by Claire Cook
I rested the package for Shannon on the sorting counter while I separated the bills from the supermarket flyers. Then I dumped the latter, since I was too responsible to dump the former.
I pushed open the door to the main post office and took my place in the long single line. A young woman in front of me, not much older than Shannon, was holding a baby over her shoulder. She had put the large package she was mailing down on the floor and was kicking it along in front of her as the line moved incrementally forward. The baby was fussing, and the woman was bouncing gently to settle it down. I caught myself bouncing my own body in time with the woman’s, as if it might help.
When the line moved again, I gave the package a little kick for her.
“Thanks,” she said. Her light blue eyes had dark circles under them, and the cloth diaper spread over her shoulder gave off the sharp, sour smell of infant spit-up.
“It’ll get easier,” I said.
“It better,” she said.
Shannon was a planner. One day on the phone she’d said babies were on their five-year agenda. A part of me thought Greg and I were far too young for even long-range conceptual grandchildren, and another part thought we’d better have fun fast because we’d get sucked right in as soon as the first one was born.
I had a sudden urge to sidle up to the woman in front of me. Psst, I’d say. You’ll never stop worrying about that baby you’re holding. Ever. No matter how old it gets. Warning, warning: Your life as you knew it is officially over.
It was probably not what she needed to hear right now, so I kept my mouth shut. When her turn came, I carried the box over to the counter for her, then walked back to the front of the line.
“Next,” Ponytail Guy said.
“Shit” slipped out of my mouth. The woman behind me giggled.
I turned to her. “Go ahead. I’m not in a rush.”
“No way,” she whispered. “He’s all yours.”
I stepped forward and placed Shannon’s package on the counter.
“Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?”
I looked up.
I blinked my eyes.
I shook my head and blinked again.
I squinted.
Ponytail Guy was wearing my glasses.
Just to be sure, I took a moment to put on a pair of my backup cheaters.
Magnified, my favorite glasses were unmistakable. Midnight blue with subtle black stripes and a little extra bling from some silver detailing on the sidepieces. That perfect strong rectangular shape.
Oh, I’d missed them so.
Ponytail Guy glared at me, my readers perched low on his nose. “Answer. The. Question.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “But did you find those glasses in the Lost and Found?”
Ponytail Guy took a step back and reached a hand under the counter.
“No,” I said quickly. “Nothing liquid, fragile, perishable, or the rest-of-it-able.”
His hand came back into view. “Express Mail?” he sneered.
“Priority,” I said. “Listen, it’s just that I left them here—”
“Delivery confirmation?”
“No. And they’re my favorite reading glasses. I’m really attached—”
“Insurance?”
“No. I mean, I can understand that the Lost and Found is a great perk and anything in there would be fair game after, say, thirty days, but it was just last week.”
I sniffed, as if I might start to cry at any moment. If I was faking, it wasn’t by much. “And I really miss them.”
Ponytail Guy tilted his chin up and looked right through my glasses and me. “Cash or credit?”
I reached into my wallet and pulled out my credit card. I leaned in close when I handed it to him.
“You can do better than that,” I whispered. “They actually look kind of girly on you.”
CHAPTER 7
DENISE WAS SITTING at our usual table at our favorite restaurant.
“Okay, out with it,” I said. “You look like the proverbial cat that swallowed a canary. Or at least a big yellow Peeps. Hey, did I tell you Luke made Peeps sushi for dessert last week? We told him he had to start contributing. He used Peeps instead of raw fish, Rice Krispies Treats for the rice, Fruit Roll-Ups for the seaweed. Greg and I still can’t decide whether it was cute or twisted.”
“Lovely,” Denise said. “So, guess.”
A waiter came by with menus, and I reached for my readers. “Don’t make me guess. You know I hate to guess.”
Denise reached for hers. “Fine,” she said. “Don’t guess. I should warn you, I spent the whole morning trying to decide which client to shoot first.”
