The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

I imagined my dad as a nine-year-old, already too tall for his grade, standing by the side of the road in his button-down shirt as his father took off down the highway. I could see the way he’d set his book bag down against his Buster Browns and stick his thumb out, the way he’d refuse to watch his father go. I could see the wind blowing his home-cut hair, the morning sunlight on his freckles, the way he’d make eye contact with every driver who passed him by to make sure they knew he saw them. When someone finally stopped, he’d sit politely in the passenger seat and focus his eyes out the window. Plenty of mornings, though, he wound up walking to school and being punished for tardiness.

  I felt tears in my eyes. “Were you even tempted at all to start seeing him again?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He just didn’t turn out to be the person I’d hoped for,” she said. She came over and hugged me as those tears spilled over. “But he did turn out to be a good daddy to you.”

  31

  The next morning, I called Randy the realtor and made an appointment to see Gardner’s house.

  “How is that going to help you?” my mother asked. “He’s gone.” “He’s not gone,” I said. “We just don’t know where he is.”

  She crossed her arms.

  “I just want to see it,” I said.

  She said she wanted to see it, too, and asked if she could come.

  I told her no.

  Randy the realtor had a lot of energy. I hadn’t told him that I was just a neighbor, and he was ready to sell, sell, sell that house. “This one’s a heartbreaker,” he said as he rattled his key in the front door. “It’s too good to be true.”

  Randy talked a blue streak as I walked through the sunny rooms. “The owner rewired and replumbed everything. He refinished the floors, retiled the kitchen and bath, and installed new fixtures.”

  “He sounds pretty handy,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe it.” Then he winked and added, “And gorgeous!”

  I was pleased to see that Gardner’s taste in furniture was entirely acceptable: mission-style, with a slightly Asian influence. It didn’t look decorator-y. It just looked like he had some nice things. And it was very clean.

  “If I have questions about the house,” I said, “can I contact the owner directly?”

  Randy laughed at that one. “No, dear. That’s not how it’s done.”

  The kitchen had brushed stainless fixtures, white cabinets, and muted-yellow walls. A window over the sink opened out onto a bougainvillea bush blooming bright pink. I gasped when I saw it.

  “Yep,” Randy said. “This baby’s not going to stay on the market long.”

  We’d covered the inside, and as we headed out the back door, Randy said, “Now, this can be torn down.”

  We stepped out onto a back porch. A huge back porch the size of two rooms. On one side, there was a long dining table, and on the other, there were wicker sofas and chairs around a coffee table. Ceiling fans up top, painted gray floor. It was just like my grandparents’ porch. I put my hand up to my mouth.

  “It’s brand-new,” Randy went on, watching my expression. “And the craftsmanship is top-notch.” He rapped on the screen frame with his knuckles. “But most people would rather have the yard space.”

  At the end of our tour, Randy gave me the hard sell. “I don’t want to rush you. But if you like it, I’d move on it. This house has been shown eleven times in two days. It’s going to go fast.”

  “I am very interested in the house,” I said. “But I’d like you to ask the owner a question for me.”

  Randy got out a pen.

  But I couldn’t think of anything. I had hoped to come up with a coded message about old houses that would sound like a real estate question to Randy but sound like “I’ve kicked Dean out! Please call me!” to Gardner. And at that point, I’d wasted so much of Randy’s time, and he’d worked so hard to get me to buy the house, that I couldn’t bring myself to come clean and just ask him for Gardner’s contact information. In the end, I just waved after Randy as he drove off, and then I walked back home, where my mother was watching Maxie.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t let me come,” she said as I walked in the door.

  I took Maxie from her.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “It was a heartbreaker,” I said.

  That night, after Maxie was down, I wrote Gardner a letter. Actually, I wrote him about ten letters, throwing them away and starting over almost as soon as I’d finished. But a letter seemed like the right idea. He’d have to go through his mail eventually.

  In the end, I had a draft I was pretty pleased with:

  Dear Gardner,

  I want to let you know that I asked Dean to leave, mostly because I realized that after everything, amazingly, I didn’t like his personality.

  Now Maxie and I are back to our real life, which has a hole in it with you gone.

  We miss you. I miss you.

  Love,

  Jenny

  P.S. I went to see your house with your realtor. I really liked it. Especially the porch. That is one hell of a porch.

  I called Claudia and read it to her. It had taken her an hour to put Nikki to bed. Now she was detoxing with a half-empty carton of Häagen-Dazs.

  “Where’s the part that says, ‘It turns out I’m in love with you’?” she asked.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Because that might be a good thing to add.”

  “It’s there,” I said. “It’s between the lines.”

  “You’re trying to be subtle?”

  “The point is,” I said, “what if he doesn’t like me?”

  “It’s not possible that he doesn’t like you,” Claudia said. “A man does not build a porch for a woman he doesn’t like.”

  “But his feelings could have changed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Dean. Because I disappointed him.”

  “You didn’t tell him you slept with Dean, did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then, if anything,” she said, “not being able to have you made him want you all the more.”

  “And then he went to Dallas.”

  “To lick his wounded heart.”

  “Or because he had no reason to stay.”

