ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 35: Cindi’s House?
Joshua shows Charles Street to Cindi and Scott a second time.
She calls him. “When you and I talked the other day, I was agreeable to your price, but my husband is not. He will only go eight thousand over what you paid for it. That’s it. If you want me to try to find a buyer for you who will give you more, I’ll do that.”
Joshua is agreeable to Scott’s price. “I would have sold it to them for even less than that,” he tells me afterward.
“I would have urged you to take anything close to what you paid for it just to be rid of it,” I say. “We’ve gotten lucky here. We overextended ourselves, but you’ll still manage to make a sizeable profit on your investment.”
“It’s not a done deal,” Joshua says, “not until I get the cash, but Cindi’s a straight shooter. She’s started the paperwork on her end already.”
“What a life lesson this has been, Joshua.”
“It’s been a good thing, in a way. The house got me out of L. A. Got me away from the crazy woman I lived with who throws pots and chairs at me, fights me, and says she wants to kill me. Got me away from the two movies I’ve been plagued with for the past three years. I have clarity now. I’m stopping my search for a rental property in this town. More than I ever have before, I feel like a displaced person here. I don’t fit in. I don’t like the cold, the gloom. I don’t meet artsy people. Where are they? Even the drivers here are retarded. I have to watch drivers here more than I do in L. A. . . . It’s not my home anymore.”
In three or four weeks, Cindi and her husband will be the new owners of the house on Charles Street. They’ll make money on it. They can’t flip it for a year because of a capital-gains rule, but they’ll do the interior work while it’s cold, the exterior work in the spring, then rent it out until the following spring. They’ll replace all the windows. Put in closets. Hang bronze chandeliers. Prettify the kitchen and bath. It’ll look good. It will be in good hands.
Joshua will head back to L. A. to look for a new place to call home, for himself alone, in Burbank. That’s his plan . . . as of today, anyway.