“All of them,” I said. “Shoot them all, and I’ll take off with you. They’ll never find us in Bali.”
“Paris,” Denise said.
“Whatever,” I said. “Before we leave I just need to run in and shoot the mean guy at the post office who stole my reading glasses.”
“The guy with that pitiful gray ponytail? I hate that guy. Yes, let’s definitely shoot him, too.”
Denise was a lawyer who specialized in family law and estate planning, and in our defense, when we talked about shooting people we only meant paintballs. Denise and I had hung around together a little bit in high school. One day a decade and change later, we ran into each other in an aerobics class a couple of states away and had been best friends ever since. We were so different I’m not sure we would have even liked each other if we’d been meeting for the first time. But she’d seen me in braces and kneesocks, and I knew what she’d looked like before she got blond and thin. Somehow that felt like family.
Denise had money. I had kids. I’d been with Greg forever. She’d been married twice and was now dating a guy who was anywhere from five to ten years younger than she was, depending on how she was telling it that day.
To each of us, the grass often seemed greener under the other one’s life, and half of the fun of our friendship was the vicarious thrill of hearing about the things we didn’t get.
I took a sip of my iced coffee. “Yes, we’ll definitely shoot him, too, but we’re going to have to aim carefully so we don’t damage my glasses.”
Denise added three lemon slices to her iced tea, sampled it, then added a fourth. “We’ll steal them back first. Then we’ll shoot him. Okay, enough about you.”
“Wait. It’s still my turn.” I dangled my hand above the table. “Look what I just found.”
Denise grabbed my hand. “Wow, I wonder what happened to my mood ring. God, when was that? Junior year?”
“Sophomore, I think.”
“Jeez, that stone is black.”
I looked down. “Maybe it’s a hormonal thing.”
Denise was already sliding the ring off my finger. She tightened the adjustable band to make sure I knew her finger was smaller than mine. Or maybe just to reassure herself that she was still skinny. She slipped it on.
“Okay, I’m done,” I said. “Your turn. How’s the boy toy?”
Denise ran a manicured hand through her perfectly tousled blond hair. “Josh is fine.”
She smiled her canary/Peeps smile again.
“What?” I said.
“Okay, close enough. Josh just bought a boutique hotel in Atlanta at a short sale. He wants to know if you’ll do the staging.”
“He wants to know?”
“Well, maybe I thought it might be a good excuse for you to spend some time with Shannon.” Denise grinned like we were still in high school. “Because that’s the kind of friend I am.”
She extended her hand. My mood ring was glowing a bright happy blue on her ring finger.
FIVE MINUTES WITH MRS. BENTLEY and I was ready to jump on the next plane to Atlanta and get to work on that hotel. At least she’d taken her house off the market long enough to get it staged. The FOR SALE sign had been in the wrong place anyway. When you’re selling your house, always place the sign on the right side of the front door when you’re
facing the house. As anybody who knows anything about feng shui will tell you, chi naturally moves to the right, or the more active side of space, the yang side.
I felt about feng shui exactly the way I did about astrology and religion: I used the parts I liked and ignored the rest. When my online horoscope predicted a good day, I was in; otherwise, I just pressed Delete. I thought Buddhism did a good job with meditation, Judaism led the pack with the Sabbath, Catholicism had ceremonial flair and knew how to lay a great guilt trip, and nondenominational was the path of least resistance for just about everything else.
Not entering your house through the front door was another major feng shui faux pas. Both Mrs. Bentley and her husband always drove into the attached garage and entered the house that way.
“You’re both going to have to start using the front door at least once a day until we get this house sold,” I said.
“That’s ludicrous,” Mrs. Bentley said. “I don’t like coming in that way.”
“Sorry,” I said, “but we need a positive flow of energy coming through the front door.”
The wrinkles between Mrs. Bentley’s eyes were working overtime. “And we have to open the door to let it in?”
“Exactly. And your front door also governs your life path. If you enter through the garage, you lose sight of your purpose, which is selling the house.”
