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Chapter 13
Mike and Kirsten had gone right in to see Frank Matson the first thing Friday morning. They hadn't expected any problem; Frank had stuck his neck out a little ten years before, when they bought their house, and had never missed a payment. Frank was a friend,
anyway, and his main comment had been, "About time you got a decent house." Still, he'd had to run it past the loan board, which didn't meet till Tuesday, so the two had decided not to break the news to the kids until they'd gotten the official word.
Tuesday was always a tough day around the Record-Herald; it was paper day, and this was a big paper for this time of the year. The problem was that there wasn't a lot of news for the front page. Mike had banked on the County Commission meeting filling out a big
chunk of it, but thanks to vacations and hospital stays, the commission had come up one short of a quorum. This was an off week for the city council, too, so that knocked out the possibility of another regular headline. The school board had met Monday night, but had managed to
make it through an absolutely nothing meeting in fourteen minutes flat. The only possibility of a headline there was that they had managed to finish a meeting in fourteen minutes, rather than the normal four boring hours. While the story Mike had turned up about the plant
expansion in Warsaw would go a long way toward filling the front page, but it lacked the Spearfish Lake local angle needed for a lead story.
Mike really had needed a lead story, and the only possibility he could think of would to be to do an in-depth story on the storm sewer separation, The thought even bored him, so he didn't put a lot of effort into it. He called up city manager Don Kutzley, and talked with
him for a few minutes, getting a couple of possible quotes, but nothing he didn't already know. A conversation with Jack Knoblauch, the sewer system superintendent, came out with about the same results.
Finally, as the afternoon wore on, Mike pulled a story about the need for the storm sewer separation out of the clip files from a couple years before, plated the quotes and losing the grant application over the top of it, and called it good enough.
"Nothing really wrong with it," he told Varner, who wandered in to report that he had no last-minute items that would make a lead story, "Except no one will pay attention to it until they realize how hard it's going to hit them in the wallet, and until this grant business gets
settled and the bids are let, no one will know how bad that's going to be." Mike finished spell-checking the story, saved it to a disk, and gave the disk to Varner. "Set it up for a three-column block, and a two-deck head, then run it off," he ordered. "I'd better wander up to the
layout room and see what other garbage we've got that we can make a front page out of."
"Aye, 'tis done," Varner replied. He'd been an English Lit major, with drama and journalism minors, and Shakespeare sometimes worked its way out. He headed off to the 286 that was connected to the Laserprinter, and Mike started to get up when the phone rang.
The caller proved to be Frank Matson. "You can call up Binky and tell her you've bought a house," he said. "The loan committee approved. You're going to need a title search and some other stuff, so it's probably going to be a month before we can close."
"Nothing wrong with that," Mike agreed. "It'll take us a month to get ready to move, and I'd really rather not move until after school's out, anyway."
"Yeah, well, that's the way it works some times," Matson said. "You get with Binky, and we can work out a time to do the paperwork."
Kirsten walked into the office, just as Mike was hanging up the phone. "That was Frank," he said. "We got the loan. It'll take a month to finish up the loose ends, but I told him that I'd just as soon move after the kids were out of school, anyway."
"That means, right about the first full week after school's out," Kirsten said.
"Yeah," Mike agreed. "I guess we'll have to put the kids in day care again, though."
Kirsten frowned. "Tiffany is starting to get a little old for day care. I'd kind of hoped we could get her into the summer rec program here in town."
Mike laughed. "She's at that awkward age. Too old for day care, and too young for a job at the ice cream parlor." He paused for a moment, and went on, "You know, if we're not going to be out at the club a lot this summer, maybe we ought to give Gil and see what it
would cost to put a hot tub put in at the new house, maybe in that third garage bay that we're not going to use anyway."
"It'd be nice to have an outdoor hot tub in the winter," Kirsten opined.
"Yeah, but it would cost a ton to heat. Gil tried it years ago, and he wasn't too happy about it," he reminded her. "Besides, living out there, we're probably going to need a snowmobile, and even a used one worth anything is going to cost us a thousand or so."
"A hot tub at home would be nice," Kirsten agreed. "My back hurts enough now that I can't imagine how bad it's going to be in a couple of months. Maybe Gil could have it put in by the time we move in."
Mike nodded. Carrot and stick had worked again, this time, more the carrot. "Can't talk to Gil today," he said. "Maybe tomorrow, if we can get wrapped up early."
