Rob and I fell in love with our house at first sight.
We knew we couldn't afford it, but we took to dropping by during the months it languished on the market, chatting up the owner, an elderly Austrian man, in the hopes that maybe he would see that we were meant to have it, despite our limited financial resources.
And on one such visit he told us about Charlie.
She was a pretty girl, he said, despite her advancing age. Many nights she didn't have the means to feed her family and so she would tap on the back door. He didn't mind. He had grown used to seeing her silhouette in the moonlight. He had grown to depend on her dependence.
"I worry," he said. "I worry that whoever buys this house won't look out for Charlie like I do, that they won't care about her. She's old now. She needs me."
We will, we promised him. We will look after Charlie.
And he nodded. A deal is a deal.
"It's time you made an offer," he said.
And so we made an offer to buy the house. And it was way too low, but he accepted it to our great surprise. We were home owners.
And only a few days after we moved in Charlie tapped on our back door, just like we knew she would.
She was very old and much more frail than we had imagined. And she had a little one with her, her daughter we assumed. They were bloodied, as if they had been in a fight. Her daughter was missing most of one ear.
We were nervous, but we fed them. They were wary of us too, but too weak to refuse our kindness.
They came almost every night after that. And all that summer Charlie grew older and weaker and her daughter stronger and more robust.
And one night Charlie didn't come. Her daughter tapped on our door. Her mangled ear glittered tragically in the moonlight. We gave her extra food. We knew we would never see Charlie again.
It has been six years since we last saw Charlie but her daughter, instantly recognizable by her ear, taps on our door several nights a week. She has no fear of us and we have no fear of her. Horace treats her as a contemporary. Graham is enamoured of her.
Charlie's daughter has a family of her own now. Every year she has a new family in fact. And every year she lines her youngsters up and nudges them towards us one by one.
And sometimes we feel a little strange about the whole thing. We wonder if maybe Charlie's dependence and her daughter's dependence on us is wrong in some fundamental way: if perhaps we are somehow subverting the laws of nature.
But after all is said and done, we conclude, Charlie and her family were here long before we were.
And peanut butter sandwiches are cheap.
And a deal is a deal.
