by Claire Cook
I ran my finger around the lip of the wineglass. Shannon had been just as devoted to Mouse Trap, so we used to have to alternate games.
“Get the cheese, but don’t get trapped,” Greg said.
I shook my head. “We don’t even need to talk anymore. We can just read each other’s minds as they atrophy.”
Greg reached for my hand. “Of course we do. Talking to you is the best part of my day.”
“After tennis,” I said.
Greg grinned. “Okay, maybe it’s a tie.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives remembering. I want to make new memories.”
“I hear you,” Greg said. “I’m just not sure it’s all about the house.”
“Okay, so what’s it about?”
Greg leaned forward. “I think we need another dog. Or maybe a cat. But definitely a new pet. Something to bring in some fresh life.”
Once for a school project, Luke had drawn a timeline of our family pets: Tigger, the sweet shelter cat we’d adopted to keep the mice in our new house at bay, and who lived to be a whopping twenty-two years old. Deaf and senile, she meowed at the top of her lungs all night long, night after night, until she forgot she was nocturnal and started doing it all day, too. Then she somehow managed to sneak out, only to get her neck broken in our driveway in broad daylight by something she no longer recognized as a dog.
Dash and Ashley, our much-loved but too-often-neglected Lab-cross shelter dogs who kept each other company when we were too stressed-out with our kids’ crazy schedules to give them the attention they deserved. Dash died at thirteen, and Ashley died of a broken heart a few months later.
Indiana Jones, the adorable two-year-old psychotic female beagle we adopted next from a family who couldn’t keep her. She chewed the shingles off the house and made a break for freedom the minute anyone left the door open longer than a nanosecond. Right before the four of us left for a funeral one day, I went back into the house to grab some tissues. She darted out between my legs and raced across the driveway and into the road. The big green landscape truck never even saw her coming, and she exploded on contact, splattering the street with black, white, and red pieces of Indie. A passing fire truck circled back and washed off the street, and a kind firefighter with kids of his own wrapped what he could in an old blanket so we could bury her.
Rainbow and Star, the sweet rabbits we loved almost as much as they loved each other. And Comet, Luke’s pet rat the rest of us were so sure we’d hate, but who turned out to be one of the smartest, most affectionate pets of all, like a little dog, really. He died a horrible, painful death as a tumor grew on his neck, finally cutting off his oxygen supply during a crazy winter’s nor’easter, when the power went out and all we could do was take turns sitting vigil with him by candlelight until the sad, sad end.
They were all buried out behind the garage, along with some mouse skeletons and an occasional bird, marked by beach stones and seashells and little wooden signs carved with their names. Luke had even given up his childhood blankie to bury Comet the rat in, and he’d made us videotape the candlelit burial service. We’d found it a few years ago at Christmas, and the four of us had watched it and cried like babies.
My eyes filled with tears as I looked at Greg.
“No,” I said. “I just can’t do it again. I want fun new experiences where nobody dies for a long, long time.”
CHAPTER 12
I TOOK A DETOUR on my walk to the post office, looping through the tiny web of downtown streets and around to the harbor. Even though full-blown spring was in the air today, on the roller-coaster ride that was New England weather, tomorrow might be another story. Still, it wouldn’t be long before the sun-bleached docks piled behind the harbormaster’s office would be back in the water and filled with boats.
Seagulls swooped and screeched overhead, waiting impatiently for the summer tourists to come back and feed them the crusts of their fat deli sandwiches, along with ketchup-soaked French fries from their take-out orders of fish-and-chips.
I unwrapped an old, half-eaten Kashi bar I found in my jacket pocket, leaned over the seawall railing, and tossed it up in the air. A gull nabbed it before it hit the water.
“You’re welcome,” I yelled.
I had to admit that this really was the perfect little beach town, which was a great thing unless you were ready to leave it. I wondered if people who lived in ugly places just packed up the minute they could and hightailed it out of town. Or maybe they loved their ugly little towns just as much as I’d loved this one.
I wondered if I’d ever really have the guts to go.
Greg and I could always come back and splurge on a rental house right on the beach for a week every summer. Or maybe we’d just go off and have a few adventures, and then come back and buy a little condo.
Word was out. Two new seagulls landed on the park bench behind me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I ate the rest of it. Dark Chocolate Coconut is my favorite.”
One of the gulls squawked.
“I know,” I said. “It was rude of me. Next time I’ll bring more.”
They eyed me for a moment, then turned their attention to the ocean.
“Pretty place, isn’t it?” I said.
We watched the tiny whitecaps rolling in with the tide and listened to the water splashing against the rocks below. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman walking in our direction.
I turned to the seagulls. “You gulls get around. I mean, if you weren’t here, where would you rather be?”
The woman caught my eye, then turned and started walking quickly in the opposite direction.
“Ha,” I said. “Like she’s never talked to a seagull.”
The gulls screeched and soared up over the water.
“Have a nice day,” I yelled.
By the time I got to the post office, I was feeling better than I’d felt in a while. The ocean will do that for you. I opened my box and started sorting through the junk mail.
