LES BOUGHT A HOUSE

Les bought the house because the ginkgo tree across Montreal Street just about broke his heart. The way it swung violently from lime green to lemon yellow every October. There were other things, of course - the wall in the hallway that curved like a hip, and the way the stair treads had worn down into a dozen weak smiles - but it was the tree that really did it. The day he first viewed the house it had rained violently and water splashed from the bedroom ceiling onto an iron bedframe that had rusted in that spot, so long had it been going on, this disrepair, and the ceiling marked up like a map of Spain. He didn’t mind that the sellers on their last day had removed half the kitchen and called those missing counters chattels, or that they had wept over the clawfoot tub until he told them to just take it, or that he had found them the day after closing in the willow tree out back, pulling nails from an old chicken coop and dropping the whole thing, wobbly now and misshapen, wire and all, into the back of a Ram pick-up. The house was his. It was a week before he even realized the grey garage around the corner came with it. There were old wagon wheels against the corrugated back wall, and a loft with straw tossed about and tunnelled through, and glass marbles all scratched up and gathered against a rafter’s low end, and in a yellowed scrape of moonlight he found a cotton ragdoll with pink gingham dress and two drooping buttons for eyes.