Interlude: The Inspector

For thirty-one years, Walter Brandt had made his living by finding what was wrong with houses.

He did it carefully and well. He climbed into crawl spaces with a flashlight in his teeth and ran his thumb along window sills, feeling for soft wood. He knew the particular hue that water leaves on a ceiling, and the sound a furnace makes when something inside it is about to give up. People paid him to be suspicious, and he was good at it. His reports were famous in the county for their thoroughness. They ran to forty pages, and every page was about what had failed, or was failing, or might.

His wife, Ana, had a saying about this. “Walter,” she would say, “you could inspect a cathedral and come home to tell me about the gutter.”

He had always taken this as a compliment, in a way. Gutters mattered. Somebody had to notice them.

On a gray Tuesday in October he inspected a small brick house for a young couple, Isaac and Tamsin, who stood in the driveway with their hands clasped, looking like people waiting to hear whether something would live. The house was, in truth, a good one. The foundation was sound, the roof had a decade left, the wiring was original but safe. There were a dozen minor defects, as there always are: a rotted section of porch rail, a loose tile, a faucet in the upstairs bath that dripped.

He wrote it all up. At the end, he handed the couple the report, and watched them read the first page. Their faces fell.

“Is it bad?” the young woman asked.

“No,” Walter said, surprised. “It’s a good house.”

“It’s just that,” she said, holding up the report, “there are fourteen pages of problems.”

He looked at the report as though for the first time. She was right. In thirty-one years, he had never once written down what was working. The roof that would last, the foundation that was dry, the beams that had held for ninety years through every winter. All of it was in his head, ticked off and silently dismissed. Only the defects had earned ink.

That evening he told Ana about it, a little awkwardly, as they washed dishes.

“And I was thinking,” he said, “that I do the same thing at home. To myself. I walk through my own life with a flashlight. The knee. The money I should have saved. The thing I said to Michael in 1998. I could give you the full report.”

“I know,” Ana said. “I’ve read it. Many times.”

He laughed. Then he stopped, because she wasn’t laughing.

“What I’d like to see,” she said, “is the other section.”

On Saturday, after he fixed the drip in his own upstairs bathroom, because it was a real drip and fixing it was simply good sense, Walter sat down at the kitchen table with a clean sheet of paper. He drew a line down the middle. On the left he wrote Needs attention, and wrote down the knee, and the savings, and Michael. It took four minutes.

On the right, he wrote Sound. He stared at the word for some time. Then he began: A marriage of forty-one years. A daughter who calls on Sundays. A roof that doesn’t leak. Hands that still work. A reputation for honest work. He kept going. The list ran longer than he had expected. It ran onto the back of the page.

At the bottom he wrote, in his careful inspector’s hand: Overall condition: good, with ordinary repairs needed.

It was the first report he had ever written that he felt entirely sure of.