Where was I? Oh yes, the bully bid.
We had no idea if this mad idea (the one to buy a house that we had fallen in love with but seemed unlikely to be able to afford) would go anywhere, so we returned to our round of viewings, buzzing through another three or four houses that afternoon. A couple of them were quite nice, but our hearts weren't in it. And we never did get to see the one I’d originally spotted, which it turned out was already under offer, way WAY too expensive, and had no parking.
We said good-bye to Kate without having heard any news. We stopped for distraction at the pie shop before retrieving children from their various friends and tried not to think about the house. It was too unlikely. Then at 6:30 in the evening we heard from the sellers’ agent that yes, the owners would 'entertain' an offer! Our hearts leaped. But there was a caveat: they were obliged to contact everyone else who had viewed the house and left their details. Fortunately for us, the house had only been on the market that one day, and the weather had been chill and drizzly, so there were not many names to be reached. Further, it was a Saturday evening, so anyone who didn’t already have financing might be stymied. (In fact, as it turned out later, we ourselves didn’t have quite the financial security we thought we did. As it turns out, it was enough, but the possibilities still give me nightmares.) The agent commented in a by-the-way manner that his one-month-old baby (his first) was ill in hospital so there might be a little delay in responding to messages. That put the deal in perspective.
The roller-coaster ride began to get more exciting.
Kate joined us at our dining table and we all began to read the home inspection (72 pages—we didn’t have enough printer ink so we read directly from the screen) and then to construct an offer. What would constitute ‘worth their while’? How much could we throw at this? We calculated percentages, conjured with kabbala, read tea leaves, and signed our initials in the red circles Kate stamped on the forms. We tried to reach our mortgage man; he ignored our calls but answered Kate’s phone at 7 pm and said okay to our proposed offer. A few days later we found out to our horror that he was talking through his hat and that we actually had no guarantee of approval. But, confidently ignorant on that Saturday evening, we filled in the spaces after the dollar sign as if we had the blessing of a major bank, Kate took the paperwork off to wherever it is that offers go, we served two of the kids a hodge-podge dinner, and then I headed across town (again) to collect the eldest child from a birthday party. I was given several other party guests who needed delivering to their respective parents, and began weaving generally homeward, taking northern and eastern forays for the drop-offs. My phone rang and my son answered it. ‘It’s Dad,’ he reported. ‘He says to come right home. You need to improve your offer.’
Good grief. I pulled over and tried to understand; apparently, we were bidding against one other competitor, and if we could offer something convincing, the house might, just might, be ours. Unbelievable that we had gotten this far; I tried not to look too much further into the face of hope. It might blind me. For the time being all I could do was disconnect and hurry home, but hurrying is not easy, or wise, on a Saturday night in Toronto. After a somewhat dubious stop that required depositing two brothers on one street corner and watching them walk across the intersection to be swept into a taxi by a woman they had assured me was their mother, we got home. ‘Shoo,’ I told the children. ‘Go watch something.’
Husband was brewing tea. He, Kate and I looked for an ‘improvement’ that we might make. I asked about the unwell baby; no news, but Kate said she would find out. More money was needed; again, we called Mr. Mortgage, and again, he said ‘sure, go for it’. More red circles, more initials; I suggested that we make the offer amount end with the digits of the house’s address to try and make some sort of personal connection. We wanted
that house. Not just any house. This one, tonight, felt already like our own and tears came to my eyes as I thought of someone else living there. I imagine that adopting a child is similar-- though of course much more profound-- in the stage before the paperwork is all done.
In fact this was an example of real estate recapitulating romance and the building of a family. We had already fallen in love with the house. Now Kate (the midwife?), raced off across town with her delivery, to the Place Where Offerings Are Made (Mount Moriah, perhaps). We had stipulated that our offer, this one, with our initials in half a dozen red stamped circles across the multiple pages, expired at 12:30 am. It was now 11:00 p.m. We sent our neglected (actual) offspring to bed and sat down to pretend to work and read. Now we felt echoes of the birth of our second child, with whom we went to the hospital a few hours too early and sat around watching a movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Rock Hudson as we waited for my labour to progress (and then progress it did, with a rapid bump and the precipitate arrival of an adorable baby boy, and we never saw the end of the film—we’ve always wondered what happened, but don’t recall the title). We looked at the online listing of the house, clicking through the photo gallery, wondering why none of the rooms looked familiar. We had a slight panic – are we making an offer on the right house? —and then recognized a bedroom with framed posters of anatomical drawings that we recalled from our brief tour. Relief. But really it was crazy; we had been in the house for no more than 30 minutes. I’ve spent longer choosing a pair of shoes.
Tick, tick, tick. Midnight. Twelve-fifteen. At 12:29 a text from Kate: ‘they are still deciding’. I flipped blindly through an issue of Bon Appetit; husband looked at his computer screen. The phone rang at 12:31 and we answered on speaker. ‘So,’ Kate enquired, ‘have you thought about which bedroom will belong to which child?’
O Joy! Jubilation! We couldn’t believe it. Shock, awe, laughter, tears, muffled so as not to wake the kids. Husband and I looked at the pictures on the screen again, then harnessed up the dog, left the children sleeping, and walked the five minutes to the house- our house (-to-be) just to look at it and reassure ourselves it was there. Our new arrival.
Of course, there was the afterbirth, the messy part about making a deposit and negotiating the mortgage. And it turned out this baby needed more than the average amount of postnatal care, because the mortgage was not in fact as fully formed as we had been led to believe. For several weeks after we had committed ourselves legally to buying the house, we were on tenterhooks waiting for the bank to grant us mortgage approval, something we believed we already had. ....[REDACTED AT HUSBAND'S REQUEST. I AM A SURRENDERED WIFE.].... Eventually, though, a manageable mortgage came through, as did one from another company, and we had the luxury of choosing the better deal. For a few weeks, though, I tried to imagine what life in prison might be like. I wondered whether it might be a productive place for reading and writing. Who would look after the kids? Could husband and I take turns serving our sentences? At this point, house-buying came to resemble those early days of infancy, with little sleep, unpredictable feeding times, and labile emotions. The phone would ring and anything might be happening on the other end.
But to keep a long story from getting too much longer, in this instalment anyway, we got our mortgage and our lawyer and all our papers signed and abracadabra, we own a tiny little piece of Toronto. (At least, our bank owns it.) In a few more weeks, we hope to move in.
Already I feel more as though I belong.
The poorly baby, the son of the sellers' agent, recovered and was absolutely fine.
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I looked out the window by my desk for quite a while. That man, the one with the little girl, came out of the Athletic Centre, walked to his silver Voyager, jumped in, and drove away, smiling at someone on the pavement. He didn’t get a parking ticket. Lucky duck.
