“Good thing it’s as fast as it is ugly.”
***
Alone in his new place, Joshua realized his white-walled apartment had become a catalog page. Everything matched too perfectly and clashed too much with the garage sale furnishings of his youth.
“There’s no there there,” his stepmother Serena would say of the cookie-cutter base housing. Joshua hadn’t understood what she meant until he overheard an American couple on vacation, appraising the canals of Venice.
“What do you think, honey?” a sweaty man asked in a flat, Midwestern accent.
The woman twirled the cord that dangled her sunglasses on her chest. “I think the canals in Vegas are nicer.”
Joshua choked back laughter at that. Sure, Vegas offered round-the-clock buffets and sanitized replicas, but Joshua didn’t want to be like those tourists. He wanted his home to have a sense of history, to feel loved and lived-in without being shabby or used.
The next morning, Joshua prowled estate furniture stores, finding a deep leather chair and a rug that reminded him of the Turkish bazaar he’d visited as a teenager. He bought an unsigned, amateur painting of a garden and an old cedar trunk for his bedroom, despite having few possessions to fill it. Aussie watched from the truck’s passenger seat as Joshua struggled with the trunk on a dolly.
When the old was mixed with new, the painting hung, the rug spread, and groceries unpacked into the refrigerator and pantry, Joshua craved just one more thing to finally call the apartment home.
Aussie hogged the couch while Joshua flicked through a battered shoebox filled with recipe cards, looking for a dish to challenge his palate—in this new kitchen, he wanted to cook something hard.
The recipes reminded him of how his family’s housekeeper in Thailand prepared spicy curry, and how the grandmother next door in Germany taught him to pickle. The kitchen was a universal place Joshua could count on, no matter where he lived.
Joshua finally settled on an experimental yellow curry, rich with coconut milk and mushrooms. He felt worlds away from the old duplex with its galley kitchen and crooked electric range that never heated evenly.
Now, he could choose how long to stay here, how late to stay up, which music to play, what to cook, and when. Without Crystal, he could choose almost anything, but this choice cost him his most significant tie to his past.
THREE
Melina almost missed the small sign, painted in shaky blue script on a scrap of cardboard.
She was plotting her plan of attack for her next client as she drove a back street to the meeting. The freeway was faster, but this road gave her time to think, to strategize. Melina took the corners fast, heading north from Seattle on a road edging Elliott Bay.
The sign said For Rent, and it took a few moments to register. Then her high heel tapped the brake and Melina spun her coupe in a snappy U-turn, making the one-eighty with a single twist of the wheel.
She pulled over beside a shiny laurel hedge near the gravel drive. The sign was propped in a window over the garage, where lace curtains fringed the windows. A wooden stairway ran straight up the side of the detached garage to a door on the second story.
Melina’s client was fifteen miles from the city in a new suburban office building skirted with acres of parking. Melina hated the suburbs because they lacked originality; it seemed as if every builder drew from the same small book of blueprints.
But this old Craftsman home was a classic.
Checking her watch, Melina gauged that she’d be twenty minutes early to the client meeting. She smoothed her freshly highlighted hair in the rearview mirror and applied lipstick, then stepped out of the car, heels rocking on gravel. A line of box hedges led to the main house’s front door.
Knocking briskly, Melina stood back on the porch, taking in the porch swing, the overflowing garden and birdhouses nestled throughout the yard. The windows revealed little, as the light inside was dim, and Melina realized there was no car in the driveway.
She memorized the house number and the small nameplate that said Callaghan, then turned back to her car. Halfway down the front steps, she heard rustling behind the door and the sound of a lock clicking open. A tiny woman in a neat dress, curly hair flying, peered out.
“May I help you?” she asked. Melina stepped back up to the porch level, feeling like a horse in heels as she towered over the woman.
“I saw your For Rent sign,” Melina said. “I wondered what you’re renting, I mean, if it’s an apartment, if it’s available.” Normally confident to the point of being overbearing, Melina faltered under the woman’s direct gaze.
