The first time I watched Vivian Ashcombe sell a house, she did it from the top of a ladder.
It was a converted firehouse on Delancey Street in Brannock, with a loft you could only reach by a ship’s ladder bolted to the wall. The buyers were a pair of retired dentists in matching fleece vests. They stood at the bottom and looked up at it the way people look at a cliff in a documentary.
Vivian went up first. She went up in six-inch black heels, carrying her clipboard, her phone and a ficus that the stager had left in the wrong room. At the top she turned around, set the ficus down and said, “Come on up. The light is the whole point.”
They went up. They made an offer from the loft. I know because I was holding the ladder.
I was thirty-one that spring and in my second year as a junior agent at Hadley & Marsh Realty. Before that I taught middle-school band for six years.
People ask how those jobs compare. Honestly, a closing table and a trombone section have a lot in common. Everybody is nervous, somebody is sticky, and the loudest person is rarely right.
Vivian was forty-four. She had been selling houses in Corliss County for twenty-two years. She had been Hadley & Marsh’s top agent for nineteen of them. The other three, she said, were “a clerical error.”
She was five foot one. Nobody believed this, because nobody had ever seen it.
Vivian wore heels to every showing, every open house, every closing and every inspection. She wore them to the office holiday party and to a crawl space. According to Nell at the front desk, she wore them to jury duty in 2017. She was excused when the defense attorney asked to approach the bench and she got there first.
They were always the same height: six inches. Black, navy, or a dark red she called “Offer Accepted.” The colors changed. The number didn’t.
“Six inches,” she told me during my first week. “Non-negotiable.”
“Why six?”
“Because at six, I’m five-seven. And nobody negotiates down to someone they have to look down at.”
I wrote that in my notebook. I had a notebook back then. I thought being a junior agent would involve a lot of wisdom. Mostly it involved driving.
There was one exception, and it was not really an exception.
On days with long drives, Vivian wore a pair of four-inch charcoal heels with a rounded toe. I made the mistake, once, of calling them comfortable.
She looked at me the way a judge looks at a lawyer who has just said “basically.”
“These,” she said, “are my flats.”
That was all. She got in the car. We drove ninety minutes to a lake house, and she walked its dock, its boathouse and a very steep lawn in her flats. The lawn lost.
Nell Abbate ran the front desk at Hadley & Marsh. She was fifty-eight and had worked there for twenty-six years. She knew every agent’s birthday, every lockbox code and every buyer who had ever lied about pre-approval.
Nell laminated things. She laminated the parking chart. She laminated the coffee rota. She laminated a note on the microwave that said PLEASE DO NOT, and nobody ever asked what, and nobody ever did.
On the corner of her desk sat a large glass jar. Inside the jar was money and a thick layer of folded paper slips. On the front, in lamination, a label read:
THE FLATS POOL. EST. 2015. RULES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST.
“What’s the Flats Pool?” I asked on my third day.
Nell didn’t look up from her screen. “You pick a date. If that’s the day somebody in this office sees Vivian Ashcombe in flat shoes, you win the jar.”
“How much is in it?”
“Eleven hundred and forty dollars.”
“How long has it been going?”
“Eleven years.”
I looked at the jar. It looked back, full of failure.
“Does she know?”
Nell finally looked up. “Caleb,” she said, “she knows everything. She knew your shoe size before your interview.”
I didn’t ask how. I bought a slip for five dollars and wrote down my own birthday. It felt like a safe way to lose.
When I handed it over, I noticed something at the bottom of the jar. It was a small envelope, sealed and laminated flat, wedged under all the slips.
“What’s that one?”
“That one is sealed,” said Nell.
“What does it say?”
“It’s sealed,” said Nell, in a voice that made it clear the conversation was also sealed.
For a year and a half, I learned the business by following Vivian Ashcombe up things.
She went up fire escapes and down into wine cellars. She crossed a gravel driveway the length of a football field without breaking stride. Once she walked a flat roof to show a buyer the view. The buyer, a man in hiking sandals, asked if she wanted a hand.
