Lookaway, Lookaway (23 page)

In 2006, Zack, her high-flying banking liaison chum from Coldwell Banker, called her from Charlotte and convinced her they were in a unique era for helping middle- and low-income families into home ownership. The banks, Freddie, Fannie, Clinton then Bush, were pushing wheelbarrows of money in their direction for sub-primes … but he needed a front woman who could identify the up-and-coming home buyer, a seller who was at ease with immigrants, black folk, naturalized Mexicans, people moving up from rentals and, heck, shacks and trailer parks. Was she in or not in?

“I’m gonna be spending more time in Charlotte,” she said, lying next to Chuck in bed, some instantly materializing Hatteras storm beating at the windows.

“Can’t say I’m glad to hear that,” said Chuck.

Once she got her first families into homes in the north and east of Charlotte, word spread and relatives and friends of previous clients made their way to her. By 2007, she had placed over two hundred families in homes—some weeks closing as many as four separate deals. But she lacked one thing the big real estate mavens in town boasted of, and she decided to do something about it.

She commanded Joshua come visit her in her small strip-mall Charlotte headquarters—and bring his friend Dorrie Jourdain.

Annie could see the quizzical looks, the combination of fear and fascination as Joshua and his sidekick Dorrie stuck their heads around the potted palm and took in her cubicle. Piles of papers, leads, documents, contracts, everything in perilously leaning stacks obeying a filing system she alone understood.

“Hey you guys,” Annie said, closing a series of computer windows. “Thanks for coming.”

“So what is this big revelation?” her brother asked.

“You’ll see, but you have to take a little ride with me first,” she said, pushing out of the chair and straightening her skirt. She reached for a coat rack from which hung her suit jacket.

“I’ve got a biggish favor to ask you, Dorrie, but I’ll wait until you’re trapped with me in my van.”

In the parking lot was Annie’s red BMW, looking just-washed-and-waxed, and her work van with the decal of the Constable & Johnston Realtors on the side.

“Who’s Ms. Constable?” Dorrie asked, after the unseen partner. “Or is it Mr. Constable?”

“Mr. Constable,” said Annie. Joshua knew the story but he let his sister tell it. “Pete Constable, thirty years in the business, helped Charlotte grow into one of the most profitable real estate markets in the country—you can trust Pete and Annie with your real estate needs.” After a dramatic pause. “There is no Pete Constable. I made him up, so it wasn’t some ditzy woman in charge of your real estate needs. People with real estate needs prefer that there’s an old masculine hand on the rudder.” When you called Constable & Johnston you got a male automated voice asking you to press “1” for Pete Constable, “2” for Annie Johnston. Anyone who called Pete, got their call returned by Annie begging pardon for Pete being swamped or on vacation.

Joshua was about to hop in the front, when Annie directed him to the backseat; the passenger seat was reserved for Dorrie. Dorrie mumbled, “Not sure what you want with me, since I have no real estate needs.”

“Oh everyone has real estate needs.”

The Brookshire Freeway left the funky-fashionable Fourth Ward, the sharp skyscrapered skyline rising up behind, impressive to Charlotteans every time they gazed upon it, taller, vaster, more big-city than the last time they looked, sixty-story Bank of America, fifty-four-story Duke Energy, forty-two-story One First Union Center, a score of thirty-story-plus buildings, forty more skyscrapers in the construction phase, amazing to those who grew up with the old 1960s buildings the tallest things in town.

West of I-77, the freeway moved with remarkable quickness into an old but rundown northwest Charlotte neighborhood, liquor stores, twenty-four-hour check cashing and bail bondsmen. Charlotte was a Southern exception; usually the west side of town was the white half, but in Charlotte, the Westside (“the Wild Wild West”) was black. Annie U-turned the van around to go back the direction they came … and there it was.

“Holy crap,” said Joshua, while Dorrie clapped her hands approvingly.

Annie’s first billboard. There was a very airbrushed and flattering photo of Annie holding a clipboard with what looked like Southern plantation columns behind her.

CONSTABLE & JOHNSTON

Let us get you into your next home!

1-800-555-7835

Generous terms of credit—Welcome Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac!

Hablamos Español!

Josh asked his sister, “Since when do you speak Spanish?”

“Eh, I can get by. I call in a bilingual agent I used to work with at Allen Tate if I get a phone message in Spanish, cut him in on the deal.”

