Daddy's Dollar

The minute I saw the “For Sale” sign go up at the house on the corner, I knew we had to have it.

Four bedrooms, an extra bathroom, a spacious garage, a lovely garden…. Perfect!

I would finally get to have my own office instead of working on my laptop at the dining room table, and we could have a guest room for my widowed mother.

“We’ve got to move,” I told my husband, Giorgio, later that evening. “I just saw the perfect place for sale.”

“Joyce, we can’t buy another house now,” he said. “That would put us in a terrible bind.”

“I know,” I sputtered. “It’s just that…” We had been trapped for more than two years by the real-estate crash. Nobody was interested in buying our house back in Tampa, and our little bungalow here in Orlando, where my job had taken us, was too small and cramped, especially when our kids were home from college.

Sure, we had two houses, but neither of them worked for us, and I was tired of living with so many boxes stacked in the garage that we couldn’t even fit in a car.

“Not now,” Giorgio insisted.

Boy, I knew just who my husband sounded like—Dad.

My father was so tight with money that I don’t think I ever had a dress that wasn’t from Goodwill or from the clearance rack. I had heard so many of his “How I survived the Depression stories” that I could have told them in my sleep.

Dad wasn’t a miser—he was very generous to people in need—but he never spent any money on himself, didn’t think he needed to. He drove the same rusty pickup and wore the same old clothes until they practically disintegrated. One of the last things he ever told me was how proud he was that he had been able to provide for our family.

But that was then and this is now, I thought. Giorgio and I both had good jobs and neither of us was extravagant. Still, if I saw something I liked—a new dress, something for the house, a book, a pair of shoes—I bought it without hesitating or feeling guilty.

I knew my husband was right about the house. In this economy we really needed to be careful. Someday the real-estate market would bounce back and we could finally move into a bigger space. But right now I was sick and tired of waiting.

God, why can’t you help us here? I prayed over the next few days. No, demanded. I was so tempted by that corner house! Everything about it was just right: the location, the landscaping, the patio, the square footage.

Then one day Giorgio and I were going through some boxes out in our garage. “Joyce, come look at what I found,” he said.