A bright yellow package notification was wedged between an ad for a dating service and one for long-term care insurance. I dumped everything but the package slip and our ridiculously high health insurance bill, and pushed open the door to the main part of the post office.
When I finally made my way to the front of the line, I couldn’t believe I actually got the nice woman for a change. Maybe the trick was not trying to strategize but to trust fate to nudge things in the right direction.
“How are you today?” I said as I handed her the yellow slip of paper.
The woman gave me a big smile. “Just fine, hon, how ’bout you?”
“Great,” I said.
I looked over at Ponytail Guy. My good mood plummeted at the sight of him glaring away at some poor guy through my favorite glasses.
The nice woman handed me a rectangular package. I put on a pair of inferior readers to check the label.
“Cool,” I said. I looked up at the woman. “You don’t have a knife, do you?”
Ponytail guy took a step back and reached under the counter.
“Relax,” I said. “I’m not even your customer.” I turned to the woman. “Never mind, I’ll use my fingernail.”
I headed over to the table at the back of the room and managed to get the package containing my new readers opened. It was like being an aging kid in a reading glasses shop. I pulled pair after pair from their soft drawstring bags, each one cuter than the one before.
“Wow,” a woman in line said. “Where did you get all those?”
“Don’t make me feel guilty,” I said. “After this, I’m not buying anything.”
I gave her the Web address where I’d ordered them, then went back to my glasses. I finally decided I could sacrifice the root beer pair with the tortoise highlights. I sealed the box back up so I could pretend I had something to mail.
“Anything liquid, fragile, perishable, hazardous, or combustible?” Ponytail Guy asked when I’d wo
rked my way to the front of the line again.
“No.” I rested my package on the counter but didn’t let go.
Ponytail Guy grabbed the box and pulled. “Express Mail?”
I pulled back. I held up the root beer readers with the hand not holding the box. “Listen,” I said as fast as I could, “I just want my glasses back. These are much better. Trust me, you’ll be a total date magnet.”
“Answer. The. Question.” He took a step back and reached under the counter.
My eyes teared up. “Please?”
When he glared at me over my beautiful glasses, a part of me wanted to just let him push the damn alarm. At least that way I could have my day in court and maybe get my glasses back.
The bigger part of me was old enough to know better. “Never mind,” I said.
BY THE TIME my reading glasses and I got home, I needed a good stiff drink. Since it was still morning, I decided to finally de-clutter my junk drawer instead. Most people don’t realize that de-cluttering a drawer can be a calming, zenlike experience.
There is no more important drawer in your house to stage than your junk drawer. It’s a fact of life that prospective buyers always snoop. They simply love opening your closet to watch a mountain of shoes and three curling irons come tumbling out. It makes them feel so much better about their own pack-rat habits.
So, under the pretext of finding out whether you have self-closing, spring-loaded sliding drawers in your kitchen, house hunters can’t resist poking around until they find the obligatory junk drawer. Imagine their shock when they don’t find tangled string, two pairs of broken scissors, twenty-three pens, and a coupon that expired in 2003—the kinds of things in their own junk drawer at home.
Instead they find clean white organizers. One contains stamps, two kinds of tape, and a shiny new pair of scissors. A fresh memo pad and two new pens are nestled in another. The third one holds a clearly labeled extra key for every item you currently own that needs a key.
It’s genius. Potential buyers are so blown away that even your junk drawer is immaculate, they’ll fall in love with your house on the spot. This is a home that has been cared for. Clean people, living the kind of life they aspire to, live here. If they bought your house, this could be their junk drawer. This could be their life.
The sad truth is that most people’s junk drawers have a long way to go. Just off the top of my head, these are the kinds of things my clients didn’t know enough to pitch:
• troll-head pencil with pink hair
• wooden nickels from long-defunct Wisconsin dairy
• unopened Mr. Potato Head from Burger King
• five chargers for cell phones client no longer owned
• Butterfinger Easter eggs from previous Easter (in February)
• vinyl adhesive to fix pool floats for nonexistent pool
• antique friction primer in sardine can–like tin packed with gunpowder to light Civil War cannon (If someone ever gave the owner a cannon, it would undoubtedly have come in handy.)
• Buddha key chain holding catnip mouse
• two dozen packages of carrot seeds that expired in 1997
• red telephone cord and no red telephone
• puzzle piece in shape of Iowa (Client’s kids were twenty-two and twenty-five and she was still hoping to find the rest of the puzzle.)
• three emergency rain ponchos (I mean, really, what family needs more than two?)
• gold wedding ring from client’s husband’s first marriage (Junk drawer was the least of this client’s problems.)
I’m not pointing fingers here. The first thing I pulled out of our junk drawer was a key to our old red minivan, the one we’d sold almost a decade ago.
I rubbed the key between my thumb and forefinger, and it all came back: buckling Shannon and Luke into their bulky car seats. The big-kid booster seats that followed. The huge relief of getting rid of the seats, only to find myself announcing every time we climbed in that we weren’t going anywhere until everybody’s seat belts were buckled, and that means you, Luke. Then the endless fights over who got the front seat, and later, a mother’s worst nightmare, having to let my babies, first Shannon and then Luke, get behind the wheel.
