At my father’s dinner table, he mocked my husband for being poor while my five-year-old son…

At my father’s dinner table, he mocked my husband for being poor while my five-year-old son…

At my father’s dinner table, he mocked my husband for being poor while my 5-year-old son listened. My sister laughed and my mother said nothing. Then Dad told me to leave and never come back for Thanksgiving because they were happier without me. I picked up my son, turned around, and said five words. The closing agent called at 6:52 a.m.

4 days before Thanksgiving and said two words that made my stomach drop before she said anything else. We have a problem. I was standing in my kitchen in yesterday’s T-shirt, coffee halfway to my mouth, and I set the mug down so hard it sloshed onto the counter. Daniel was still in the shower. Noah was asleep. The house was quiet except for the furnace clicking on, and I remember thinking absurdly that this was the kind of silence that comes right before something breaks.

The appraisal came in low, Sandra Lou told me. She was the escrow officer at Ridgeline Title, a woman with a voice like she delivered bad news for a living and had stopped apologizing for it years ago. 41,000 under contract price. Your lender’s going to require you to either renegotiate the purchase price, bring the difference in cash at closing, or walk.

We don’t have 41,000 sitting around, Sandra. I know. I’m sorry. I wanted you to hear it from me before Diane calls. A pause. There’s something else you should probably know, too. Are you sitting down? I wasn’t. I sat down anyway, right there on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet, because some part of me already understood that whatever came next was going to matter more than the number.

The seller’s broker mentioned there’s a backup offer on the table. Came in yesterday afternoon, all cash, 5-day close, no contingencies. She hesitated. He said the buyer’s already a tenant in the building. I closed my eyes. There were six tenants in that building. A dental office, a nail salon, a tax preparer who worked out of a single room in the back, a vape shop that probably wasn’t going to renew its lease anyway, a physical therapy clinic, and Whitfield Insurance Group, my father’s business.

16 years in that same ground-floor suite, corner unit, big window facing the parking lot so people could see the sign from the road. Sandra, I said, “Does the backup offer have a name on it?” “I I have that yet. Richard’s supposed to send the LOI over this morning. Why? No reason. I lied. Just curious.

I hung up and sat on my kitchen floor for a long time doing math that had nothing to do with money. Here’s what my father never bothered to ask. In 11 years of calling my husband a mechanic like it was a diagnosis, what does a person do with the years he doesn’t spend being told he’s not enough? Daniel worked. That’s the whole answer if you want the short version.

He worked doubles at Ferris Automotive back when it was still just Marcus’s father’s shop, learned the business from oil changes up, married me in a courthouse because we couldn’t afford the venue his mother wanted, and never once complained about any of it in front of Noah. I used to watch him come home at 8:00 or 9:00 at night smelling like brake cleaner and cold coffee, peel off his coveralls in the laundry room so he wouldn’t track grease through the house, and ask about my day before he ever mentioned his own.

My father met that man exactly four times before deciding permanently who he was. When old Mr. Ferris decided to retire 3 years ago, he didn’t sell to the regional chain that offered him more. He offered it instead to his son and to Daniel in equal shares at a price that assumed they’d earned it because they had.

I remember the night Daniel came home and told me, sitting at our kitchen table with the offer letter in his hands like it might dissolve if he set it down too fast. He’s trusting me with his name, Daniel kept saying, more stunned by that than by the money. Mr. Ferris had built that shop from a single bay in 1987, handing half of it to a 26-year-old with no family money behind him was its own kind of faith, and Daniel never once treated it lightly.

We didn’t have savings, we had a plan. Daniel and Marcus took out a loan against the business itself. And for the first 18 months, we lived like the shop’s survival depended on every extra dollar we could throw at the debt because it did. I picked up bookkeeping shifts for two local contractors. Daniel stopped taking a full paycheck for four straight months the year Noah was born, and I never told my father that because by then I’d stopped telling my father anything that mattered.

By year two, the debt was manageable. By year three, it was gone, and the shop was profitable enough that Daniel and Marcus started talking in in easy way men talk when they trust each other about what came next. Marcus wanted a second location. Daniel wanted something steadier, income that didn’t depend on how many transmissions failed in a given month.

