What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels)

by Wendy Markham

  “Yeah…what’s up with it, though, Trace?”

  I tell him about my mother and the hot August afternoons.

  “Yeah, but you can always buy fresh tomatoes and basil and flowers any time of year. You do now.”

  “It’s not the same. The tomatoes were so sweet and that deep red color.”

  “You can get sweet, deep red tomatoes now. On the vine, even.”

  He just doesn’t understand. I try to explain. “But they’re not warm from the sun. They always tasted better warm from the sun.”

  “Okay, okay, whatever. I get it.”

  But he doesn’t.

  Seeing my scowl, he adds defensively, “I just never knew you had such a hankering to make things grow.”

  To be honest, I didn’t, either. It’s a relatively new phenomenon. For all I know, it’s displaced maternal longing. Or maybe there’s just something about all this concrete that makes me long to plant something and watch it grow. Or maybe I’m just feeling nostalgic and homesick for my mother and the tomato salads of my childhood.

  “I guess I just have a green thumb like my mother,” I tell Jack, who doesn’t look convinced. “We’re Sicilian, after all.”

  The thing is…

  My mother, when I spoke to her the other night, didn’t sound so good. She admitted she hadn’t been feeling well, either.

  I’m not a worrier—

  Okay, I am a worrier, but usually not about my mother, who is invincible.

  But that conversation made me feel uneasy. I really need to plan a trip back to Brookside as soon as possible so that I can see for myself how she is.

  Not that I’m not a hundred percent certain she’s fine, but…

  “So you’re really going to plant a garden, huh?” Jack smiles.

  “Yes, and don’t laugh at me.”

  “I’m not laughing. I’m picturing you out in the sun, picking tomatoes. I think that’s sweet. Come here.” He pulls me into his arms and presses his forehead against mine.

  I laugh. “What are you doing?”

  “Want to take a break from purging? We still have our bed, don’t we? You didn’t chuck it into the trash?”

  “Nope.”

  Jack and I both agree on that, at least—that furniture is essential.

  It’s in the definition of furniture that we run into trouble.

  I would say anything made of wood. Like our oak sleigh bed, which was my first major adult purchase, back when I was slightly single during my first summer in the city.

  Jack would include plastic (the stacked milk crates he uses as a bedside table), rubber (an airbed that may or may not have a hole) and cardboard (the aforementioned CD cabinet he bought at Wal-Mart), all of which I’m plotting to throw into the trash as the day wears on.

  “Come on.” Jack pulls my hand toward the bedroom.

  “What about Buckley?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s supposed to be coming over.”

  “Well, it’s not like he can just walk in on us,” Jack points out, and he’s right.

  All this building security is a definite plus. When we move into our house, people can show up right outside our window and peer in at us.

  Not that I expect that to happen.

  But I suppose it could.

  Somewhere overhead, the circus freaks’ interior designer drags an armoire across the floor. Or something like that.

  Glancing up, Jack knits his brow and asks, “What do you think they’re really doing up there?”

  “I told you. Redecorating or disposing of dead bodies. Whatever. Just think, after today, it won’t matter. We’ll be home sweet home.” Reaching our bed, I shove overboard a heap of clothes on hangers.

  Jack sits on the edge of the mattress and pulls me down beside him. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high, Trace.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel like you think this house is the answer to all our problems.”

  “Well, it’s the answer to the circus-freak problem, and the roach problem, and the street-noise problem, and the M.C. problem—” Yes, the Mad Crapper is still on the loose, inching ever closer to our doormat. “Unless you’re the M.C.,” I add, and ask Jack, “You’re not, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  We smile briefly at each other.

  Then Jack says, “I just want you to be realistic. We’re buying a total fixer-upper, and we haven’t even seen it since we walked through it with Verna over two months ago.”

  Nothing is going to burst my bubble, dammit!

