PART 2 — ELEVEN YEARS
I bought that house when I was thirty-one years old. Three years before I met Curtis Ferraro.
My father died in March of that year, of a heart thing nobody caught, at sixty-two, in the parking lot of the plant in Brayton Falls where he had worked for twenty-six years. He had a life insurance policy through the union that he had paid into every two weeks his entire adult life, and I was the only beneficiary, because my mother was already gone and I am an only child.
The policy paid a hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
I had eighty-one thousand of my own saved, because I had lived in a studio over a laundromat for six years doing medical billing and coding and taking every overtime shift the hospital would give me.
I put the whole thing into a four-bedroom on Hallowell Court in November. Two hundred and forty down, the rest financed, in my name, alone, because there was nobody else’s name to put on it. I refinanced twice and paid the note off in the eleventh year with a bonus and a very unglamorous decade.
I want to be extremely clear about something, because I know how these stories get read: this was not family money and it was not luck. It was a man who stood at a machine for twenty-six years and a daughter who lived over a laundromat.
I met Curtis in the spring, three years later, at a friend’s cookout. He was warm and easy and he made me laugh, and he had a way of listening that I had not had much of in my life.
We married when I was thirty-four and he moved in, and that was the last decision about that house that anybody made together.
He never paid a mortgage payment. That was not a scheme; it was just how it worked out. My note was already low, and we agreed early that I’d carry the house and he’d carry the cars, groceries, and utilities, and for a long stretch of years it was roughly even and neither of us kept score.
Here is what he did do.
He never corrected anyone.
The first Thanksgiving, Loretta told a cousin that Curtis had bought a beautiful place and was so good to bring Simone into it. I was standing four feet away holding a dish. I looked at my husband and my husband smiled at his mother and said the potatoes were good.
I brought it up that night in the car. He said, “Ma, she doesn’t listen, it’s not worth it. Everybody knows.”
Everybody did not know.
For eleven years I heard some version of it, two or three times a year, at every holiday and every birthday and one funeral.
You landed on your feet with my brother.
Not every woman gets taken care of like that.
Curtis worked hard for this house, Simone, put a coaster under that.
Bridget said the coaster one. In my dining room. In 2019.
There were two of those eleven years I could point to and say, that one, that’s where I should have stopped it.
The first was the mortgage payoff. I made the last payment on a Tuesday in the eleventh year and I was so pleased with myself I could barely sit still, and we had his family over that Sunday because it happened to be Loretta’s birthday.
I said it at the table. I said, we paid off the house this week — we, because I was thirty-nine and married and that felt like the generous thing to say.
And Loretta reached over and patted her son’s hand and said, “Oh, Curtis. Your father never managed that in his whole life.”
Curtis said thanks, Ma.
He did not look at me. He looked at his mother and he took the pat on the hand, and I sat at my own table on the anniversary of nothing and cut a birthday cake I had baked.
That night I said, in the kitchen, doing dishes, “You could have said it was me.”
And he said the sentence. The one he said every time, in the same tone, like reciting a phone number: “She doesn’t listen, babe. It’s not worth it.”
The second was 2021.
I got very sick that February — nothing dramatic, a bad gallbladder that turned into surgery and six weeks of recovery — and Loretta came and stayed nine days to help, and she genuinely did help, and I want that in the record because it complicates the story and the story deserves to be complicated.
She cooked. She did laundry. She was kind to me in a way she had never been before or since, and on the fourth day, sitting on the end of my bed, she told me about her own mother’s illness in 1974 and cried a little.
And on the seventh day she stood in the doorway of the room that would later be at the center of all this and said, “This is a good room. Whole side of the house, this room.”
I thought she meant it was nice.
I’ve since gone back and looked at that sentence about two hundred times.
That is what I mean when I say she was not a monster. She was a lonely woman who had been told, for over a decade, by the person she trusted most, that a house she liked belonged to her son and would therefore one day be a place she could go. And nobody ever once told her different.
The cost of eleven years of it’s not worth it is that everybody involved ends up standing on a porch in front of the neighbors, and the only person who saw it coming was the one who kept saying it wasn’t worth it.
And every time, Curtis let it go by, and every time he told me afterward that it wasn’t worth it, and somewhere around year six I stopped raising it, because I had learned that raising it cost me an evening and changed nothing.
That is the actual crime here, and it took me a long time to see it clearly. He did not lie to his family. He just never once put a stop to a lie that was very convenient for him. Eleven years of a small silence, repeated, until it hardened into a thing his mother would stake a 911 call on.
Because she believed it. I want to say that plainly. Loretta Ferraro stood on my porch and said my son owns this house and she was not lying. She had been told it, in effect, three hundred times, by the only person in the world who could have stopped it.
Now — the block party.
They picked that Saturday. I have never gotten either of them to admit it, but Bridget had the phone up before anybody said a hard word, and you do not start recording a woman answering her own front door unless you already know there is going to be something to record.
They thought the street would do the work. Twenty-five neighbors, a canopy, a table of food, and a seventy-four-year-old woman on the steps with a peace lily. They thought I would be too polite to make a scene in front of the people I say good morning to.
They had the mechanism exactly right.
They just had the wrong deed.