Patricia Nguyen, the CPA who’d done our books since the buyout, was the one who first said the word commercial real estate out loud in a conference room that smelled like burnt coffee and made it sound like something people like us were actually allowed to do. You’ve got two profitable businesses under one roof, she told us.

You’ve got clean books, no debt, and a banker who already trusts you. That’s rarer than you think. Most people your age with your net worth don’t know what they’re sitting on. Our net worth. I remember laughing when she said it, not because it was funny, but because I’d spent so many years hearing my father describe us as barely scraping by that the phrase sounded like it belonged to somebody else’s life.

We found the listing for 4400 Westerville Road 9 months ago. Mixed use, six units, fully leased, owned for 31 years by a man named Walter Kessler, who was tired and wanted to retire to Florida before his knees gave out completely. Daniel walked the building twice before I ever saw the listing sheet.

He liked the bones of it. The roof was newer than the paperwork suggested it should be, the parking lot had good drainage, and every tenant, according to Kessler, paid on time. I remember standing in that parking lot with him on a gray Saturday in February, both of us in jackets that weren’t warm enough, while he pointed out things I never would have noticed on my own, the way the gutters drained away from the foundation instead of toward it, the newer HVAC unit on the dental office’s side of the roof, the cracked asphalt near the dumpster that would

need patching within a year or two, but wasn’t an emergency yet. This is a good building that somebody just got tired of, he said. Those are the best kind to buy. I’d married a man who noticed drainage. My father had spent a decade acting like that made him small. It was Marcus who noticed the tenant roster first.

He read it out loud in the truck, unit by unit, the way you’d read a grocery list, until he got to suite 102 and said, Whitfield Insurance Group. Hey, isn’t that your dad’s outfit? I remember exactly what I felt, sitting in the passenger seat of Daniel’s truck with the listing sheet in my lap, not excitement, not even irony, not yet. Just a strange, cold clarity, like the moment you realize a door you thought was locked has been open the whole time.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s my dad’s outfit.” Daniel looked at me for a long moment. “You want to walk away from this one?” I thought about it. I really did. I want to be honest about that, because this isn’t a story about premeditated revenge, whatever it might sound like from the outside. I thought about how strange it would be to own the roof over my father’s head, professionally speaking, and I thought about whether that made me petty or just tired.

“No,” I said finally. “We looked at this building because it’s a good building. His lease doesn’t change that. Let’s not make it about him.” We tried not to. For months, we genuinely tried. The first strange detail came during due diligence, back in September, two months before any of this. Diane Kowalski, our attorney, 22 years in commercial real estate, a woman who talked in the clipped, unhurried cadence of someone who has read 10,000 contracts and never once been surprised by what people do for money, flagged something in the

estoppel certificates. An estoppel certificate is a simple thing, really. Each tenant signs a form confirming the terms of their lease, so the buyer knows exactly what they’re inheriting. Five of the six came back clean within a week. “My father’s did it. Whitfield’s estoppel is three weeks late,” Diane told us on a call.

“His office manager keeps telling Kessler’s assistant it’s being reviewed by counsel. For an estoppel certificate, that’s not normal. That’s someone stalling.” I told myself it was nothing. My father was like that with paperwork. He treated every document as a hill worth dying on, a way of reminding people that his time mattered more than theirs.

I’d watched him make a waiter reprint a receipt once because the tip line wasn’t itemized the way he liked. This was just Gerald being Gerald. Then Kessler’s assistant mentioned almost offhand that Whitfield’s office had also asked, twice, whether the listing broker could share who was interested in buying the building.

My hands went cold on the phone. “Why would he ask that? Sellers get asked that all the time,” Diane said, in the tone of someone trying to talk herself into her own reassurance as much as me. “Tenants get nervous about new ownership. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” I wanted to believe her. I told Daniel it didn’t mean anything three separate times that week.

The way you repeat something so it’ll finally sound true. Then in October, Kessler’s broker, Richard Austerander, a heavy-set, good-natured man who’d been selling commercial property in the county for almost 30 years, mentioned during a routine call that the insurance guy in 102 had asked unprompted whether Kessler would consider selling directly to him instead of going through with an existing contract for the right number.

That was the evidence. That was the moment denial stopped being a place I could comfortably live. I remember standing in our garage that evening while Daniel worked on our own car under a drop light and telling him what Austerander said and watching his jaw tighten in a way I rarely saw. Not anger, exactly, something quieter and more resolved.

