Objects of My Affection
Page 1
Advance praise for
OBJECTS OF MY AFFECTION
“I loved this deeply felt, bravely honest tale of a professional organizer who discovers just how messy life and love can be, but that everything truly does have a place. A treasure of a novel.”
—MELISSA SENATE, author of The Love Goddess’ Cooking School
“Simultaneously breezy yet thought provoking, this is a fun read that stays with you.”
—SARAH PEKKANEN, author of These Girls
Praise for
JILL SMOLINSKI
“Smart, engaging, and as refreshing as a dip in the surf.”
—JENNIFER WEINER, author of Fly Away Home
“Fresh and fun to read.”
—THE BOSTON GLOBE
“Warm and original.”
—PEOPLE
In the humorous, heartfelt new novel by the author of The Next Thing on My List, a personal organizer must somehow convince a reclusive artist to give up her hoarding ways and let go of the stuff she’s hung on to for decades.
Lucy Bloom is broke, freshly dumped by her boyfriend, and forced to sell her house to send her nineteen-year-old son to drug rehab. Although she’s lost it all, she’s determined to start over. So when she’s offered a high-paying gig helping clear the clutter from the home of reclusive and eccentric painter Marva Meier Rios, Lucy grabs it. Armed with the organizing expertise she gained while writing her book, Things Are Not People, and fueled by a burning desire to get her life back on track, Lucy rolls up her sleeves to take on the mess that fills every room of Marva’s huge home. Lucy soon learns that the real challenge may be taking on Marva, who seems to love the objects in her home too much to let go of any of them.
While trying to stay on course toward a strict deadline—and with an ex-boyfriend back in the picture, a new romance on the scene, and her son’s rehab not going as planned—Lucy discovers that Marva isn’t just hoarding, she is also hiding a big secret. The two form an unlikely bond, as each learns from the other that there are those things in life we keep, those we need to let go—but it’s not always easy to know the difference.
Jill Smolinski is the author of the novels The Next Thing on My List and Flip-Flopped. Her work has appeared in major women’s magazines, as well as in an anthology of short stories, American Girls About Town. She lives in Los Angeles with her son.
www.jillsmolinski.com
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COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER
ALSO BY JILL SMOLINSKI
The Next Thing on My List
Flip-Flopped
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Touchstone
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Jill Smolinski
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Touchstone hardcover edition May 2012
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Designed by Joy O’Meara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smolinski, Jill.
Objects of my affection : a novel / Jill Smolinski.
p. cm.
“A Touchstone book.”
1. Single mothers—Fiction. 2. Compulsive hoarding—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.M65O25 2012
813′.6—dc23 2011039107
ISBN 978-1-4516-6075-3 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-6078-4 (eBook)
For Mary Jo Reutter, who, as best friends go, is forever in my “keep pile”
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
objects
of my
affection
chapter one
I remind myself as I enter the coffee shop that it’s actually a good thing I sold my house and, for that matter, almost everything in it. Sure, some may find my situation pitiful—a thirty-nine-year-old woman reduced to sharing a bedroom with her best friend’s preschooler daughter. But for purposes of this particular job interview—I pause to look around to see if anyone is looking around for me—it makes me even more of an expert. Will Meier is going to be downright impressed that the woman he’s thinking of hiring to clear out his mother’s home barely has a possession left of her own.
Not that I’ll mention anything about it to him.
A man at the counter orders one of those ridiculous coffees that sound as if you should get a cake with several people around it singing “Happy Birthday” rather than something in a paper cup. Then he turns his attention to me. “You must be Lucy Bloom.”
This is my guy. “Hi, and you’re Will Meier! Nice to meet you,” I say, shaking his hand. He’s tall, fortyish, clean-cut, and wearing a business suit with the sort of ease that makes it clear he doesn’t usually waste his mornings hanging out in coffee shops.
“I recognized you by your book.” He points toward the copy of Things Are Not People that I’m clutching. “What can I get you to drink?”
“Coffee, black. Thanks.”
Maybe my spartan drinking style will be another check in the yes column for me. The woman is amazing! Even her beverages aren’t cluttered!
The coffee shop is only half-full this late in the morning on a Tuesday. We grab a table near a window.
“So what have you been told about the position?” Will asks.
