The Last House on Elm

The house had been for sale for three years. Everyone in town had a theory about why.

The Hendersons said it was the foundation — you could see the crack from the street if you knew where to look, a diagonal line running from the basement window to the corner of the porch. The Okafor family said it was the location, the way the street dead-ended into the old rail yard, the sound of the freight trains at two in the morning. Old Mr. Vásquez, who had lived on Elm Street for forty years and considered himself its unofficial historian, said it was the history of the place, though he was never specific about what history he meant.

Nora had her own theory, which she kept to herself: the house was for sale because it was waiting for the right person, and the right person had not come along yet.

She was not sure she was the right person. She was not sure of much, these days. She had come back to this town after twelve years away, following a divorce and a job loss that had arrived within six months of each other, and she was living in her parents' spare room at the age of thirty-eight, which was not where she had expected to be.

But she walked past the house every morning on her way to the coffee shop, and every morning she stopped for a moment and looked at it. It was not a beautiful house. It was a plain, two-story house with white siding that had gone gray and a porch that sagged slightly on the left side. The yard was overgrown. The windows were dark.

But there was something about it. A quality of waiting, of patience. As if the house had decided to outlast whatever was keeping people away.

On a Tuesday in November, she called the number on the sign.

The realtor was surprised to hear from her. "It needs work," she said, several times, in the tone of someone managing expectations. "Quite a bit of work."

"I know," Nora said.

"The foundation—"

"I know about the foundation."

There was a pause. "Most people are put off by the location," the realtor said. "The trains."

"I don't mind trains," Nora said. This was true. She had always found the sound of trains at night comforting — the idea of things moving through the dark toward somewhere, the world continuing its business while you slept.

She made an offer that afternoon. It was accepted by the end of the week.

On the day she got the keys, she stood on the sagging porch and looked out at the dead-end street and the rail yard beyond it. A freight train was moving slowly through, its horn sounding once, twice, fading.

She unlocked the door and went inside.

The house smelled of dust and old wood and something else — something she could not name, something that was almost like the smell of a particular season, of a particular time of day. She stood in the empty front room and breathed it in.

She was not sure she was the right person.

But she was here. And the house was waiting.

That seemed like enough to start.