Monsoon

It’s not easy being RE/MAX’s top Scottsdale realtor for sixteen straight years. But that was exactly what Lisette Buckingham had achieved. When asked at the 2019 Western Arizona Realtors Conference what her secret was, she did not mince words. “Dynamism,” she said.

From the moment Lisette’s toes touched her bedroom carpet, she was moving. She started with a shower, rolling through it like her hybrid Audi at a gas station car wash, then moved onto her espresso machine where she twisted knobs and pressed the tamper till thick sludge dripped from the filter and into her favorite to-go cup.

By 8am—and 7am on Sundays—she was scouting properties or meeting buyers or wandering up and down grocery store aisles with a cart of non-perishables while eavesdropping on conversations in the hopes of picking up gossip she could use to her advantage. An ugly divorce… a late mortgage payment… a grandmother who broke her hip and might finally be giving up her Paradise Valley four-bedroom...

Lisette prided herself on knowing more about the city than her competition. Any old Coldwell Banker agent could compare neighborhood values and school ratings. Lisette went further, studying weather patterns and subclimates on individual streets.

“You don’t want to live on that cul-de-sac,” she would tell a client. “Monsoons hit that pocket extra hard in the late summer. Always have. You’ll be buying a new roof every ten years.”

Her pace of activity was all the more impressive given the steady creep of her weight from a forgettable 145 pounds to a hard-to-miss 265 frame. But Lisette’s size matched her presence. When she arrived at an open house, other realtors unconsciously moved behind potted plants or disappeared into walk-in pantries. She was like a black hole, and everyone feared if they stepped too close to her they would be sucked in and only emerge a decade later somewhere south of Tucson as a broker for dilapidated mobile homes.

In their defense, Lisette had decimated the careers of numerous plucky agents over the years. Usually these were realtors who were first on the scene when a golf course community broke ground and naively believed they could establish themselves as the young sexy agents for a fresh flock of snowbirds.

But Lisette Buckingham was not about to be outfoxed by youth and good looks. And before winter had even arrived, she was on a chartered RE/MAX flight to Vancouver and Calgary and Winnipeg with floor plans in one hand and a duffel bag full of Titleist Pro-V1s in the other. When the sexy agents’ clients went to put their money down on the new properties, they were shocked to learn every lot had already been sold, sight unseen.

“Find a different desert,” Lisette group texted. More often than not, they did.

Still, the community at large revered her. She was their constant. A pillar of strength. If you wanted to accomplish anything of note in Scottsdale, you didn’t get very far before someone advised you to “talk to Lisette.” She always had an idea. Usually the right one. The locals hoped she might run for mayor. Maybe even governor. But Lisette only ever wanted to be the Shining Star of Scottsdale Real Estate. And so she sparkled.

And yet her personal life was a mystery. For as much time as she spent in other people’s homes, no one had ever been invited inside hers. There were theories, of course. Rumors, really. That Lisette Buckingham had a secret family up in Prescott that she only visited during the summer. Or that real estate was a way to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel.

Unfortunately, the great secret was that beyond the awards and commendations and six-percent broker fee, Lisette had no one. No significant other. No children. Her only friends were her clients, but those relationships never lasted longer than the thirty or sixty-day escrow. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a great uncle east of the city in Tortilla Flat. But there was nothing great about him, to put it gently, and, as soon as she could, Lisette moved west to Scottsdale and started a life. All on her own.

She didn’t land on real estate because she loved sales or even people. What she loved was the idea of having her regal-sounding name and happy smile plastered on bus benches and billboards and front lawns from Camelback Mountain all the way up to Cave Creek. She was multiplying herself, if only in paper and ink. And if Lisette Buckingham were ever to be introspective, which Lisette Buckingham never seemed to be, she might confess she held the deepest of hopes that some distant relative would see her name and graft her into an extended family that had long ago forgotten her.

For two decades and counting, no one had. Instead, with every passing season, Lisette grew a little bit larger and a little bit redder. Her once enviable “dynamism” was slowly being replaced with something more menacing. And as she reached middle age and the roots of her hair turned white, she began to resemble a walking pimple—round, red, and about to burst.

And burst she did. Regularly. At potential buyers who had a change of heart. At sellers refusing to consider her offer. But like small tremors along fault lines, they didn’t ease the pressure. They were foreshocks. Harbingers of a major seismic event to come.

It was a Tuesday morning in late August when the “Big One” finally struck. Lisette was at the Whole Foods on Scottsdale Road, just down the street from Grayhawk Country Club. She had been eavesdropping on two botoxed golf wives discussing a wave of firings at a Tempe software company. Instantly, Lisette could see the downstream effects: a market flood of single-family homes near Pima Acres.

Wheeling her cart around, Lisette prepared a mental list of clients to call as she powered up the cereal aisle to an open register where the checker was already bagging the person in front of her. Lisette exhaled, confident that she would be at her Audi in four minutes tops.

But then, to her horror, she watched as the checker abandoned her station mid-bagging.

“No no no…” Lisette said under her breath.

The checker walked around to the elderly woman in her line and held out her arms.

“What is happening?” Lisette said a little louder.

To her dismay, the customer fell into the checker’s embrace and the two began to hug.