The key was still attached to a key chain that said WORLD’S BEST MOM. The kids had given it to me for Mother’s Day a couple of decades ago.
I tossed it into the CRAZY box. I couldn’t help myself.
CHAPTER 13
EVERYBODY CALLS ME SANDY, and it drives me nuts. Over the years, I’ve also been called Sand and Andi, and even SandraDee and, briefly, LookatMe. But Sandy is the nickname I can’t seem to brush off, and it always makes me feel like I’ve just come home from the beach and need a good shower. Sometimes it seems like I’ve spent my whole life in the mysteriously unattainable pursuit of the more dignified Sandra.
“Hey, Sandra,” Denise’s boyfriend said when he finally called. Actually, it sounded more like Sahndrah, but it was still better than Sandy. “How the hell are you?”
Josh and I had met exactly once, when he’d come by for a drink while Denise and I were having dinner at a restaurant near his office. Since then, Denise and I had both mentioned the four of us getting together, but not in any detailed way that might actually result in it happening.
Their relationship was still new. It was always more fun when just Denise and I went out. And Greg had already spent time with Denise’s two husbands as well as several of the more fleeting men in her life, so in his mind, he’d paid his dues and then some.
“If you really want me to, I’ll go,” he’d say. “It’s just that I always worry I’m going to call one of them by the wrong name.”
“Imagine how Denise feels,” I’d crack.
Greg would shake his head. He wouldn’t admit it, but he didn’t quite approve of Denise. He wanted her to pick somebody and stick with him.
“There’s nothing wrong with any of these guys, you know,” he’d said once as we came home from a night out with Denise and a guy she’d just started seeing. “It’s Denise.”
I thought that was at least half true, and I knew Denise did, too, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit it. “Maybe her goal is not to be in a relationship,” I said. “Maybe her goal is to lead an interesting life.”
Greg held the door connecting the mudroom to the kitchen open for me. “And the two are mutually exclusive?”
I turned in the doorway and struck a pose. “Make the rest of my night interesting, and I’ll let you know.”
Greg put his arms around me.
“Gross,” Shannon said. She walked by us and opened the refrigerator. “Get a room.”
I looked at the cell phone in my hand and remembered Josh. “Fine, thanks,” I said. “How the hell are you?”
“So, are you in?” Josh said. “Denise said you sounded really interested.”
“Interested.”
“Hotel? Atlanta? Staging? Did I get you at a bad time? Do you want to call me back?”
It’s not that I’d forgotten about it. It’s not that staging a hotel didn’t sound like a fun job, and it’s not like I wouldn’t normally jump all over any excuse to spend some time with my daughter. But without me around to crack the whip, it was hard to imagine that this house would ever get on the market.
“No, no,” I said. “Now’s a great time.” I grabbed a Care Bears memo pad and one of Greg’s old mechanical pencils from the junk drawer. I chose a fiery red pair from my new box of readers. “Can you tell me a little bit more about the job? And the timeline?”
Always be careful when working with friends, or friends of friends, or men your best friend is dating. Pin down the details. If I decided to do this, I’d send Josh an e-mail going over everything we’d discussed, just to make sure we were on the same page, and so we’d both have it in writing.
“Sure. It’s an old hotel in midtown Atlanta that went under. Bank owned. I jumped through hoops for so long I’d almost forgotten about it, and then the bank
finally caved on the price. It was a total steal.”
I could hear the thrill of the chase in his voice. “What’s it look like?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“What?”
He laughed. “I’m an investor. The bank agreed to an inspection, and the place is solid. At the price I paid that’s all I needed to know. I’d like to turn it into a pretty package and get it up and running. Then I’ll keep an eye out for the right buyer.”
“How many rooms?”
He laughed again. “You had to ask that, didn’t you? Listen, if you’re interested, I’ll send you everything I’ve got. Spend what you need to and not a cent more. Keep track of the hours, and I’ll pay your going rate. I’ll have a plane ticket sent to you, send a car to pick you up at the airport. You can stay at the hotel. At least, I think you can.”
He sounded about twelve. What kind of grown-up bought a hotel without seeing it first?
“I’d stay with my daughter,” I said, as if that were the only decision to be made here.
“Fine,” he said. “Just rent a car and send me the receipt.”
“When would you need me to start?”
“The sooner the better.”
Mrs. Bentley’s house was almost a wrap. I had just given bids to three potential clients and was waiting to hear back. There was no reason I couldn’t sneak in a quick trip to Atlanta. If the project turned out to be too big, maybe I could find someone to take it over.
I cleared my throat. “Let me check my schedule and get back to you, okay?”
“Sure. Take your time. Just call me by noon tomorrow. I want to get this baby moving.”
After we said good-bye, I tried to get back into sorting through my junk drawer, but I was too distracted. Staging Josh’s latest acquisition was probably a great opportunity, but the timing was off. And Denise’s most recent boyfriend didn’t sound like the kind of guy I could talk into waiting. I mean, take your time but call me by high noon tomorrow?
I decided to check up on Greg and Luke, who were sanding the cabinet doors out in the garage. I couldn’t wait to get those doors back up again. The kitchen looked like a great big toothless mouth without them.