“I’ve never lost a showing to a staircase,” she said, “and I’m not going to lose one to a roof.”
She didn’t. He bought the house. He also, I noticed, never offered her a hand again.
I asked her once whether she was ever tempted to switch. Sneakers, loafers, anything.
“Tempted,” she said, “is for dessert menus.”
That was the most I ever got. Vivian talked about everything else: interest rates, crown molding, which title officer cried at closings.
Her shoes were not a topic. They were weather. You didn’t discuss the weather with Vivian. You just carried an umbrella.
Then it started raining in Corliss County, and for six weeks it didn’t really stop.
It was the kind of April that made every basement in the county confess. Our listings turned into a catalog of sump pumps. Nell laminated a new chart for which open houses needed towels at the door.
On the second Monday of the rain, Nell called Vivian and me to the front desk. She held the office phone against her shoulder.
“A seller wants you,” she said. “Specifically you. She called twice.”
“Address?”
“Fenwick Farm, out on Route 9, past the grain elevator.” Nell read from her notepad. “A hundred and sixty acres, a farmhouse from 1890 and two barns.”
“Who’s the seller?”
“Mrs. Ida Fenwick, eighty-three, widowed. She’s selling everything and moving to her sister’s in Arizona.”
Vivian was already writing. Farms were rare in our office. A farm that size, at the price land was getting, was a career line.
“There’s a catch,” said Nell.
Vivian kept writing. “There’s always a catch.”
“She’s also talking to Ridgeline.”
Vivian’s pen stopped.
Ridgeline Land & Farm was a small brokerage out of the next county. They sold acreage, orchards, hunting land: things with fences.
We almost never crossed paths. When we did, it was usually because of one man.
“Boone,” said Vivian.
“Boone,” said Nell.
I had never met Boone Radley. I had only heard about him the way you hear about a storm system.
He was fifty-one, six foot four and the most relentlessly cheerful man in real estate. He had sold more farmland than anyone in three counties. He was also famous for one thing.
He wore hiking boots. Everywhere.
He wore them to closings. He wore them to the county realtors’ gala, with a tuxedo. He reportedly wore them to his own wedding, where his bride had said, “At least they’re brown,” and that had been considered a blessing.
“Mrs. Fenwick has one condition,” Nell went on. “She won’t list with anybody who hasn’t walked the land. All of it: the fence line, the creek, the back pasture.”
She checked her notepad. “She said, and I wrote this down, ‘Walk it or don’t list it.’”
Vivian set down her pen. She glanced at the window. Outside, the rain had given up on falling and was now simply hanging in the air, waiting for someone to walk into it.
“When does she want us?”
“Thursday at ten o’clock, at the barn.” Nell paused. “Boone has the same appointment. Same time.”
“Of course he does.”
“Viv,” said Nell, and her voice was careful. “It’s a farm. In April. In this.”
“I’m aware of the weather, Nell.”
“I’m just saying. There’s mud out there. Real mud. Not driveway mud.”
“Book it,” said Vivian.
She turned and walked back to her office. Her heels made the sound they always made on our lobby tile, a quick, even rhythm. Like a metronome set to “certain.”
Nell watched her go. Then she looked at me.
“What are her shoes for Thursday going to be?” I asked, quietly.
Nell reached under her desk and brought out a fresh stack of blank paper slips. She squared them on the counter. She uncapped a pen.
“Caleb,” she said, “that’s the first question in eleven years that’s worth five dollars.”
I thought that would be the end of it. I was new. I didn’t understand how fast news moves through an office that sells houses for a living.
By ten-thirty, the agents on the second floor had heard. By eleven, so had the title company across the street. By noon, there was a line at Nell’s desk, and Nell had laminated a sign that read ONE SLIP PER PERSON PER DAY.
At twelve-fifteen, I went to get lunch. When I came back, I looked at the jar.
The Flats Pool had taken forty-one new bets that morning.
Every single one of them said Thursday.
Up next: Mud Season
Continue to Part 2 →