Mrs. Bentley bit her lower lip.
“It’s really just common sense,” I said. “We need to make the front entryway irresistible so it will attract buyers into the house. We’ll add big pots of flowers on either side of the front steps, and we’ll paint the front door Million Dollar Red.”
“That part I like,” Mrs. Bentley said.
I’d already hired painters to transform Mrs. Bentley’s dusty rose walls with Benjamin Moore’s Pismo Dunes, and the house had jumped two and a half decades by the second coat. We were going for neutral but not sterile, a chic, transitional palette—essentially a blend of modern and traditional colors and furniture.
Pismo Dunes is one of my all-time favorite wall colors, but you have to be careful that it’s Benjamin Moore. Behr also makes a Pismo Dunes. Great paint, wrong color.
Now the painters were working on the crisp China White trim, and I was trying to nudge Mrs. Bentley onward without getting in their way.
I nodded at the three prints hanging on her living room wall. “And now it’s time to put these out of their misery.”
She tucked her tan hair behind her ears and adjusted her earrings. “You’re absolutely sure they’re out?” she asked, as if there might have been a style revolution since I’d mentioned them the last time I was here.
“Way out,” I said. “And I don’t think they’ll ever be back in. Honestly, I can say with complete confidence that cabbage rose print trios in brass frames have had their time in the sun. But the stock is heavy and the size is good—and it’ll save us a ton of money.”
She gave me a hurt look, as if she were a cabbage rose and taking my pronouncement personally.
I was already carrying them out to her yard. “We’ll spray the frames a flat black. We’ll cover the prints in one of our accent colors, probably Nantucket Fog, then tape off some bold, contemporary lines over that and paint on the other accents, Saybrook Sage and Brewster Gray. Then we’ll tape on a big fern leaf from your garden. We’ll stipple our wall color right over the fern with an almost dry brush to connect them, and also to draw the eye to that beautiful backyard of yours. We’ll peel off the fern—and voilà!”
I almost said woilà, the way so many of those designers on TV did, just to be funny. I mean, who is in charge at those shows? Before you knew it, woilà would be listed in the dictionary, along with Realator and duck tape. But Mrs. Bentley hadn’t demonstrated any noticeable sense of humor, so I decided not to get into it.
Mrs. Bentley followed me outside. “I still can’t see it. And I simply don’t understand the difference between having cabbage roses and ferns on your wall.”
“Trust me,” I said. The truth was I wouldn’t be sure until we tried it whether it was going to work or not, but it was only paint. Paint is the quickest, easiest fix and also gives you the best bang for your design buck. And if it doesn’t work out, you can simply go over your mistakes with another coat.
Unlike the mistakes in the rest of your life.
CHAPTER 8
THE OAK FRONT DOOR was original to the house and staggeringly beautiful. It was four feet wide and almost eight feet high, with carved panels and a large rectangular insert of beveled glass. The heavy brass knocker had deepened almost to bronze, as had the elongated doorknob with clamshell detailing.
Every time we turned the knob and pushed the door inward, it creaked with the weight of a century of openings.
Greg and I had opened the door at least a dozen times by now, but we still couldn’t get over it. “Wow,” one or both of us would have to say.
Shannon always wanted to lead the pack. “Me first,” she’d yell as she pushed her baby brother out of her way.
We bought a box of disposable latex gloves and filled the rented Dumpster with all the junk the former owners and the wayward boys had left behind. Then we bought a new broom and a jumbo bottle of Spic and Span. We opened all the windows that would open and started sweeping and scrubbing. Every single surface was covered with dust and grime and cobwebs. But it was ours.
When we needed a break from the mess inside, we worked on the mess outside. Greg and I mowed the lawn, dividing the five hours it took with our old mower between us equally, while the nonmower kept an eye on the kids.
We borrowed a power washer from a friend. “Uh-oh,” Greg yelled over the torrential noise of the spray. A shingle teetered sideways, then slid down the side of the house and landed in an overgrown rhododendron. We nailed the shingle back on and gave the power washer back. We had enough going on without borrowing trouble.
