I bought the house in 2011, two years before I met Mark, with a down payment I had saved over six years working as a supply chain analyst for a regional distribution company, a job I had taken at twenty-four because it paid well and because I was good at it and because I had grown up in a house where the lesson about money, stated and restated until it was bone-deep, was that the person who owned the building had a fundamentally different experience of life than the person who lived in it.
My father owned a small hardware store for thirty-one years and lost it in the recession, and in the years after losing it he paid rent to a landlord who could raise it whenever he chose, and the watching of this had produced in me a specific and thorough understanding of what I wanted, which was to own the thing I lived in and to own it in my name and to have the mortgage and the tax statements and the homeowner’s insurance all addressed to Claire Bennett, because Claire
Bennett was the person paying them.
The house on Alderwood Drive was a four-bedroom colonial with a yard and a study and a
kitchen that had been updated in the nineties and needed another update but had good bones and good light, and I had been in the house for two years when I met Mark at a work event, a vendor dinner that I had almost skipped because I was tired and had a report due.
Mark was in commercial real estate, which seemed ironic later and perhaps should have told me something from the beginning, though I do not think it tells you anything about a person that they work in real estate, only that they understand the general principle of property value.
We dated for a year and got married in 2014.
I want to describe the marriage accurately, because accuracy is what I owe it.
