Keeping House: A Christian Romantic Comedy

She clears out other people’s houses. He sells what’s left. Neither of them can let go of a single thing.

When a man who has lived a hundred years in the same house finally passes away, he leaves behind nineteen rooms, six outbuildings, and a family who cannot agree on a dollar-fifty dishpan.

Tess Ammons has cleared more than three hundred houses in sixteen years. Her rule is simple: don’t keep anything. Price it. Tag it. Sell it. Drive away.

Nine weeks on a job. A flat fee. A handshake on the porch. Gone.

She is very good at leaving things behind. She has just never managed to do it once, in her own life, when it mattered.

Jared Landrum takes his hat off before he gets out of the truck.

He is an auctioneer, and he’s been hired to sell the same house Tess has been hired to clear. The problem? Jared won’t budge an inch. He tells a room exactly what’s wrong with every piece before he sells it, and he has never once lied to Tess about a chest of drawers.

He is also carrying something he won’t talk about, locked inside a building out on the by-pass.

And by the time Tess figures out what it is, she’s carrying something of her own she can’t bring herself to say.

Then the family makes one very inconvenient rule: neither Tess nor Jared can touch a single object unless the other one is standing there.

Nine weeks. Every room. Every argument settled in a doorway.

Jared has spent his whole life giving things to people and has never once known how to let anyone give him something back. Tess is the first person who has ever said so to his face.

And somewhere between a fence line at dusk and a wasp nest in a corn crib, Tess is going to have to decide whether a woman who has spent her whole life being the one who leaves is finally willing to be the one who stays.

Keeping House is a warm, funny, wholesome Christian romantic comedy—clean throughout, slow-burn, and full of small-town people who will feed you, pray for you, and tell your business on the prayer chain before you have got your boots on.