“It depends,” the woman said slowly. “Is it you who would like to rent it?”
Obviously. Melina nodded, but wondered if the woman might be a little senile. Her stooped shoulders and small waist looked bird-like and fragile.
“Well, that’s good, dear.” The woman held up a finger, signaling Melina to wait, and shuffled back inside the house. After a few moments she returned with a key dangling from a silk ribbon. “Why don’t you go upstairs and take a look? I’m looking for just the right kind of renter; someone who will be good company.”
***
Melina didn’t think she needed company. She never invited guests to her apartment, which was plagued by leaky aluminum windows and temperamental plumbing.
The crumbling warren of studios hadn’t seemed so decrepit when she moved to Seattle five years earlier, and she stayed because cheap rent afforded her the opportunity to buy things that made an impression.
Instead of searching for a better apartment, Melina bettered her wardrobe, her handbag, and her car—anything that fed the image she cultivated. Melina preferred to meet friends in the city at upwardly mobile hotspots. If no one would see her home, it wasn’t worth the extra money.
A promotion and a considerable raise gave Melina the means to move up, but her lifestyle of designer clothes and extravagant nights out still cost enough that she couldn’t afford one of the glassy high-rise units many of her coworkers rented or owned.
As she climbed the stairs to the apartment over the garage, Melina thought that this place, in an upscale neighborhood just a few minutes’ drive from downtown, could be the perfect compromise.
Inside, she found smooth wood floors, a small sitting area just large enough for a couch and television, and an efficiency kitchen with a dwarf refrigerator. At the rear, the bedroom’s large windows overlooked a substantial garden, and a clawfoot tub dominated the hexagonal-tiled bathroom, complete with a marble vanity.
Melina was sold on the bathroom alone, thinking of the rust-stained shower stall in her current apartment.
Back at the main house, Melina made her pitch to the old woman: she was looking for an apartment, somewhere quiet and dignified, somewhere close to the city but not a claustrophobic apartment complex.
“Do you like to garden?” the elderly woman asked.
“Yes,” Melina lied, surveying the mature beds.
“Do you like birds?” the woman asked, more insistently.
“Yes.” Melina swallowed hard. She was not in charge of this interview. All of her presentation skills, honed from years in marketing and close observation of the best in the business, were useless under the direct gaze of this tiny woman.
“Would you mind driving me to the grocery store?”
Melina balked. “Right now?”
The woman smiled and her features relaxed. “Of course not now, dear, but sometime. If you rented the apartment, it would help me immensely if you’d drive me to the grocery store from time to time.”
Melina felt her shoulders drop, heard her voice agree to take the woman on errands. The woman explained that she was losing her eyesight and could no longer drive.
They discussed a price, a move-in date, and a bit more about Melina’s background. Melina marveled at the woman’s sharp mind and efficient questions, which pried more information out of Melina in ten minutes than most dates got in a whole evening.
; Melina peeked at her watch and knew she’d have to push the speed limit to meet her clients on time. She left her contact information with the woman and wrote down the address of her soon-to-be-new home. She promised to come back to pay for her first month’s rent and pick up a key.
“Thank you, Mrs.—Callaghan?” Melina said, glancing at the nameplate next to the front door.
“It’s Momo,” the woman said brightly. “When you move in, I’ll explain why.”
***
The movers were startlingly efficient, wrapping Melina’s walnut dresser and removing boxes of clothes, cosmetics and shoes. They tipped the fourth and final wardrobe box, fastened it to a hand truck and wheeled it out the door and up the ramp of the moving van.
Melina surveyed what was left: a few dry cleaning hangers, bits of lint clinging to the stained carpet, a yellowing shower curtain, and an ugly plastic soap holder next to the perennially dripping faucet.