“He doesn’t even know it’s us,” Daniel said. “No, he just knows somebody’s about to be his landlord and he can’t stand not being in control of that.” Daniel wiped his hands on a rag, slow, like he was giving himself time to choose his words. “Then let’s make sure he doesn’t find out until it’s done. If he knows it’s you, he’ll turn this into a war instead of a real estate deal.

And wars like that, he doesn’t fight fair.” We kept our names off everything we could. The LLC, Cole Ferris Holdings, and was formed months before the listing even went up for the shop’s original insurance purposes, so there was nothing suspicious about its paperwork trail. Diane structured the offer so that Daniel signed as managing member and I wasn’t listed anywhere a casual observer would look.

It felt at the time less like scheming and more like armor. I tried twice to make peace with my father that same month before any of this came to a head. I want that on the record, too. I called him in early October and asked carefully, evenly, whether we could talk about Thanksgiving. He let me get four sentences in before he said, “I already told you where I stand, Emily,” and hung up.

My mother texted me a week later, “Give it time. He’ll come around. You know how he is.” The same sentence she’d been sending me since I was 19 years old, as if patience were a debt only I owed. So no, I didn’t go into November trying to hurt him. I went into November trying to buy a building and he was the one who kept climbing into the middle of it.

By the first week of of Austerander’s offhand comment had become something closer to a pattern. Kessler mentioned to Diane that the tenant in 102 had stopped by his house, his actual By the first week of November, Austranders’ off-hand comment had become something closer to a pattern. Kessler mentioned to Diane that the tenant in 102 had stopped by his house, his actual house, uninvited, to discuss the future of the property, businessman to businessman.

My stomach dropped the way it does on the downhill part of a roller coaster. That half second where your body knows before your brain catches up. I pictured my father standing on Walter Kessler’s porch in one of his good coats, doing the thing he does where he makes ordinary conversation feel like a negotiation you didn’t agree to enter.

I called Patricia, our CPA, mostly because I needed to hear a calm voice say numbers instead of feelings. “Even if he tries to outbid us,” she said, “cash isn’t the only thing that matters to a seller like Kessler. He’s tired. He wants certainty. A financed offer from a buyer with clean books and no drama can beat an all-cash offer from someone who makes his broker’s life miserable.

Don’t panic yet.” I didn’t panic. I rationalized instead, which is its own kind of quiet drowning. “He’s just a nosy tenant asking questions,” I told myself. “He doesn’t actually know. He can’t actually know.” I went to Noah’s parent-teacher conference that week and smiled through the whole thing and didn’t tell Daniel how many times my phone buzzed with Austranders’ name on the screen and how many of those calls I let go to voicemail because I was afraid of what was in them.

Two of them were about the appraisal coming in soft, weeks before Sandra’s call, an early warning we thought we’d handled by adjusting our loan terms with Tom Bellamy, our loan officer at First Ridge Community Bank, a steady, unhurried man who’d financed the original shop buyout and knew our history better than half our own relatives did.

“We can work with a slightly lower valuation,” Tom told us in early November. “Just don’t let the gap grow.” The gap grew. Then, the second week of November, a fourth thing happened that I still can’t quite explain except to say that some instincts don’t need proof to be right. My mother called on a Wednesday afternoon, out of nowhere, and asked too casually, the way she asks things when she’s been told to ask them, whether Daniel had picked up any new business lately, not new customers, new business.

I told her the shop was doing fine and changed the subject, and she let me too easily, like she’d already gotten whatever answer she’d been sent to fish for. I called Daniel at the garage that night, my hands cold around the phone even though the house was warm. I think my dad’s using my mom to find out what we’re doing, I said.

That’s insane, right? Tell me that’s insane. He didn’t tell me that. He went quiet instead. The kind of quiet that meant he was already three steps ahead of me. Insane or not, he said, we close before he figures out the rest. I tried once more to head it off cleanly. I called my mother back the next morning and asked her directly, point-blank, whether dad had said anything about a property on Westerville Road.

She laughed, a short nervous laugh I’d heard my whole childhood, and said, why would he know anything about that? Don’t be paranoid, Emily, which is of course exactly what a person says when the answer is yes and they’ve been told not to say it. Vanessa texted me on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving week, a single message with no greeting.

