Seven Minutes to Noon

suppression of a smile as she flipped the pages of her notebook, sticking on Post-its.
    “It looks like there actually might be a few possibilities,” Alice said.
    Pam stopped turning pages and fixed her eyes on Alice. “Honey, there are always possibilities. I’m in the business of making things happen. I’ve never failed a customer who seriously wanted to buy.”
    Pam quickly lined up appointments to show Alice houses: two first thing the next morning, one later in the afternoon, and one the day after.
    The next day Alice dropped the kids off at school and then wandered slowly toward the address Pam had given her on First Place between Court and Clinton Streets. Because she was early for the nine o’clock appointment, she took a circuitous route up Carroll Street and all the way to Henry, basking in the long shadows of the houses on the north side of the street. Each brownstone facade was a cipher of history and tumult and the passions of lives that had passed through it. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were built in the 1800s, back when babies were born at home, deeds were kept in the family, and grandparents died in their childhood beds. She turned the corner at Henry onto First Place, passing tall, wide houses with their gated front gardens abundant with roses.
    A glance at her watch told her to hurry. She quickened her pace to the corner of Clinton, where she waited for a small burst of traffic to pass. It was then, in that brief pause, that she noticed the large gray-haired man with the mismatched eyes, the limo driver from the other morning by the canal, sitting on a stoop across the street. He seemed to be watching her, and as soon as she noticed him, he nodded. Just like before. This time, she didn’t nod back. He was weird, and she didn’t like him; sometimes this urban village could get too small. If that eerie-eyed man on the stoop lived in the house it was attached to, it was one strike against the block.
    She kept walking, almost there.
    Pam had told her that the owner was asking only seven hundred thousand dollars. Only. Alice wondered when she had joined the ranks who thought that was a bargain. But for this neighborhood, it was. “Heart of Carroll Gardens,” Pam had read from her sheet. Four floors, owner’s triplex, one rental, unusually narrow at fourteen feet wide, and only twenty-five feet deep, lots of potential. Available immediately. Before even getting to the house, Alice had spun a fantasy about fulfilling the abundant potential of her unseen, centrally located, bargain home. It would be their quick route away from Julius Pollack. But as soon as she saw it, her stomach dropped.
    Lots of potential, she learned in the instant her eyes fell on the lean, brick husk, meant gut renovation required. Pam was waiting for her outside, scribbling in her notebook. When she saw Alice, she started walking.
    “I’m sorry,” she said with such conviction Alice believed she really meant it. “It’s a new listing and I never saw it. Can you believe this crap? I couldn’t even show it to you if you wanted to see it. It has no floors! Come on. We’ll grab some coffee before the next stop.”
    They went around the corner to La Traviata Café, stood at the counter and ordered cappuccino for Pam and an orange juice for Alice. Stock photos of Frank Sinatra competed with a life-size poster of Placido Domingo on the rear, brick wall. It was a funny hodgepodge of a place, offering the Post and the News, a few women’s magazines, a single rack of paperback books and an eclectic assortment of opera and rap CDs. Candy and gum were arranged on slanted shelves beneath a counter that held both cash register and huge, gleaming espresso machine. The air was rich with the smell of strong coffee and by the time Pam’s arrived, Alice felt ill. She regretted ordering juice; it would be too acidic on her queasy stomach.
    They picked up their drinks and sat at the single outdoor table. Pam blew craters into her milky foam and stirred in a packet of sugar.
    “That place,” Alice said, thinking about the house and the limo driver as if an ill-willed cloud hovered over their shared territory.
    “Forget it.” Pam sipped her coffee. “Every house is a blind date. It’s hit or miss, mostly miss. You move on.”
    “I’ll remember that.”
    “You never looked before?”
    “We’ve lived in the same place for fifteen years. Before we changed careers, we could have bought something easily. We should