Good Faith Read Free

the Nut County Board of Realtors agreed on that. Even so, I knew that this Dutch Colonial, just like three-fourths of the houses I had shown the Sloans, would fulfill their needs. Houses are houses. If you had a lottery to assign houses of appropriate sizes to random families, it would do no worse and no better than those families did themselves in finding abodes, because the accumulated human wisdom about dwellings is sufficient to satisfy dwelling-related human needs. But no. Mrs. Sloan sighed in the kitchen, her spirit that was uplifted in the garden now depressed. Mr. Sloan found his suspicions confirmed—in addition to tuck-pointing, there would be replacement of the carpets and a new refrigerator. Making a low offer wouldn’t solve these problems, it would only convince the Sloans that they were settling for less than they wanted. As we went to our cars, cordial in every way, I wondered if I would return their next call. I was single. There were other clients.
    As I was getting into my car, Mrs. Sloan said suddenly, “We should put our house on the market. I think we’re doing this backwards.”
    “Honey—” said Mr. Sloan. They had talked about this. She was enlisting me in a family disagreement. I said, “There’s no one way to do it. You want things to mesh, but—”
    “I just feel that if we had the money in hand for our house, things wouldn’t be so complicated.”
    “I never think it’s a good idea to burn your bridges behind you,” asserted Mr. Sloan.
    “I need something to happen,” said Mrs. Sloan.
    I said, “We can put your house on the market any time you like.”
    As I drove down the driveway, I looked in my rearview mirror. They were sitting in their car, arguing. It was a pleasure to drive away.
    I had been divorced for a year by then. My wife left me, I always said, as a result of terrorist activity. What happened was, we were in Barcelona in 1969. We’d been married two or three years by that time, and every year we went to Europe. She loved to shop, so we were strolling down the Ramblas, I think it’s called. We turned into a side street and went into one shop, heard some popping noises, came out, looked around, didn’t see anything. We went into another shop, and she got kind of into the back of it. I went out into the street, then into a shop around the corner. From there I could hear louder noises, and when I came out a few minutes later, I saw smoke and heard sirens. I went out into the middle of the Ramblas to try and see what was happening, and suddenly policemen and police cars were everywhere, and they were herding us all away from the shopping district. I could see the end of the street where Sherry had gone into the tile shop, but I couldn’t get to her, and she wasn’t visible. I said a few things in Spanish, but it was no use. They pushed us back and cordoned off the street, and then, literally, there were bullets in the air.
    I didn’t know what to do and didn’t have the fluency to ask. I went back to our hotel and got the concierge to call the police and a hospital or two, but of course there was nothing to learn; everything was still happening. I went to our room, but that made me nervous, so I hung around the hotel lobby for a while, and then I made the mistake that was fatal to our marriage. I went into the bar and ordered a drink. Sherry appeared in the doorway at exactly the moment I was raising the glass to my lips. I admit there was something about it that looked excessively casual, especially since my clothes weren’t disarranged or anything. Our marriage went on for nine years after that, but to the last day she would append to every argument, “And for another thing, when there was all that shooting in Barcelona and people were being killed,
you
were in the hotel bar ordering a stinger! Why weren’t you out looking for me? That’s something I’ll never understand!” That was always the last word.
    Sherry was still around. She had taken the money she