The apartment appeared much shabbier without Melina’s clothes and accessories to give the place some style. As usual, Melina wasn’t sentimental. She was on to the next stage in her life, prepared to use her best assets—her looks, quick wit and killer instinct—to take advantage of the next opportunity.
One of her favorite phrases summed it up: “You snooze, you lose.”
Walking down the steps toward her car with a final box of breakables in her hands, Melina congratulated herself for scoring a deep discount on rent from the old lady in exchange for a few gardening chores and a ride to the grocery store now and then.
“Melina! What’s up?” A sandy-haired man in his thirties huffed down the stairs toward Melina. She knew she couldn’t get to her car in time to avoid her neighbor, who also worked as the apartment’s part-time handyman. Regretfully, Melina slowed her pace.
“Raymond,” she said with a bit of a sneer, “how lovely to see you.”
“I saw two guys coming out of your apartment with boxes and I almost called the cops.” He pointed to the moving van. “Lucky for you I asked them for ID to show they were legit.”
“Yes, lucky for me,” Melina said drily, crossing the parking lot toward her car, Raymond in her wake. She balanced the small box on her hip as she dug into her designer jeans pocket for car keys.
Raymond made a move to help her with the box but she stopped him with a glare. “I’m moving, Ray. I found a new place and I’m moving today.”
His face fell. Melina ran hot and cold with him, sometimes pouring on the charm to gain his help jump-starting her car or scraping ice off it in the winter, sometimes cutting him with a snide comment as she refused repeated offers for a date. Melina didn’t see anything wrong with twisting Ray’s eagerness to her own advantage.
“Well, now I’m not gonna see you as much, but maybe that means we can finally have dinner?”
Melina’s car chirped as she unlocked the coupe, popped open the door and laid the box on her passenger seat. She turned to face Raymond, leaning on the edge of her doorframe as if it were a shield to block his advances.
She could no longer give her standard excuse: “You don’t shit where you eat, Ray.” Meaning: you don’t date neighbors, because that can get complicated. She never explained which part of the phrase applied to dating him.
“Ray, we’re not going to have dinner. I’m never going out to dinner with you. You’re just not my idea of a good time.”
Raymond recoiled as if slapped, and he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. His eyes jumped sideways to the movers, already in their truck, waiting to follow Melina to her new place.
“Well, do you at least want to keep in touch? You could give me your phone number. You know, for old time’s sake?” His mouth turned up in a grin, hope still lighting his face.
Melina’s eyes hardened. Back home, Raymond would have been fine, a regular guy who’d join her father’s bowling league and make himself useful doing projects her mother assigned. He was friendly and decent-looking, but Melina didn’t see herself with anyone like Ray.
She would choose a man with polish and spark, someone who could command a boardroom or an army. Someone to steer a yacht and sling back martinis, someone who could appreciate and afford the finer things. Someone who made Melina look more successful.
The next step toward the life Melina intended was luring the right man, and she had no intention of letting an average handyman like Raymond cloud that crystal-clear vision.
“No,” Melina said, an edge in her voice and ice in her expression. “I’m leaving you and this dump behind.”
FOUR
“Look at you! Look at this! This is totally amazing,” Stephanie gushed, nearly flattening Joshua as she burst through his new apartment’s front door for the first time. She thrust a beribboned wine bottle in his hands and hugged him fiercely.
Stephanie gazed at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room that framed the cityscape. It was as if you could step off the balcony and levitate among the partially lit office towers. This was her first visit, and Joshua thought the view from his apartment was even more impressive at night, especially during Seattle’s dreary winters.
“Josh, this is perfect,” Stephanie enthused, combing her fingers through Aussie’s mane as his wagging tail picked up speed. “I couldn’t get a word out of Mark. That rat was holding out on me.”
Mark grinned at the well-kept secret.
“You all want the dime tour? It’s as clean as it’s gonna get.”
Joshua led Stephanie and Mark around the living room, pointing out his new furniture. “It feels wrong to be able to flip a switch for a fire, but the gas flames look real enough.”