Hope you’re happy. Dad’s stressed about work and now he has to deal with your drama on top of it. Real family shows up even when it’s hard. Guess that’s not you. I read it standing in the shop’s little front office, where I’d started helping with the books three afternoons a week once Noah started kindergarten.

Marcus glanced up from the counter, saw my face, and had the decency not to ask. I didn’t respond to Vanessa. I’d learned a long time ago that responding just gave her a new place to stand. My mother called that same night, crying in the particular way she cries when she wants you to fix her feelings for her.

Can’t you just apologize to your father? For Noah’s sake, it’s Thanksgiving. Mom, he told me not to come back. He didn’t mean it. You know how he gets. I did know how he gets. I’d known it my whole life, the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in even in the dark. What I didn’t say to her, what I couldn’t say to her, not yet, was that in 72 hours, how he gets was about to become considerably less useful to him.

Then came the 24 hours that I still, months later, have trouble describing without my hands going cold again. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Sandra’s call about the low appraisal had come that morning. By 4:00 in the afternoon, Richard Ostrander called Diane directly, and Diane called us on speaker in Marcus’s cramped little office at the shop, surrounded by parts catalogs and a space heater that smelled like scorched dust.

“The backup offer just got more serious,” Diane said. “They came in 25,000 over your contract price. All cash, willing to close within five business days, which, given the calendar, means before Thanksgiving. Kessler’s attorney is asking for our best and final by tomorrow at noon. We can’t beat 25,000 cash,” Daniel said. His voice was flat, the way it goes when he’s holding something down hard.

“You might not need to,” Diane said. “But you need to close the appraisal gap and show proof of funds that’s at least as convincing as theirs, or Kessler’s going to take the sure thing. I’ve seen it happen. Tired sellers pick certainty over money nine times out of 10, but only if the certainty looks real. How much time do we have?” I asked.

“Best and final is due to Kessler’s attorney by noon tomorrow. So, call it 20 hours.” 20 hours. I remember writing it on the back of a parts receipt Marcus had left on the counter, like putting a number on it would make it smaller. It didn’t. Patricia joined the call 5 minutes later.

Tom Bellamy joined after that, from his car in a bank parking lot, eating what sounded like a sandwich he clearly hadn’t planned on eating at his desk. For the next several hours, our kitchen table turned into something between a war room and a confessional. Patricia pulled every account we had, the shop’s reserve fund, our savings, a small inheritance from Daniel’s grandmother that we’d never touched because it felt like bad luck to spend it.

Tom ran numbers against the bank’s guidelines twice, said no the first time, then found a way to restructure the loan-to-value using the shop’s financials as additional collateral, something he later admitted he’d only agreed to because he’d watched Daniel pay off the original buyout loan 2 years ahead of schedule without missing a single payment.

“That’s not nothing,” Tom said. “That’s the kind of history that makes a bank comfortable being flexible.” Around 9:00 that night, Marcus showed up at our door unannounced, still in his shop uniform, and set an envelope on our kitchen table without a word. $6,000, his own savings, no strings, no interest, just a look on his face that said, “Don’t argue with me about this.

You’d do it for me,” he said when I tried anyway. “You did do it for me 3 years ago when I couldn’t cover my half of the parts order and you two ate ramen for a month and never once brought it up again.” I cried a little in the kitchen after he left. Not from sadness, but from the specific, disorienting relief of being helped by someone who never once made it feel like a transaction.

By 10:30, we were $4,000 short of where Tom needed us to be and Patricia was cross-referencing our accounts for the third time, hunting for anything we’d forgotten. A business reserve account, a small overpayment sitting with the county on last year’s property taxes for the shop, anything. “There,” she said finally, tapping her screen.

“You overfunded your quarterly estimate in September by 3,800. I can get that released, but it’ll take a same-day request first thing tomorrow, which means it has to be filed the second the tax office opens, not a minute later.” Diane redrew the purchase agreement twice that night, tightening the financing contingency language so it read, in her words, “Like a buyer who isn’t going anywhere,” and stripped out a minor repair credit we’d originally asked for, so the offer looked cleaner on paper even if it wasn’t larger in dollars. “Sellers don’t just buy price,”

she said. “They buy peace of mind. Let’s sell him peace of mind.” Noah was asleep by the time we wired the additional funds request through, but I remember standing at the counter at 11:40 that night watching Daniel review Diane’s revised purchase agreement on his laptop. His eyes red-rimmed, a mechanic’s hands typing his own name onto a document that would make him, for the first time in his life, someone’s landlord.