I take a sip of my coffee to buy myself a few seconds to think. Then I list off some of what the woman at the referral agency explained to me. “You need someone to help you clear out your mother’s home. I’d be supervising crews and working directly with her to determine what stays and what goes. And it’s important the job get done in a timely manner.”
What she said that I elect not to mention: Your mother, besides being renowned artist Mar
va Meier Rios, is a monumental pain who has either frightened away or turned down every organizer they’ve referred to date. Also, the contents she’s managed to cram into one house could in fact supply an entire third-world nation if there were a way to ship it there … that is, if most of it weren’t junk.
“It needs to be done no later than May fifteenth,” Will says.
Just shy of two months. “Sure.” It seems like a generous amount of time, and I can’t help but wonder what the catch is. “Of course I’ll need to see the house first,” I say in a tone that I hope disguises how desperate I am to get this job. “May I ask why your mother wants to do this now?”
He gives a shrug. “Don’t know.” Pulling his cell phone from his pants pocket, he snaps it open. “Although she’s had health issues. Smokes like a chimney. Diabetes. Been hit with some chronic infections—miracle she’s hung in there this long.” He looks at the screen. “Hold on a sec. I need to return this text.”
It’s all I can do to hide the disgust I feel. Could the man be any colder? Talking about his mother’s failing health as if he’s commenting on the weather! It’s weird how quickly Will Meier morphed from being a man who’d initially struck me as rather good-looking in a Clark Kent sort of way to one who could be but isn’t due to an apparent lack of a heartbeat.
Tucking the phone back in his pocket, he says, “I assume the agency described the pay structure?”
I nod. Although I’m supposed to charge by the hour, Will is offering a weekly salary that, truthfully, isn’t great. But there’s a big, fat bonus if I bring the job in by the deadline—enough to make my eyes roll in my head and make that cha-ching sound like an old-fashioned cash register.
More important, it would be enough to start my life over again.
Will smiles, but I see there’s a challenge in his eyes. “Tell me, Lucy, why should I hire you?”
My mind immediately flashes to the list of credentials I’d mapped out while preparing for the interview.
1. I’ve always been good at letting go of things. Back in grade school when they were collecting toy donations to raise money for the starving babies in Africa, I didn’t give them old, broken junk (like some brothers of mine I could name)—I even fixed up my outgrown Sting-Ray bike to add to the pile.
2. On a recent trip to see my parents in Arizona, I managed to talk them into throwing away their entire collection of empty margarine containers, which took up two cupboards.
3. Anyone who can convince her nineteen-year-old son to go away to a drug rehab will have no trouble strong-arming some lady into giving up stuff.
4. I really, really, really need the job—rehab costs a fortune—so I’ll work hard out of sheer desperation. …
I pull out the copy of Things Are Not People that I brought. “You should hire me because I’m organized, efficient, and an expert in the field of de-cluttering,” I say as I hand it to him. “This is for you. I would have autographed it, but that seems so pretentious.”
“I’ll admit, I was intrigued when the agency mentioned you’d written a book on clutter. Interesting title.”
“The book is part how-to, but it’s also an exploration of the way people tend to get attached to things—you know, if Susan gives you a mug, and then Susan moves away, you can’t let go of the mug because it reminds you of Susan. The mug becomes Susan.”
“What inspired you to write it?”
“It started as an article on assignment for a magazine—I did a bit of freelancing when I worked for a PR agency, before I opened my own organizing business.” I fish my résumé from my bag and hand it to Will. “The article was supposed to be tips for de-cluttering your home, but as I researched it, it grew into something different. The editor liked it so much, he suggested that I shop it as a book.”
“How’d it sell?”
Why do people always ask that? Can’t they just be awed by the fact that I got a book published at all? Does success always have to be based on how many copies it sold? “Quite well … for that type of a book.”
Truthfully, after I got laid off from the PR agency, I’d hoped that writing a series of books about organizing would become the next step in my career. That idea hasn’t panned out since the first book was such a flop. A few months ago, with my unemployment and much of my savings having run dry, I earned a possibly bogus online degree as a professional organizer and decided to try my hand in a new field. My first client was a former neighbor who needed help running a garage sale, which I did for the fee of him helping me run mine. Then, unable to drum up any other business—and too broke to rent office space and hang my “open for business” sign—I stumbled across a referral agency that specializes in placing organizers. Will Meier is the first nibble I’ve had from them.
He sits back in his chair and levels a look at me. “You know who my mother is?”
