Fiction | July 28, 2025

Real Estate 

The first time I showed the house to Frank Haverford, he led his pregnant wife by the hand through the rooms like a show pony. Though his smile could have sold toothpaste, he fretted aloud about all the work to be done with a baby on the way.  

“Is it too much?” Frank asked his wife. The Haverfords were finicky, exacting clients who worked for one of the large technology companies down on the peninsula. None of the many properties that we had toured had measured up, until we visited the 1896 Victorian on the woodsy side of Bernal Hill near the freeway, noisy with traffic. The house was a leaky ruin, but some old splendor still shone through. It was exactly what they had claimed they wanted: hardly renovated, without decades of fad updates to strip back.  

I was a new real estate agent but dressed the part of a more experienced broker. Before I got my real estate license, I had led a vampiric life. I dressed from the Salvation Army bins and worked at night and lived off tips, cocktailing at nightclubs or serving terra-cotta saucers of cassoulet at white-tablecloth places. For my new job, the Visa was inundated with charges from Nordstrom and a high-end salon near the agency office on Valencia where you were served oolong tea in fragile porcelain cups while the hairdresser did his transformative work. My new husband worried when the statement came each month, but I assured him that it would all be worth it once I finally sold a house. 

To ease the Haverfords’ doubt, I channeled my boss, whom I had spent the last few months shadowing. He said that to sell a house you must first sell a dream. I brazenly ripped up a corner of shag carpet to show them the oak floors hidden beneath. Behind the dated wallpaper was wainscotting and beadboard. And all the original, amber-colored woodwork? Untouched.  

“It should be illegal to paint wood like this!” I said.  

“Absolutely,” Birgitta Haverford said, her Scandinavian accent smooth and dull as a butterknife. She rubbed her bump with both hands, pacing the high-ceilinged living room, probably picturing future Christmases before the chipped marble mantle. Her eyes gleamed with hunger, or lust. They put in a competitive offer later that day.  

What I did not tell the Haverfords was that the house had once been my childhood home. When I first saw it listed on the RMS website days earlier, I winced. The previous owners had left it in even worse shape than my parents had. I probably had some obligation to tell the Haverfords the truth, but what was the point? It might have put them off, tainting their potential home with the stench of the past. The house, lost to foreclosure in that last overwhelming financial crisis. My parents’ divorce. My father’s drinking.