We weeded the gardens. We learned to recognize poison ivy in itchy hindsight and found out that vinegar calmed the rash as well as anything. It also had the added bonus of neutralizing the lingering smells back inside the house.
We taught Shannon and Luke how to peel the velvet-flocked wallpaper off the dining room walls in long vertical strips. They wrapped them around their shoulders like capes and played Xena the Warrior Princess versus Michelangelo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. When they got bored, they climbed the steep steps up to the secret room hand over hand like a ladder.
“Look what we found!” Shannon yelled one day as they clunked their way back down the stairs.
Shannon handed me two empty bottles of Boone’s Farm apple wine.
Luke held out a well-worn copy of the February 1988 issue of Playboy. “Read me ’tory,” he said.
“Oh, those wayward boys,” Greg said, grabbing it from Luke.
“I’ll take that,” I said, grabbing it from Greg.
A week or two somehow turned into six. Things were getting tenser by the minute at Greg’s mother’s house, so we decided to focus on finishing the master bedroom and move all four of us into that. It was a huge room, almost as big as the rumpus room. It had the added bonus of an attached sitting room, so we’d be able to put the kids on their own mattresses in there.
The big drum sander we rented to refinish the floor had a tendency to eat its expensive sandpaper. It also liked to take off as if it were possessed. If we overcompensated and held it in one place for a moment too long, it made angry gouges in the wood. When one of us would melt down in frustration, the other one would jump in, and eventually Greg and I managed to get the floor sanded. We moved on to two coats of Minwax stain, followed by three coats of satin gloss polyurethane.
We painted the ceiling and walls a soft pearl white, and the trim a shinier, brighter white. We wanted simplicity, tranquility, a sanctuary. We needed a room that looked undeniably clean.
We moved our stuff in and celebrated our first night in our new home, sitting in a circle on the shiny wood floor with a large che
ese pizza in the middle. We toasted with cheap champagne and juice boxes.
“To our great big beautiful new house,” I said.
Shannon started to cry. “I want my old house back,” she sobbed.
Luke crawled into Shannon’s lap and started to cry, sounding exactly like Shannon. “Me want Grammy’s house,” he sobbed.
After the first night, Greg and I hung an old white sheet between the bedroom and the sitting area with masking tape. When the kids were fast asleep, if we were really, really quiet, we could even make love again.
THE CABINET DOORS AND DRAWER FRONTS were stacked neatly against one wall of the kitchen, as fresh and white as twenty-nine slices of Wonder bread. Carrot and ginger soup simmered on the stove. A baguette nestled in a white paper bag stretched across a clean counter.
For a split second I wondered if I’d somehow walked into the wrong house.
I pulled the trash compactor open. Two empty cartons of Trader Joe’s carrot and ginger soup sat on top, along with the crumpled plastic from a bag of shredded carrots and the papery skins of several cloves of garlic.
I lifted the lid off the pan and gave the soup a stir with a wooden spoon. I tasted it. I added a generous shake of dried ginger. I tasted again and added some crushed red pepper flakes.
A meal hadn’t been cooked from scratch in this kitchen in ages. We were all about assembling now, adding spices and fresh ingredients to premade, healthy, if slightly boring items. Brown rice, black beans, and chipotle salsa mixed with shredded meat from a cooked rotisserie chicken. Frozen turkey meatballs baked and added to whole grain pasta and organic marinara sauce. Hummus and tabbouleh with chopped romaine and shredded veggies on high-fiber roll-ups. Grilled wild salmon arranged on a bed of organic baby lettuce mix.
I was just as over cooking as I was over this house. But I’d taught my family to assemble well, and if they got hungry enough, they actually would.
I opened the fridge, took out a clear plastic box to rinse the mixed greens inside, then put it back and shut the door. The trick was not to jump in. Greg had an annoying tendency to start meals, only to back off the moment I got involved.