Dorrie: “That’s a real glamour shot.”

“I know you both think it’s cheesy as hell but that’s how it’s done. I look better than Candy Kinney, that ol’ tramp. She’s got her billboards up all over South Charlotte.”

“See if you can have as many,” Joshua chided, “as Berma Bigglefield.” She was a bail bondsman whose billboards were everywhere.

“Yeah,” said Dorrie, “I hope it’s not a bad thing to point out but this broke-flat tumbledown neighborhood doesn’t have many potential clients in the home-buying market.”

“
Au contraire.
This is the big feeder road for African-American commuters out from the developments around Paw Creek and Peachtree, Beattie’s Ford. That’s my niche market: emerging middle class and some lower income, people who’ve rented all their life but have good jobs, jobs but no equity. What I was going to ask you, Dorrie, was to think through your friends, your church—”

“I don’t really go to church anymore. All black folk don’t spend all Sunday morning in church, you know.” She waved her hands like they held tambourines. “Shoutin’ and gettin’ washed in the blood of the lamb—praise Jesus!”

“I didn’t think there was anyone who didn’t go to church, white or black, around this camp meeting masquerading as a major American city. Anyway, think through the cousins, the relatives, the family friends, if they’d had trouble in the past with banks and Realtors, if they’re in a mood to move up—”

Joshua jumped in with the theme from the TV show
The Jeffersons,
about movin’ on up.

Annie smiled serenely. “Mock all you want. I am not embarrassed to ask my friends and family to send me clients! You’d have thought Dubya would have shut down the easy-loan program at Fannie Mae but the Republicans like the sub-primes, too. Everybody’s making money and everybody’s getting a dream house and the Charlotte market is as hot as they come! Number three in the whole nation! They cannot
build
downtown units in the First and Third Wards fast enough.”

Dorrie began, “If you have a business card, I—”

Annie was already pressing a business card—twenty of them—into Dorrie’s hand. It had the same soft-focus sultry photo as the billboard, and a variety of phone numbers, including a cell anyone could call anytime. “Go out among the people, out into the world unto all nations,” Annie said.

Josh wondered, “Why not help millionaires trade up in Myers Park and make some real commission money, sis? And then give me some of it.”

“I hate those people,” she said. “Money can take care of itself. I’m trying to do the Lord’s work here and get normal people into homes so they can see how the other half lives, the half with credit and equity and a tax code that has bent over backward to make sure they never suffer any disruption in the flow of their prosperity. Landlords have it made. I didn’t know how much until I became one.”

Annie was doing the thing that any self-respecting real estate agent eventually did. Though a small fortune could be made on commissions in a hot market like Charlotte, a
vast
fortune could be made buying the homes yourself in an up-and-coming neighborhood, paying someone like Chuck to renovate them, and then showing, selling the homes, and pocketing the profit. Such a feeling of wheeling and dealing, such a high from signing the papers. Annie put down $24,000 on a $120,000 home in a marginal downtown neighborhood—enough to avoid the mortgage default insurance, then she would negotiate another mortgage with Zack at Allen Tate Realtors, spend another $10,000 to make the kitchen and bathrooms look nice—nothing too dramatic, no marble tops or gas stoves, just enough to look clean and functional. She and Tony (her renovator, he and his bunch of Mexicans) found a deal on used Kenmore stoves—they bought twenty at bulk and had them in their own basements and in a hundred-square-foot storage unit on Tryon. Wood floors, drywall, new carpet on stairs … Annie loved the shopping, the bulk buys at Lowe’s and Home Depot, the smell of new paint and repairs, the bustle inside a home when the Mexicans who—good God—could do anything, absolutely anything to a house you wanted done overnight, under cost. What a world she had found herself in! And every little bit of those costs were business costs, ready to be written off against profits … which were continually sewn back into new buys and new turnovers. Annie didn’t pay a cent of taxes last year! Her accountant Bob told her how much to spend and how much to write off to balance it all out perfectly.

Bob, balding and graying, with some shitty substandard CPA certificate from some East Backwater community-college-type place, but he had surpassed the Ivy League MBAs she knew from high school, both in fortune and showy possessions. Bob knew how to dress; he knew the effect of a pressed blazer and tight starched shirt. Not much in the face, chin a little weak, but he had powerful legs straining against those creased pants—oh, he could show a woman what for.