“Oh come on…”

“I am so sorry for your loss,” the checker whispered. Lisette stole a glance at the checker’s name tag. Cheyenne. She made a note to avoid her in the future.

After ten seconds, the two were still hugging. In fact, Lisette noticed they were now rocking. Left and right and left and right… It was less hug and more dance now. With each rock they rotated twenty degrees. Eventually, the old woman’s face came into view. Eyes puffy, snot running down her nose.

Lisette looked away, uncomfortable, and drew her attention to the still-moving conveyor belt where the sad woman’s unbagged items were piling up. She counted them. Twenty-three. She noticed condensation forming on the outside of a half-pint of rocky road ice cream.

“Oh my sweet love,” Cheyenne said to the elderly woman.

Lisette pondered what sort of tragedy could have befallen a woman of that advanced age that could really be worthy of all this blubbery. If anything, this woman still being alive herself was a minor miracle.

“Ice cream,” Lisette blurted out.

Cheyenne looked back at Lisette as she rocked into view again.

“I’m sorry?”

“She bought ice cream,” Lisette pointed. “It’s melting. Just thought someone might care.”

The comment accomplished exactly what Lisette intended and the old woman finally patted Cheyenne on the shoulder and pulled back from the hug. “I better get going. Gotta keep living. That’s what everyone says. That’s what Reginald would have wanted,” she said, drying her tears and wiping her nose with a wadded up Kleenex.

Cheyenne bagged the rest of the woman’s groceries then flagged another employee to help her make it safely to her car, giving one last rub on the arm as she shuffled off with her head down.

Relieved to have that over with, Lisette stepped forward as if their previous exchange never happened. “Good morning,” she said.

Cheyenne scanned Lisette’s items in silence—two bottles of rosé and a tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls—but instead of announcing the total, she looked Lisette in the eyes and said, “That woman was grieving.”

Lisette’s eyes were focused on the key pad. “Clearly,” she answered, tapping her credit card to pay.

The register spit out a receipt. Cheyenne ignored it. “And what, you ain’t ever cried like that?”

Lisette found the question absurd. Unfathomable. Insulting, in fact. “Do I look like a child?” she said.

Cheyenne did not realize that this was intended as a rhetorical question. Rather, she accepted it at face value and took in Lisette Buckingham as objectively as she could. The splotchy skin, the round face, the thin hair of an indiscernible shade, the folds of fat around her wrists and neck.

“I mean, kinda…” Cheyenne responded.

The unapologetic honesty of the answer pierced Lisette’s soul and she started to tremble. It began in her knees and spread north through her sturdy hips and barrel chest. Something large had been dislodged and was rising internally toward her licorice red face. Forgetting her receipt, Lisette swiped her groceries from the register and ran as fast as she could for her car.

Lisette sped through Scottsdale, struggling to breathe. As her vision grew blurry, she flipped on her emergency flashers and flew through red lights and stop signs, scattering cars behind her as she went. She pulled safely into her garage and rolled out of her car, stumbling down the hall before tripping over her own feet and falling face first onto the travertine floor of her sunken living room.

Her torso’s impact with the polished stone acted as the final thrust for what had been brewing, and there, all alone, Lisette Buckingham, the Shining Star of Scottsdale and 16-time RE/MAX realtor of the year, started to weep.

The tears came on slowly, like those first thick drops from her espresso machine. But then they came faster. And steady. Within ten minutes a small puddle had formed around Lisette’s heaving body. At the hour mark, the living room had taken on an inch of water. But Lisette was just getting started. She cried the rest of the morning without ceasing. By lunchtime, her tears had breached the living room and were spreading through the rest of her house. By dinner, she was floating above the furniture as the saline mix covered every surface and stretched into every crevice. As darkness settled on her street, anything that wasn’t tied down in Lisette’s 3,731-square foot home drifted up and out as dry wall withered and bay windows cracked under the pressure of four decades of unconfronted pain.

The following morning, Lisette Buckingham’s neighbors woke up to find their street was strewn with all of Lisette’s intimate possessions. Underwear and prescription bottles and credit card statements and draft after draft of handwritten letters to distant relatives that she never had the courage to send.

And lying face up at the bottom of the driveway, her tears now slowed to a trickle, was Lisette herself. As the August sun crested the brown mountains and lit up her face, she squinted and opened her eyes. Then she gingerly rolled to her side and stood up.

She was barely recognizable. Her clothes hung loosely off her body. After shedding all that water weight, she was no longer the 265-pound rock that realtors had come to fear. She was softened. Closer to that vulnerable young girl who set out from Tortilla Flats all those years ago to make a name for herself.

A concerned neighbor stepped over Lisette’s belongings and through her tears and set a hand on her shoulder. “Lisette? Are you okay?”

Lisette didn’t answer with words. She just gave her neighbor a long, wet hug.

Then she started to rock. The neighbor rocked with her. When the tears finally stopped, Lisette took a breath, pulled away, and looked into her neighbor’s eyes. “How are you?”

The neighbor could see that, for once, she meant it. “I’m okay. How are you?”

Lisette considered all that had transpired. Then, with a buoyant spirit, she answered. “I’m drained.”

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