This could all be yours

We had not had hot water for days. Then the heat went. From my twice daily reminders, the property manager was aware we lived with such privation. If my neighbors also messaged her, I do not know, but I had done my due diligence of being so mildly pesky that she could ignore me.

The threat of having to boil water again for a bath was too much for Amber. I had been taking cold showers, trying to convince myself there was something spiritual about being an acetic and/or that I was bathing under waterfalls, as my ancestors surely did.

Amber resumed house hunting, an activity we had abandoned years ago--when we might have better bought a house, in retrospect. We couldn't know a pandemic would spur cidiots to buy up real estate in cash to turn into third homes, flipping projects, or rentals. However, instead of buying a house, Amber went back to college. This was the right call as they had just graduated with a 4.0 and were the commencement speaker.

Amber presents me with the listing for a house. I identify it as a trailer, though it isn't. It is a box on a cement platform behind some bushes, austere and unremarkable.

"It has solar panels," Amber says. "I can't see them in the pictures, but it does."

I search for the address, which brings up the property record. It sold for $125,000 in 2002, and the owners want $360,000 now.

"They've made improvements," Amber says. "They are house flippers."

They have not made enough improvements to justify more than doubling the price, but that is the nature of these things. We live in a beautiful community, and it will take every penny you have saved if you think you get to own property here.

"Is this a real house we genuinely want," I ask Amber, "or a practice house to get the taste for looking at houses?"

Amber considers this. "A practice house," they decide.

I don't mind tromping around a stranger's home. We did it some dozen times years ago with a real estate agent who seemed to think we were rubes. She would show us houses with a wall torn open to the hundreds of Wal-Mart shopping bags used as insulation, the massive rickety barn she assured us would be our problem and expense to remove or the property would be condemned, the house covered in asbestos ("As long as you don't break any of it, you'd be fine. Good fireproofing!"), the one with no appliances, the one that was sold while we were standing in it, the one where police met us at the door and demanded to know why we were in the building, and so on. She was then disbarred--or whatever happens to real estate agents--because she was making illicit deals and then trying to defame people.

I was immediately put off when the owners of the unassuming house demanded we get preapproval through a bank before they would show it to us. This is not usual, but Amber says a buyer fell through at the last minute because of a lack of approval. We are far from the buying stage. We are in the "I have only seen the exterior of this house because you have not posted pictures inside. Let us at least see the bedrooms before we get a hard pull on our credit." Throwing up roadblocks so early in the process makes me think I would not enjoy working with them.

They then change when they wanted us to visit.

Hours before the showing, they change it again because they doubted we would get preapproved and didn't want to waste their time on us. Amber hustled paperwork to compress a week of interactions into half a day, and the bank declared we were extremely preapproved. I couldn't help but find their doubt insulting.

The house is okay; it is a box in three-quarters of a square fence with overgrown bushes in front. It is not far from the center of town, and I do love Red Hook. The town doesn't love anyone who isn't rich, but I love it no less. We pay half the rent many around us do, in part because our landlords seem to have forgotten we exist. There was a sense we either keep renting there or move to another county since nowhere seems affordable.

The numbers Amber's paperwork presented us state we would pay more than a thousand more a month, which they believe is affordable. "With our savings, we could do that for at least four years."

We will live in the house for more than four years, and having the money in reserve is a great relief to me. I have been poor. Throwing money away to own a place a little bigger than our apartment—though with a yard—doesn't quite resonate with me.

Amber measures each room when we visit. These figures should be on the listing but must not be if Amber goes to these extremes. They promise to calculate these later rather than sitting on the floor with their calculator app.

The agent explains that the payments for the first few years wouldn't really be a thousand dollars more a month because we might get $350 of that back come tax time—but we would have to pay it upfront. After he has spent some minutes figuring this out, he admits he pulled the numbers out of nowhere and could not be held to this back-of-the-envelope estimation.

I mention equity, not because I care as much as I understand the sounds that should be coming out of my mouth in this circumstance. The agent's eyes light up as he talks about sheltering our money and flipping the house every ten years to protect the half a million we could make. He did this with brownstones in Brooklyn when he was young. I do not want to deal in real estate speculation. I would not buy this home as an investment--I was not, at this point, buying a home at all--but as a place to live. I could afford one without struggle if more people wanted to live in these houses rather than make them vacation rentals. Amber worked in garden maintenance, the owners of some homes visited maybe once a year.

As we leave, I scuff the linoleum beneath my shoes and ask what is under it. The agent says it is concrete, the foundational platform on which this home was built without a basement. (Amber points out that this means the basement could never flood, nonexistent as it is.)

I leave knowing this house was not where I would live. Amber doesn't fully understand this, their head buzzing with possibilities and calculations. We would look at other houses, but all listings I had seen believed they were worth $150,000 more than would be pricy but almost reasonable. If told this house was $200,000, I would begrudgingly admit it might be in the right light, with gutters that had been fixed. This was not the reality of the market--which I was assured was a buyer's market, something that doesn't seem true given that there are only three in our price range.

We visit the next house from behind, walking up a new porch with a ramp. Our agent gave us the code to get in rather than showing it to us himself, which is not legal, but we didn't know. At least we are honest people and not in it to rob an empty home.

Amber is immediately put off by the cramped kitchen with outdated appliances covered in inspirational Christianity. It seems possibly unchanged since 1986. I wander the solid floors but cannot ignore the poles in the living and bedroom, the electric wheelchair abandoned in one corner.

"Someone died here," I say to Amber, adding, "Recently. Their kids must be trying to offload it now."

