St. Salesman
by Katherine Glover
The Rake
February 2004
My mother’s house wasn’t selling. No one was even looking at it; a total of four open houses had yielded less than a dozen people, most of them curious neighbors with no intention of buying. When she shared her troubles with co-workers at the hospital where she works, a fellow nurse directed her to obtain a miniature statue of St. Joseph, bury it in the back yard, and pray for him to sell the house. My mother’s not a religious person, but she figured she had nothing to lose.