“I’m familiar with her work, of course.” Originally, I’d planned to gush a bit at this point—mention how Marva Meier Rios practically pioneered the neo-Expressionism movement back in the 1970s, how one of her paintings, Woman, Freshly Tossed, is considered one of the greatest works of art of this century, how she used to hobnob with celebrities from John Lennon to Liza Minnelli, and other fun facts I’d looked up on the Internet (never having heard of her before). Given Will’s chilly attitude toward his mother, however, perhaps understated was the way to go.
“You’re aware she can be difficult,” he says.
“Who could blame her? She’s sick. She’s elderly.”
“You want to see how difficult she can be, try calling her elderly to her face.”
“I’m only saying I can roll with the punches.”
“There might be a few of those, too.”
“You’re joking. I get it.”
He leans in. “Look, here’s the deal: I don’t have time to babysit this project. I’m out in Hinsdale, and the drive here is a hassle. Meanwhile, I’ve got a crew of guys ready to work, and everything’s at a standstill because the client—my mother—is being uncooperative. They can’t get rid of a thing unless she says so. I need somebody in there who can make it happen.”
“I can definitely do that.” I feel a strange urge to leap to my feet and salute.
“She’ll need to meet you first, give her okay, before I can say ‘you’re hired.’”
“Of course.”
“Well then”—he stands, tossing his cup neatly into a trash can—“let’s go face the firing squad.”
As I follow Will Meier’s car the two or so miles from the coffee shop to his mother’s house, I find myself humming along with the radio to calm my nerves. It’s playing one of those cookie-cutter pop songs that my son, Ash, and I used to make fun of—him because he was far too hip for pop music, and me because I wanted him to think I was hip, too.
It’s been a month since Ash left for rehab in Florida. Rough deal, huh—Florida? Staring up at palm trees sure sounds like more fun than looking up at this gray, drizzly Chicago sky. Almost makes it seem ridiculous that anyone could feel sorry for him.
But I do. Feel sorry for Ash.
Or at the very least, feel sorry about him—that his life got so horribly derailed—that instead of being at college pulling all-nighters and playing pickup soccer, he’s sitting in a circle, sharing war stories with a bunch of other drug users.
Plus he’s fair-skinned and burns easily—I know he won’t always remember to wear sunscreen. The sun there is so much stronger than it is here.
And, yes, I do realize how stupid it is to worry about something that minor, considering the circumstances. At least I didn’t call his therapist at rehab to ask if he could remind Ash to use an SPF 30. Although I don’t believe an e-mail on the subject would be entirely out of line.
Anyway, I would say that sending my son away was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I’ve officially stricken that phrase from my vocabulary. Hear that, Universe? I am no longer making proclamations as to what has or has not been the hardest thing. You can q
uit upping the ante now. The first time I was foolish enough to say it was twelve years ago when Ash’s father and I divorced. I naively thought that was the height of my bottoming out, so to speak. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” I sighed to myself again, years later, as I explained to an eleven-year-old Ash that his already infrequent visits with his dad were being suspended altogether because they made the new family “uncomfortable.” By the time Ash and I had battled our way through his later teen years, I’d worn the phrase down to a nub. I’d hardly felt a thing these past couple months while selling my home and cashing in my savings to pay the rehab’s outlandish fees.
It’ll be worth it, though. I gave up everything, and I’d do it again if it means that I’ll have my sweet boy back, instead of the pasty, sullen, almost unrecognizable one I sent away. The one who refused to let me accompany him and the interventionist to the airport.
Like that song, Ash said he didn’t need rehab, no, no, no, but nonetheless he went. It was with checkered Vans sneakers digging into the ground all the way … but he went.
And now here I am.
As I drive down a densely tree-lined street, I can’t help but get excited about the prospect of working in this neighborhood. Oak Park is one of those eclectic, artsy areas of Chicago where you can have a funky bungalow right next to a house personally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s about a thirty-minute drive from where I’m staying now, depending on traffic, which of course in Chicago you can never depend on.
Will pulls into a curved driveway and parks his car, and I follow. Like the other houses on this block, Marva Meier Rios’s house is set back from the road, with plenty of yard and foliage surrounding it. It’s Craftsman-style in a warm brown with absolutely gorgeous woodwork on the windows. From the description the agency gave me, I half-expected there to be a couple of cars on the lawn jacked up on cement blocks and a refrigerator on the porch.