives of the people inside, the fights they were having, the loves they were going home to. After my parents moved, all of my friends long moved, no siblings, there wouldn’t be a reason to come back here. I’d spent more of my life there than somewhere else, but that would change eventually. Eventually, where I’d grown up would just be a place in my memories.
Driving home, I drove the long way to pass by Josie’s parents. I was going to stop in and set up a lunch date with Mrs. Raines. At first, I thought I’d gone too far, been lost in my head, so I turned around and drove back a bit. But I hadn’t missed it.
Their house was gone.
But, it wasn’t just gone. It was as if it had never been. The space between the two houses surrounding it looked closer.
“What the fuck,” I said out loud. I parked the car and got out. Stood on the side of the road, looking to my left and right. It just wasn’t there. I knew where I was. But, it wasn’t there.
I got back in the car, hands shaking, and drove to my parents. I half expected the house to be gone. Everything to be gone. But my mom and dad’s car was in the driveway. I could see my mom through the window, cleaning.
I ran inside. “Mom! Mom! The Raines’ house is gone!”
She turned to me, startled. “What?”
“The Raines’ house. It’s gone.”
“Whose house?”
“Josie’s parents!”
My mom frowned, concerned. “Who is Josie? Is this some kind of joke?”
“My best friend? Since I was four? Josie?” I could only talk in questions, realizing that I must have sounded panicked, insane.
“You mean Elle? Does she go by Josie now?” My mom’s concern settling in to confusion.
My whole body shook. But, it wasn’t a prank. It wasn’t something my parents would have understood. I slowed my breathing. “No, sorry, someone you must not have known. I just couldn’t find their house.”
Her look skeptical, my mom said, “okay, then. Are you okay with us selling the house? You’ve been acting strange and…”
“It’s just a lot of emotions, but I’m glad you’re selling. You’ll be closer to me,” I smiled, or tried to.
My mom smiled, relieved. “It is a lot of emotions. So much of our lives was in this house.” She looked around the room, as if she was seeing her life play out. Me as a toddler, my dad young, all that time.
She shook her head, shaking out of whatever daydream she’d been in. “Back to cleaning!”
I went into the kitchen and pulled out my phone. I’d call Josie. If I could get through to her she’d call her parents and we’d figure this out. Her number was gone from my phone. No texts, no call logs. I pulled up social media and typed in her name into every search bar. Nothing. I scrolled through my camera roll, but every photo of her was gone. If there was a photo of us together, now it was just me, smiling at a camera by myself. I ran up stairs to my bedroom. The bedside photo was now just me, Elle, and Alexa. The framing again more closed in to accommodate less.
I sat on the bed, shivering for a few minutes. There was no explanation. I would not find an explanation. I pictured Josie in my head. Red hair, blue eyes, freckles. I tried to lock in. But, her features were already slipping from memory.
The house buyers had said they’d only ask Mrs. Raines one more time. I got up and went downstairs, hurried past my mom, saying I forgot something outside. I ran to the corner of the road, where another neon yellow sign was posted. I dialed the number.
“Hello, we buy houses,” a voice answered. It was low and fluttery.
“Hi, um, I was wondering—”
“Miss, you don’t have a house to sell,” the voice said.
“H-“
“We don’t have time to waste,” the voice said. Then the phone clicked off.
I went up to the sign and tried to pull it from the ground, but it wouldn’t budge, as if something was holding it from the other side, under the dirt. I could dig, dig deep, and try to uproot it. But I didn’t think it would help.
I looked across the road, and saw the Millers outside their house. They were loading up a car with boxes. Mr. Miller smiled and waved, so I waved back.
My parents’ house was all packed up in time. Everything in its place. On the day we were driving up to their new house, the moving trucks already gone ahead, my mom pointed out the etches on the doorframe where I’d measured myself growing up. “You can’t recreate this,” she said with a soft smile.
I ran my finger over the etches. The memories in each one. I’d been so small once. So young and unafraid of the world. We all grow up from that, I suppose.
I don’t drive that way anymore, no reason to. Though, I can tell you that the one time I did, it was just a big city. The town next door quadrupled in size and no one remembers that there was once a small town there instead, a place called Elton. The place I grew up. Though, I can’t say that for sure. The memory is almost gone now. Maybe it was never there.
Every place fades eventually. That dish from a favorite closed restaurant? It’s easy to remember the highlights, bits of flavor, for a while. But the exact components, the way it was influenced by a song on the radio and who it was eaten with and the particular color of the wallpaper? Those disappear and then so do the flavors, the tastes, until all that’s left is a ghost. Your school, favorite hike, the movie theatre you sat in every weekend with your friends, your childhood home. It leaves you mostly. You remember it alongside the people who were with you, but then one by one they’re gone, and there’s no one there anymore to remember it with you. And then it’s all just dust, parking lots and barren fields in place of what you knew. Some trace we all thought we could keep forever. I know there’s not much there left now.
But, I do remember that the Millers always hung stars from the trees in the woods behind their house. We’d take that walk as a shortcut home. The stars were just dollar store things, cheap little sequins and glue. But in the sun, they shimmered and dazzled, and cast light on our faces. It dazzled us. I think that really happened. I think I was really there.
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Every Galaxy a Circle, and more.