  “We had it professionally inspected,” I remind him, “and it was structurally fine. Do you think the foundation has crumbled and termites have gotten to it since we saw it?”

  “No…”

  “I mean, I suppose Hank and Marge could have hung more bad wallpaper, but we can deal with that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Be happy for us, Jack.”

  “I am happy for us.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine. I promise you.”

  “You sound pretty sure about that.”

  “I am.”

  And I’m right.

  For about a week, anyway.

  That’s how long we have before the shit hits the fan in a way even the Mad Crapper’s wildest dreams couldn’t conjure.

  But I don’t know that just yet, so I’m feeling pretty content by the time Jack and I, sated, stroll back to our abandoned project, just in time for Jimmy to call upstairs to announce Buckley’s belated arrival.

  He blows in the door with a bottle of champagne, flushed cheeks and a “Sorry I’m late, guys. Look what I brought.”

  Leave it to Buckley to think of toasting our little apartment’s last hurrah.

  Except that he didn’t.

  “Guess what? Are you sitting down?” He looks at me and Jack. “No, you are not. Sit down. You have to sit down.”

  We look around the cluttered room.

  “There’s nowhere to sit,” Jack points out. “What’s up? Wait, I know. You’re pregnant.”

  Buckley flashes him a distracted grin. “Seriously, sit, you guys.”

  “Is everyone all right?” I ask Buckley, because when people tell you to sit down, something big is going on.

  It’s not my mother, is it? I want to ask. Please don’t let it be my mother.

  Which is ridiculous, and I need to get a grip.

  Mental Note: if something were wrong with my mother, it wouldn’t be Buckley who’d show up to tell us, with a bottle of champagne in hand, no less.

  Okay. So my mother is still obviously hanging in there.

  But something is definitely up. Something big and good.

  “Paramount just optioned my book for seven figures,” shouts Buckley, who never, ever shouts.

  Jack lets out a whoop and slaps him on the back.

  “Oh my God! Buckley!” I hurtle myself at him, squealing. “This is amazing!”

  “I know. I can’t believe it. I feel dazed.” He looks dazed, all wide-eyed and glowing. “They want me to collaborate on the screenplay.”

  “You’re going to write a screenplay? Do you even know how?”

  “For a million bucks, I’ll figure it out.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Just now. Today. That’s why I’m late,” he says breathlessly as Jack produces three champagne flutes from a high cupboard. “I had to tell my mom, and my sister, and then I had to call this Realtor my agent suggested—”

  “You’re already shopping for mansions?” I ask. “Maybe you can find one in Glenhaven Park. Then we can be neighbors! Although,” I add teasingly, “I didn’t see any mansions on our block. But I’m sure there are—”

  Then I catch sight of the look on Buckley’s face.

  Uh-oh. “What?” I ask.

  “The Realtor is helping me find a place—n
ot a mansion, though—in L.A.”

  “Buckley! No!” Jack gives me a look, which I ignore. I can’t help it. I don’t want Buckley to move to the West Coast any more than…

  Any more than Raphael and Kate want me to move to the suburbs, I suppose.

  “It’s part of the screenwriting deal,” Buckley explains. “I have to be out there by next month.”

  “For good?”

  He hesitates. “For now.”

  “Well, we’re really happy for you, Buckley,” Jack says, putting a champagne flute into my hand. “Right, Trace?”

  “Right.”

  Jack gives me another look. I guess I sound less than enthusiastic.

  You know, I thought Jack was the one who hated change, but he seems okay with all of this. Maybe it’s me. Maybe, for all my big plans, I’m the one who would just as soon stay put in the end, and keep things just the way they are, forever.

  Maybe I hate change.

  Maybe I don’t want to let go, after all.

  Maybe I just want to hold on tight.

  In that spirit, I give Buckley a big, heartfelt hug. “You know I’m going to miss you like crazy.”

  “I’m going to miss you, too.”

  “But this is a great opportunity for you.”