“If we lose it,” I said, “we lose the deposit, too. $15,000.” “I know. Are you scared?” He looked up at me and for a second the exhaustion cracked into something almost like a smile. “I’ve been scared since the day I told your father I was going to marry his daughter. This is just Tuesday.” We hit send on the final numbers at 1:04 in the morning, Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, was the longest day I have ever lived through while doing something as mundane as folding laundry because that’s what you do apparently when your entire financial future is sitting in an

inbox somewhere and there’s nothing left for you to control. I folded four loads of laundry that did not need folding. I reorganized the pantry. I let Noah watch two extra hours of cartoons and didn’t feel a single ounce of guilt about it. Ostrander called Diane at 2:15 that afternoon. Kessler had chosen us.

Diane relayed later what Ostrander told her about why. My father, furious, she said, borderline unprofessional on the phone with Kessler’s own attorney, had tried to shave a contingency into his offer at the last minute. A request to personally inspect and approve every existing lease before closing, which read to anyone paying attention like a man trying to buy control rather than property.

He’d also apparently been rude enough to Kessler’s assistant over the Astapole delay months earlier that Kessler remembered it specifically, unprompted, when deciding who he wanted to hand his life’s work to. Kessler told Richard he didn’t want to sell his building to somebody who was going to make his last months as an owner miserable, Diane said.

He said the other buyer, meaning us, meaning Daniel, meaning a name Kessler had never once connected to a mechanics shop and a family dinner table, never once gave him a hard time, showed up on time, didn’t waste his broker’s hours. He said that mattered to him more than $25,000. We closed the next morning, Thanksgiving morning, 9:40 a.m. A conference room at Ridgeline a.m.

A conference room at Ridgeline Title that smelled like stale coffee and printer toner. Sandra Lou sliding documents across the table one at a time. Daniel signing his name, his real name, Daniel Cole, managing member, Cole Ferris Holdings LLC, on page after page while I sat beside him with Noah’s baby monitor still somehow clipped to my bag out of habit and thought about my father sitting down, 3 hours away, to a turkey at a table with one fewer chair than it should have had.

See, the notice of change of ownership went out by certified mail the following Monday, addressed to every tenant of 4400 Westerville Road, including suite 102. I wasn’t there when my father opened it. I only have Ostrander’s account, relayed second-hand through Diane, and then my mother’s account, given to me in a phone call four days later, in a voice I hadn’t heard her use in years.

Not sharp, not performative, just quiet and a little stunned, like someone describing weather. He read the letter twice, apparently, standing at the reception desk of his own office. New landlord entity, Cole Ferriss Holdings LLC, new payment instructions. And near the bottom, where the letter listed a contact for lease questions, a name and a cell phone number he recognized immediately, because he’d spent 11 years using it as an insult at his own dinner table, Daniel Cole.

My mother said he didn’t speak for almost a full minute. His office manager thought something had happened to him. Then he asked her, very quietly, to get Kessler’s old broker on the phone. And when Austrender confirmed, yes, the sale had closed, yes, it was final, yes, that was in fact the same Daniel Cole, my father hung up without saying goodbye and didn’t come out of his office for the rest of the afternoon. He called me that evening.

I almost didn’t answer. “Is this a joke?” he said when I picked up, not a question, a demand dressed as one. “No,” I said. “You bought my building.” “Daniel and Marcus bought a building. It happens to have your business in it.” “That wasn’t the plan, Dad. It’s just where the good listing was.” There was a long silence on the line, the kind I’d spent my whole life filling for him, apologizing into, smoothing over, so he wouldn’t have to sit in his own discomfort. I didn’t fill it this time.

I let it stretch until it was his to carry. “I have a lease,” he finally said, quieter than I’d ever heard him. “You can’t just Nobody’s touching your lease, Dad. You’re a good tenant. You pay on time. That’s not personal. That’s just business. I think you taught me that phrase, actually, a long time ago.” I paused.