Amber hmms at this but is not too affected. "It's still a hundred thousand more than it should be. I'm not sure they will let us offer what it is worth."

Otherwise, I could see the promise if coming upon this house truly empty instead of as the shell someone's grandparents lost a month ago. The yard is weedy and would be difficult to mow, but I could be up to the challenge.

We find the supposed second bathroom in the basement garage, a toilet full of muck without walls around it. "I am not paying extra taxes on that," I say. "I don't need to relieve myself while looking at the hood of my car."

"The bank would make us enclose that," Amber speculates.

I had my heart set on the next house, which I had only seen in pictures. It sat across from a lake down a wooden staircase, to which we would have full rights. It had a cozy personality that was rare in this area, though it might have been a touch too backwoods.

My first solid indication of the truth came before we entered. Bricks held up the garage door, and one was off-kilter. It is a tiny thing to notice, but it indicates that someone had neglected the home. As though to prolong the moment of revelation, we go first to the backyard. Amber is enamored of the wooden swingset. I swear to them we can build one on any of the properties we have seen, but they want this one.

"If we buy another house," I say, "I will rent a truck and steal it."

A panel on the back porch had fallen. Five minutes and six nails would have disguised this. $20 and as many minutes would have fixed it. No one did.

My fury at this indignity grows.

We enter, unable to find a light switch and resort to flashlights on our phones where the sunlight doesn't pour in the windows. I still want to find excuses that would make this home a possibility. We can clear the profusion of webs, patch the holes in the drywall, and paint the many walls that are already a lively shade of purple.

There's likely mold. The sink seems intentionally wrecked, the doors wrenched off. Amber questions why the bottom of a door is warped until seeing the duct tape a top to keep out the rain.

Ten years ago, I would have begged to keep this as a contender. It would have been just the quirky home we could make suit us utterly, with staircases, a garage, and a weird layout. It could have been built for us—though I do not love that it is built on such a one-lane dirt road that we would have to drive to pick up our mail; it would not be delivered.

"Maybe we can move in and fix up one room a season?" I ask, knowing we cannot.

"The bank will not give us a loan for this," Amber says. "This is for house flippers. Otherwise, we could not afford it."

The state of this home brings me near tears. This could have been a place for us to live and build more of our lives together. Instead, it will sit empty, decaying more. I don't know to what degree it is worth anyone fixing at this point. It would require such a major expense of time and money. Who would want to live in this outpost of an outpost?

Part of my reluctance to homebuying is that I never fully got over the fact that we would be doing this in the Hudson Valley. I became ready for a fresh start when Amber matriculated to Cornell, buying a house in Ithaca—doctoral programs are not customarily brief. Inexplicably, Amber did not get into Cornell, and they had bothered applying to no lesser universities. It was Cornell, or it was nothing—and so it was nothing.

They talked for a few weeks about going to other programs to bolster their cred with the Ivy Leagues, but these didn't happen. Buying a house so strongly tethers Amber to this town. They cannot go to Cornell now, which I regret. I saw clearly the future they might have, but this feels like a continuation of the present. It is ironic that after spending over a decade in a town I genuinely love with a spouse I adore and three cats, after having worked for thirteen years in the same system without constant complaining, I do not like the idea of being tied in place. I can concur that our apartment is overdue to be someone else's. It was made apparent when Amber started doing the painting and home repair that one usually does not bother with when it comes to a rental.

Before Amber met me, they considered taking their car around America. They were single, graduated, and their mother paid for their gas; it was a low-risk proposal, though they acknowledge they might have been murdered or would at least not meet me.

"True," I say. "You might have fallen in love with someone in California and never returned."

"Unlikely."

This will never happen, though they are about fourteen years away from it being practicable or appealing.

Amber is more of a homebody, which is fitting given that they spend several hours of their one precious day on the phone with insurance agents and loan appraisers when not going over forms. Without them, this process would move far more slowly, if it would move at all. This could be the predictable culmination of gathering moss in the same place.

It is the collapsing of possibility, but what was I doing with it?

It turns out that the first house we see is not a practice house, so we pursue it.

We get a new real estate agent, one who doesn't give us a code to roam around empty homes alone. Erin is attentive and funny, with a boisterous personality that comes off as abundantly honest. The seller is covering her fee as part of closing, which surprises me.

We visit again. Erin and I mostly talk about local community theater while Amber measures more. They have created an accurate house floor plan on their Remarkable 2. It is not my modality, so I am glad to have someone whose hyperfixation is so useful.

Years ago, this approaching move would panic me. I know this because it did. It does not now, though I wish I knew how this ended and when. Amber tosses money at the people, paying to insure a house we do not own and still might not. There are these compounding costs whose nature is a surprise to me. Amber may limit my exposure to the worst of these as I growl at bureaucracy I do not comprehend.

Whenever we get closer to having the house, someone directly or tangentially related to the sale throws up a new roadblock. Another person stands with their palm up, waiting for their baksheesh. At one point, we are charged a fee so we can pay money, a request so Gilliam-esque that it seems they are daring us to call them out, but no. This is just how the system works. It is not the fault of these people. They are not originating these fees; they are just following what is de rigeur.

This experience triggers my anxious attachment. Since this began, I have asked Amber not to divorce me easily a dozen times as a joke but beneath it is the fear we will complete this process and end up in a situation beyond difficult. No money would be enough for Amber to push this drastic step if they were not 100% sure this works out. They love a project, but not this way.

last watched: Futurama
reading: Absolution