  “Yeah,” he says, beaming. “It really is. Thanks, Tracey.”

  He sounds a little strangled. Realizing I’m crushing his lungs, I release him. “Just promise me one thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “If you get nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award, and you don’t have a date because your starlet girlfriend is away in rehab and your mother and sister are busy, take me to the Oscars. That’s all I ask. Oh, and give me a cut of your goody bag.”

  Buckley breaks into a big grin. “Deal. If you make a deal with me in return.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t mention this to Raphael just yet. You know how he is.”

  I nod solemnly. I absolutely know how he is: obsessive about anything remotely Hollywood related. If he finds out Buckley is moving to la-la land and hobnobbing with people of TMZ-video ilk, he’ll figure out a way to tag along as, I don’t know, Buckley’s houseboy or something.

  Jack pours the champagne so that we can toast Buckley’s amazing success, and Hollywood and Glenhaven Park, standing in our living room this one last time all together.

  “To happy endings,” Buckley says.

  “And new beginnings,” Jack adds.

  I don’t say anything at all.

  I can’t, because there’s a huge lump in my throat.

  CHAPTER 10

  Well, it’s official.

  Jack and I have just closed on the house. We are now home owners.

  For such a landmark occasion, the closing itself is pretty understated. Not that I expect to step off the train in Glenhaven Park and be met by the mayor, streamers and a marching band to escort us down the main drag to the lawyer’s office.

  But when you think about the milestones in your life—first communions, weddings, childbirth—they are usually surrounded by ritualistic fanfare.

  Buying a house is as low-key as a trip to the dentist, from the clipboard sign-in and bad magazines in the waiting room to the parting gift—not a new toothbrush, but a refrigerator magnet calendar.

  Of course, the dentist involves considerably more gore (if you have the misfortune to inherit the bad Spadolini teeth, as I did), considerably less paperwork and a mere ten-dollar co-pay. As opposed to a mountain of contracts and about fifty thousand times the co-pay. And let me tell you, all that ch-ching, ch-ching is far more nerve-shattering than the dreaded high-pitched hum of the drill firing up.

  The highlight of the closing is meeting Hank and Marge, who turn out to be exactly as charming and folksy as I imagined. They show up holding hands and wearing hats and suits, à la 1948 and tell us how happy they are to be selling their house to a nice young couple like us.

  We promise them we’ll take good care of it, and we are all hugging and a little misty-eyed by the time the whole thing is over.

  “What now?” I ask Jack, back out on the street less than an hour later, depleted checkbook and keys in pocket. “Should we go check out the house again? Or go out and celebrate?”

  “We don’t have time for that—or money, for that matter,” proclaims the Budget Master. “We have about twenty-four hours to get out of our apartment, and we’re nowhere near ready.”

  This is true.

  It seems a little anticlimactic to take the train straight back to our apartment in the city to finish packing, but that’s what we do.

  Good thing, because it takes forever.

  Somewhere in the midst of all that, I spoke to my sister, who said she had talked my mother into going to the doctor this coming week for a checkup.

  Mary Beth sounded worried. Which shouldn’t have bothered me, because Mary Beth frequently sounds worried. But I’m worried, too: the invincible Connie Spadolini has been feeling uncharacteristically fatigued, and Mary Beth said she doesn’t look good, either.

  I’m going to try to get up there in the next week or two to see for myself.

  What if something is seriously wrong with my mother?

  Riddled with uncertainty, I pushed the thought from my head and concentrated on packing.

  By the wee hours, we have run out of boxes. I am bleary-eyed and haphazardly throwing stuff into big black Hefty bags, hoping I’m hitting the ones that are meant to be moved, as opposed to the ones that are meant to be tossed.

  For all I know, my shoes and belts are lying at the base of the building’s garbage chute—possibly in a fresh Mad Crapper load—and we’re transporting to Glenhaven Park a bag filled with expired condiments and old newspapers.

