It was such a strange turn of events that brought me into this little house. There I was, just going to work every day, a project superintendent in charge of building a shopping mall on a lot that was empty except for this one little ramshackle house we had to build around. It wasn’t my fault that there was this struggle between the project and this lady’s house. It’s just the job. The developers were trying to get her to move. She was digging in her heels, insisting that she was going to stay. And there was me, caught in the middle. Everyone thought I was trying to trick her into moving. But the truth was just the opposite. I was doing everything I could to allow her to stay.
So what, you might ask, was I doing over there? What was in it for me?
Good question.
I guess, if you try to dissect the friendship that formed between us – and a lot of people seem to want to do that – you could start with the books.
Over on one wall, next to the couch, there was a whole collection of classic books, like Wuthering Heights and Canterbury Tales and Das Kapital and the poems of Longfellow. They were all dusty, like no one had read them for a long time, but every once in a while she’d quote from them, so I know she read them all, some more than once.
I think that’s one of the things that drew me in. I was fascinated with how much she knew. I guess that’s because I never met anyone who had read as much, who knew as much, as Edith did. It was like meeting someone from another planet. A different kind of intelligence. It just draws you in.
And then, of course, there were the stories. Edith’s stories.
For a guy like me, growing up like I did, you didn’t exactly run into people every day who told you they were Benny Goodman’s cousin. Or who taught Mickey Rooney some dance steps. Or escaped a Nazi concentration camp. Or said they did, anyway.
Here’s exactly what I thought of that, at first:
Wack job.
Not very nice, I know. But that’s where I was at, pure and simple.
But as I started to go over there more often, and heard more and more of the stories – just little bits and pieces of them, just enough to make you wonder – I found myself wanting to hear more. Looking at Edith was a little like looking at those books: a million stories hidden in there. Maybe half of her stories weren’t true. But it was real interesting, just to know they were there.
I was never much of a reader, myself. There weren’t a whole lot of books around my house, growing up. I guess if I was going to school today they would have diagnosed me with attention deficit disorder, because I could never really focus on reading or anything like that. But as it was, I muddled through. I never even watched a lot of movies, to tell you the truth. Take me to a movie theater and I’d be asleep in fifteen minutes. Just couldn’t focus on it. But I did watch a few movies with Edith. She had tons of tapes all around this room as well, all movies from the forties and fifties. Lots of Bette Davis, lots of Sherlock Holmes. A lot of Greta Garbo, too: Grand Hotel, Anna Christie, Ninotchka. Somebody told me they thought Edith was a little like Garbo, holed up here in this little 106-year-old house in a shabby section of Seattle – but they had it wrong.
Edith didn’t want to be alone.
I was nervous, that first day on the job, walking up to her house. I’d heard so much already. At first I hadn’t been paying too much attention. I’m not that much of a reader, as I mentioned, and I hadn’t seen any of the articles in the paper, or heard about how the local newspaper reporters were all scared of Edith because she’d chase them away whenever they got within ten feet of her. In fact, when I got the job as construction superintendent for the shopping mall project, my wife asked me, “Oh, is that the one where the old lady won’t move?” And I said no, because I was sure I would have heard about it.
But when I mentioned it to the guys I worked for, they told me that yes, they had this stubborn old lady, like a little bulldog with wire-framed glasses, holding up the whole works. They’d gotten every other inch of the property they wanted, basically a city block square, except for this one little ramshackle house. Now they were having to build around it. And if anyone tried to talk to her, she’d more likely bite their head off than give them the time of day.
The first time I looked at the architect’s drawing, I saw the tiny rectangle that was cut out where Edith’s house stood. Later, the owners of the project and I talked it over, and we decided to put some steel embeds in the side walls facing Edith’s house, big galvanized steel plates with metal studs that go back and tie into the concrete. If she wound up selling, we could tear down her house and build across by welding beams to those embeds – basically filling in the little rectangle. And if she didn’t, well, I had perfectly good plans for building around her. To me, it was a construction job, and a pretty big one at that. I didn’t really care one way or the other.
The wheels had all got set in motion about a year earlier, back in the spring of 2005. I had worked for one construction company for almost ten years. For a while, there was a ton of work. Up here in Seattle, we really reaped the benefit of the dot-com boom even more than people know. I was a project superintendent, meaning I was basically in charge of all the people and subcontractors on a big project, such as an office building. It was the kind of thing that you figured, well, this is what my life is gonna be, and I’ll retire with this company. And you feel pretty good about it.
Then the dot-coms all went down and things got strange. There was a glut of office space, so the banks started pulling the plug on any project with office space in it. There just wasn’t enough work to go around. The company I worked for finally went out of business. I went to work for another fellow, building assisted-living facilities.
I wouldn’t know until later how ironic that was. When it became my whole life’s work just to keep one old lady out of them.
The boss was a good person to work for; the firm was small, and I was given a lot of autonomy, so it was easy to get things done. I was happy just to have landed on my feet, given how tough things were. But that spring, all the guys from my old company, the one that went out of business, got involved with another firm, called Ledcor. The owner of the old company came to run Ledcor’s Seattle office, and the old operations manager came on board, and the business-development guy, and their best project manager. Then they called me to come join the party.
I loved working with that crew. They were nice guys, and they really cared about you. They had this project they wanted me to do, and – not to put too fine a point on it – they started hounding me. Hounding me in a nice way, of course. But I knew what they were doing. The first calls came from the project manager, a great guy named Roger Wagner. Roger wouldn’t tell me too much about the job – just that it involved a whole city block, and that once that was done, there were one or two other blocks, and by the way, this Ledcor was a great place to work.
See, that’s how it works: he’s sticking the bait out there and waiting to see how hard you’re sniffing. Then if you’re interested, he’ll feed you the bait and reel you in. I knew what he was doing – and he knew that I knew – so it was all very jovial. But at the same time, I was a little intrigued, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow so you never slam the door on anything.
The next one to call me was the operations manager. He was also giving it the soft sell, because nobody wanted to seem too eager. So we all went around it for a month or two, until they finally gave me the are-you-in-or-are-you-out call.
It was a tough decision. These guys were like family to me, but I hated leaving the job I had. I don’t like leaving things without a reason. I need to be able to say, well, this bothers me or that bugs me.