He showed them his bedroom and bathroom, the barely-there dining nook, and then, the real prize, his kitchen.
“I finally pimped it out—I’ve got my pans and knives and spices and everything sorted out,” Joshua said. “I’ve even got Darth.” On the counter sat a black espresso machine that made ghostly, menacing noises when steam escaped from its spigot. It earned the appliance a nickname suitable for the supreme villain, Darth Vader.
Joshua watched as Stephanie ran her hand across the seamless granite countertop, opened and closed the kitchen cupboards, sized up the appliances, and took a second look in the bathroom and closets.
Most people would consider it nosy, but Mark and Joshua were used to it—Stephanie was a real estate agent with a burgeoning practice in several up-and-coming central Seattle neighborhoods. Her wild, curly hair, bubbly laugh and infectious smile charmed her first-time-homebuyer clients but proved lethal in negotiations: too often, the seller’s agent underestimated Stephanie.
“This place is going to sell like crazy if it converts to condos,” Stephanie mused. “It’s got the right kind of finishes to advertise well and enough closet space to keep an owner happy. The bathroom needs work, swap out the vinyl for tile, but it’s nothing major.”
“Don’t jinx it!” Josh warned her. “The last thing I want is to have to move. This place is mine.” He shook off the fear of yet another upheaval in his life.
“That’s a nice piece,” Stephanie pointed to the painting hung over his fireplace. “Where’d you get it?”
Joshua told her about the estate furniture store. “Probably some amateur, but who cares? I’ve never owned an original piece of art before. I figure, real homes have art; this is my home, I should have some too.”
As if to underscore Joshua’s point, Aussie nudged between them, circled three times on the new rug in the living room, and settled for his umpteenth nap of the day.
“Want to know my favorite part? The dishwasher. I can’t believe how long I lived without one. I would trade my running shoes. I would trade my TV. I would go without underwear as long as I could keep my dishwasher.”
“Thankfully, you don’t have to choose.” Stephanie wrinkled her nose. “But now you’re spoiled. You’ll never be able to go back. I’m telling you, Josh, this apartment will make you soft.” The laughter in her voice told Joshua that Stephanie was likew
ise delighted.
A knock on the door signaled Juan and Eric’s arrival, and Mark swung open the door, grandly welcoming them in.
***
“That’s it, don’t feed me another bite. I’m stuffed.” Mark pushed back from Joshua’s cramped dining table and held his stomach, grinning widely. “The best thing about when you were sleeping on our couch was when you were awake in our kitchen.”
Joshua swallowed another gulp of wine, poured from the third bottle they’d opened that night, and surveyed the wreckage on the table.
Every morsel was gone, his friends were well-fed and happy, and Joshua’s home felt alive and cozy, nothing like a sterile catalog page. Aussie snored in front of Joshua’s fireplace, virtually the only open space since the dining table had been extended into the living room to accommodate Mark, Stephanie, Juan, Eric and Joshua.
Juan jumped up from the table. “I know you said to just bring booze, but I also brought some dessert.” He opened Joshua’s freezer and pulled out plastic-wrapped disks shaped like hockey pucks.
“Ice cream sandwiches.” He tossed each person the homemade chocolate chip cookies filled with vanilla ice cream. “They’re better than the kind from the store.”
“He’s more Martha than Martha,” Eric said, giving his roommate a gentle shove. “My ex would have hoped Juan would rub off on me, but I am just not meant to be domestic. I’m an artist.” Eric made a goofy face to show he was not taking himself too seriously.
“So are you single?” Stephanie pried. “Are you dating?”
“I’m, uh, between boyfriends at the moment,” Eric admitted. “My ex moved to Boston about a year ago. I’ve been going out more lately, but I haven’t found anyone worth seeing regularly.” He picked up the last wine bottle and poured a trickle into each of the five glasses to finish it off.
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