Zack at the loan office, also balding, but very fit due to a Soloflex in one of the empty offices at his Allen Tate suite. When the phones weren’t ringing or his eyes weren’t crossed from mortgage documents, he did a few cycles on the Soloflex which resulted in upper arms and abs to shame a gym instructor. And he had been an English major before he went into mortgages—it was just about Love the one time she was making idle conversation and pointing out that not only was Allen Tate the name of the ubiquitous Realtor in Charlotte, but there was also a poet named that, and Zack looked ceilingward and began,
“Row after row with strict impunity / The headstones yield their names to the element…”
Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Shame about Zack having a wife.

And of course, Tony her contractor, just like her husband, Chuck, working-class hunky Southern male, beard stubble and a moustache, NASCAR T-shirt and country music blaring from the truck.
Hell yeah,
she would do him and he was edging closer to letting her. All she’d have to do is show up late to a renovation site after he sent the Mexicans home … and, while we’re on the subject, some of those
chihuahuaenses,
those vaqueros turned construction workers, she wouldn’t mind some fiesta time with those muchachos either—and those big brown eyes never failed to scan Annie from head to toe, aficionados of a plus-size woman, reminding her of the pure carnal oblivion that was Vinicius so many years ago.

Men! A world of working men, men sanding drywall, men installing stoves, men cutting tiles for the kitchen floor, men moving money, men drawing up papers, leaning in close with their sweat and cologne and arms and chests. All that maleness orbiting around her like she was the sun! They got up in the morning to work on her projects, to do her bidding.

Michael Oxamander, though. Suppose he’s out there somewhere, needing to find a home? She did wonder what he was up to. That was the one guy she kept thinking about, the one she didn’t and couldn’t rope in. Nowadays she could hold him. She was canny enough to keep him coming back. Perhaps. She’d give Myspace the once-over, try to find him on various social networks, Google him … He was off the grid. Maybe he would be Husband Number Four. Would he be proud of all that she accomplished? Or would he find her degraded by money, crass and commercial?

“Thanks for the cards,” Dorrie said, committing them to her handbag. “Guess I’ll be seeing all y’all Johnstons at the big wedding.”

*   *   *

Jerilyn’s wedding was at the Johnston house, which Annie took at first to mean that her family was finally broke … but that was before she saw the booty and swag assembled for the big day. No, it was at the house, Annie realized, so Jerene’s control could be utter and inexorable.

The Johnston homeplace had never been more beautiful; worn furniture was reupholstered, the out-of-date lighting fixtures were replaced, new carpet, new paint on the walls; and their yellowing backyard lawn, in the six months preceding the big day, was transformed into a flowering garden, aisles of tulips and irises, fringes marked by azalea and camellias, all blooming on cue for the June event. The caterers, under the direction of Alma and Jerene, outdid themselves.

There was a sweepstakesworthy tableau of gifts arrayed in the living room, a buffet of the ages in the garden, open bar in the kitchen area, a ziggurat of a cake aswirl in artisan frosting-flowers, and—here was a Jerene touch—there were varieties of chairs, divans, love seats, ottomans in all rooms of the house and corners of the yard so people could really be comfortable and not worry about flimsy rented folding chairs sinking into the grass or not supporting their weight. The weather, probably also secured by Jerene in a soul-leasing diabolical deal, was flawless.

Their brother Bo, aka Reverend Johnston of Stallings Presbyterian, performed the ceremony and the effect of his faltering a little, his voice wavering, as he stated the vows for his little baby sister got everyone dabbing their eyes. Skip looked like his usual shell-shocked, just-sobered-up self. Liddibelle Baylor, Skip’s mom and a longtime family friend, bawled through the whole ceremony, before, during, after, and would have kept on had Mom not slipped her a Valium. And Jerilyn was radiant. Annie told someone, without bitterness, just stating a fact, that “you could see who got the good looks” in this generation.

Annie made herself useful, talking to Aunt Dillard who was having one of her “bad days,” with her fibromyalgia; she also enjoyed talking politics with her sister-in-law Kate, Bo’s wife. At last, there was at least one other person nearly as liberal as she was in the family! Annie suspected Kate was on a kind of probation with Jerene, since Kate was, unforgivably, country as a turnip, twangy and loud-laughing from Fayetteville, North Carolina, but you could see why Bo married her—she was sunlight, kindness, goodness, endless energy. (In fact, she was surprised her staid brother had the good sense to marry someone like that.)