“You’re the one who made everything personal at that dinner table, not me.” He didn’t have an answer for that. For possibly the first time in my adult life, my father was the one without a script. Austrender told Diane a few days later, almost gleefully, that my father had shown up at his office in person that same week.

Not to complain this time, but to ask, very stiffly, whether the sale could somehow be unwound. Richard had explained, as gently as a man in commercial real estate is capable of, that closed is closed, that Walter Kessler was already on a beach somewhere south of Tampa, and that the new owner of 4400 Westerville Road had every legal right to be exactly who he was.

He asked me twice if I was sure, Richard told Diane, like the paperwork might change its mind if he asked politely enough the third time. I heard second hand that his office manager watched him take that meeting and come back quieter than she’d ever seen him. Not humbled, not yet, but rattled in a way that seemed to cost him something to hide from his own staff for the rest of the day.

He didn’t apologize that night. I want to be honest about that, too, because tidy apologies are for movies, not for men like my father who have spent 61 years believing that admitting fault is a form of collapse. What happened instead was smaller and in its way more real. Three weeks later Diane forwarded a routine lease amendment request from Whitfield Insurance Group, a minor request to adjust signage on the building’s exterior, standard stuff, except that this time the request came through the front door, formally, with none of the

maneuvering that had defined every interaction that had passed through that building for months. Daniel approved it the same day. No comment attached, no leverage pulled. He told me later he did it specifically that way, quick, clean, unremarkable, because he wanted my father to feel in the most boring administrative way possible what it was like to be treated fairly by someone he’d spent years treating as beneath him.

Vanessa found out at some point in December. I don’t know exactly how, only that her texts stopped being cruel and started being strange, half-formed, like she was recalibrating something she’d built her whole identity around. She never apologized, either, but she also never brought up the SUV again. My mother called me the week after that and for the first time in longer than I could remember, she didn’t ask me to smooth anything over.

She just asked how Noah was doing in school and whether Daniel liked the new property. And when I mentioned, almost testing her, that the roof needed some work before winter, she said, “He always did buy things without checking the roof first.” And I realized, with a strange, unfamiliar warmth, that she was talking about my father and that some small, buried part of her had been watching him for years, taking notes, waiting for someone else to say it out loud.

Patricia sent us the closing summary in January, the way she does every deal. A tidy one-page breakdown of numbers that had felt like a war a few weeks earlier, and now just looked like a spreadsheet. Purchase price, loan amount, reserve balance, a line item labeled Marcus Ferris repayment, which Daniel had insisted on adding even though Marcus told him twice not to bother.

At the bottom, in Patricia’s dry, professional handwriting on the printed copy she gave us in person, “You two built this. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” I keep that copy in a drawer open often, mostly because I don’t need to. I remember what it says. We had our own Thanksgiving the year after, the two-year mark, at our house, at a table with exactly the right number of chairs.

Marcus and his wife came. Patricia came, because by then she’d stopped being just our accountant and had become something closer to family, the kind you choose. My mother came, too, alone, and sat next to Noah, who was six now, and had stopped asking whether his father was poor, because at some point in the last year he’d overheard Marcus, half-joking, call Daniel the guy who owns half the block.

And that had apparently settled the matter for him completely. My father wasn’t there. I didn’t invite him, and he didn’t ask to come, and I think we both understood without saying it that some doors don’t reopen just because the weather’s turned cold and sentimental. What we had instead was quieter than reconciliation, and I think more honest.

A landlord and a tenant who paid each other the professional respect neither had managed as father-in-law. A lease renewed on time every year since. A Christmas card that arrived, unexpectedly, the December after the sale, signed only Gerald and Carol. No note, no apology, just a name where silence used to be.

Daniel still calls it the best deal he never planned to make. I still think about that dinner table sometimes, my father’s wine glass catching the light, Noah’s fork frozen midair, the five words I said on my way out the door. I was wrong about one thing, though, looking back. I told him he’d regret it. He never said he did.

He didn’t have to. Every first of the month, for the rest of the time he leases that corner suite with the big window facing the parking lot, he writes a check to a company with my husband’s name on it. The same hands he once said had grease under the nails, now the ones signing off on the roof over his head. Some men apologize with words.

My father apologizes, if you can call it that, with a rent check that clears on time every single month without fail. I’ll take it.