  At long last, we collapse into bed on this, our last night in the city that never sleeps.

  We manage to get all of two hours’ shut-eye before the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., and I awaken swamped in ambivalence.

  Not just about the daunting day ahead, but the equally daunting lifetime ahead in Glenhaven Park.

  Even now, I am not a hundred percent sure we’re doing the right thing.

  Which I’ll admit is ironic, since the doing is pretty much done.

  As I lie here in the dark listening to Jack whistling Jimmy Buffet’s “Grapefruit–Juicy Fruit” in the shower, I think back to how the whole thing started on the rainy night I’d had it up to there with city life.

  And, call me crazy, but I really have to wonder…

  Is this suburban home-buying thing the real-estate equivalent of my plot to have a baby just to get a few months off from work?

  Why didn’t sensible Jack stop me this time, like he did before?

  Why is he whistling, dammit?

  What is wrong with him?

  What is wrong with me?

  I think I just finally snapped under the pressure of living in Manhattan and working in a major ad agency. I’ll bet it happens to everyone, sooner or later.

  But couldn’t Jack have seen that I had gone off the deep end?

  Couldn’t he have thrown me a lifeline instead of jumping right in with me?

  This whole thing is insane.

  One minute, I’ve had it up to here with urban stress; the next, we own a four-bedroom fixer-upper in the middle of nowhere.

  In retrospect, I’m thinking that a weekend at a charming bed-and-breakfast might have done the trick.

  Well, it’s too late now.

  At this point, maybe I should just be glad that a baby isn’t involved.

  Guess what?

  Jack got called into the office for a mandatory department meeting, probably some late-breaking Client crisis, leaving me to tie up loose ends and supervise the pair of moving men we hired.

  Doesn’t it just figure?

  He promised he’ll try to be home by lunchtime. It’s a quarter of twelve now, and the movers have already worked their way through the kitchen and most of the living room.

&nbs
p; I hate to say it, because I don’t want to jinx myself, but…

  So far, so good. Really.

  “Yeah, hi, listen, I need a straw,” announces a burly—aren’t they all?—mover, sticking his head into the nearly empty bedroom, where I am hurriedly shoving the last of our dirty laundry into the last Hefty bag.

  “You need a what? A straw?” He must be taking a lunch break. Unfortunately for him, the collection of fast-food straws from our junk drawer went the way of all those Chinese condiment packets.

  “No,” he says, “a saw.”

  I stop shoving the laundry and stare at him. “A saw?”

  He grunts a “yup.”

  See, the thing is, when it comes to moving, I’m not exactly a pro. I’ve never hired movers before, and I’ve moved only three times in my life, not counting college (which I don’t count, because it was ages ago and didn’t involve furniture): into the Queens sublet for my first summer in New York, into my East Village studio two months later, and then here, with Jack.

  So I have no idea: Do movers routinely need saws?

  If so, for what?

  I’m not sure, but something tells me anything that involves a saw and a moving man can’t be positive.

  Maybe he’s joined forces with the serial killer upstairs and needs to dispose of a body.

  Maybe I heard him wrong.

  I don’t know how I could have, though. Aside from “straw,” “saw” doesn’t sound like anything that isn’t used to cut something into pieces, unless he swallowed the first syllable and it was “see.”

  “What did you say you needed?” I ask, hoping it was a seesaw. Not that I have one of those handy or can imagine why he might need it.

  “A saw.” He has the nerve to look pissed off at me.

  “Mind if I ask what you might want to do with it, if I had one?” I’m pretty sure we don’t, but if we did, it would be packed in one of the trillion sealed boxes in the next room.

  “The couch won’t fit out the doorway.”

  “So you want to saw the doorway?” I ask, horrified. The super would freak.

  “No! Geez, no.”

  “Good. For a second there I thought—”

  “We need to saw the legs off the couch. Well, maybe just one leg. We’ll have to see.”

  “What?” I stare at him.

  He nods.