Wesko had hung, what was it now, eighty-five signs? The ads promoted the business he'd started with his recovering brother. Dark blue, shape of a barn—the signs said:
      WE BUY HOUSES. WITH CASH. AS-IS!
Wesko sat beside a young tree covered with plastic the city installed to keep dog piss off it. Here he ate his egg salad, staring at the sign, feeling the pinching swell of a cry. Shouldn't it be AS-ARE? he asked himself, and later his husband, and then his reverend. "Shouldn't it be, WE BUY HOUSES. WITH CASH. AS-ARE!, Doctor?"

The business did okay, but they both decided to quit when it got sad, just like all their businesses eventually did. The kind of people who were selling their homes for cash, as is, were the kind of people Wesko had always seen himself as separate from, but when he met a seller at a deed signing who used the same bald-spot cover-up hair-flip that he did, Wesko got the sense that there was no difference here at all, and it seemed almost like he was selling the houses to himself, as were. So, they shuttered it, the brothers did. Only now they couldn't go drink it off like they had in the past. Instead, they went to a library, who knows why, to read?

But it was Sunday. The library was closed. So they read instead a friend's text message inviting them to climb a mountain, wishing, as they read, that they had never read it. 


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