  “Look,” Claudia said. “This is a time to be brave! Send him a long letter! Let him know how you feel! Lay it all out!”

  Inspired, I started again and wrote unrestricted confessions of love for four pages.

  But then I sent the short letter. Largely because I got the two envelopes mixed up.

  “He builds you a porch and all you can muster for him is two paragraphs?” Claudia wanted to know.

  “It was an accident!”

  She was caught up in the details. “But why did you mail it, anyway, when you could just walk over and drop it through his slot?”

  “In case he’s forwarding his mail.”

  She nodded. She liked my thinking. “We won’t let him get away,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. I was just going to have to watch and wait. The house already had a SOLD sign. He’d have to come back eventually—if for no other reason than to get his stuff. And Maxie and I would be at the window, waiting.

  But he didn’t come back. Not his truck, not a moving truck, not even the folks who were buying the house. The SOLD sign stayed up, and nothing happened down there. I watched from the window, and the porch swing, and the front yard. Maxie and I walked the block and watched. I peered in his windows whenever Maxie and I went by. Nothing.

  And in the meantime, I got on with things. I cleaned up the house and removed all evidence of Dean, including a coffee can of cigarette butts I found on the back steps.

  I wrote a long letter of thanks to my father, accepting his check and telling him that I would wait to deposit it until my funds had truly run out. I told him I thought I could stretch that money out for a year. I tol
d him that, because of him, I could stay home with Maxie, and that it was the best, kindest thing he’d ever done for me. I told him I was grateful.

  Maxie started sleeping through the night a few days after Dean left. Maybe she hadn’t liked the disruption of having him around. Or maybe she hadn’t liked Dean himself. But with him out of the house, she was giving me five hours a night of uninterrupted sleep. I would have taken eight, or ten, or fifteen, but five would do just fine.

  I didn’t go out to the garage after Gardner was gone, and I didn’t do much about starting the shop. It suddenly seemed like too much. I didn’t have time to run a shop, not really. The idea of a shop was one thing, but the reality of running a business was quite another. I wasn’t sure what I had been thinking.

  And then I got a phone call from Meredith. She wanted to bring me my motherhood gift.

  “What motherhood gift?” I asked.

  “The one I have for you,” she said, as if I should be on top of it.

  “When are you free?” she asked.

  “I’m always free,” I said, trying not to sound bitter. “Just hangin’ out with Maxie.”

  It had been months since I’d seen Meredith. And even though I knew that most women dropped all their friends for a while when they fell in love, and even though I was guilty myself of having done it to Meredith when I first met Dean, I was still feeling very injured. The part of me that wanted to defend her said that she couldn’t have done things differently. She’d never really been in love before. It was bound to hit her like a Mack truck. But the part that wanted to defend me couldn’t deny that her timing had been very bad.

  We arranged for her to meet me the next day at my house during one of Maxie’s naps. That way, we could talk a little and catch up before I was back on duty and distracted.

  When she showed up, she was carrying flowers and a red box with a white ribbon. She looked prettier than I remembered, and she burst into tears as soon as I opened the door.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, and wouldn’t let go of our hug.

  “No big deal,” I said.

  “I’m a bad friend,” she said.

  “You fell in love,” I said. “It happens.”

  We sat down on the sofa.

  “How is your Dr. Blandon, anyway?” I asked.

  “How is your Dr. Blandon?” she countered.

  I glanced over at him, belly-up on a dining room chair. “Still handsome,” I said.

  “Mine, too,” she said, looking a little flushed.

  “You guys are still happy?”

  “Still happy,” she said.

  “I thought maybe you called because you’d dumped him.”

  “No,” she said, straightening a little. “I called because I missed you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Actually,” she said, “we’re getting married.”

  And then it was hard for me to be mad. She told me that after he asked her, the only person she wanted to call was me, but she wasn’t sure if we were even on speaking terms anymore, she’d been so neglectful. She wanted me to be her maid of honor.

  “Who are the other bridesmaids?” I asked.

  “Just you,” she said. And then she started to cry again.

  I shushed her and made her give me all the details of everything. I insisted on feeling nothing but happiness for her, and did not let myself think, even for a minute, about my own crappy, loveless situation.

  We hadn’t yet exhausted the wedding topic when Meredith checked her watch and said, “How long before Maxie wakes up?”

  I said, “Maybe half an hour, if we’re lucky.”

  “Let’s do the present, then,” Meredith said. “I just want you to be able to concentrate.” She handed the box to me.

  Inside was a sterling-silver charm bracelet laden with charms. “Wow,” I said as I lifted it up and started to examine them.

  “They’re vintage,” Meredith said. “I’ve been collecting them ever since you got pregnant.”

  Some of them were baby charms: a little carriage with moving wheels, a baby bootie, a bottle, a rattle, a teddy bear, a pacifier, a stork with a bundle dangling from its beak. Lots were about love: a box of candy that said YOU’RE SWEET, a fan with blades that said I LUV U, a letter that said SEALED WITH A KISS, and a lock in the shape of a heart. Others were charms Meredith knew I would just like: a sombrero, a boot spur, a seal with a ball on its nose, a little perfume bottle with a removable top, an hourglass with sand inside, a dragonfly.

  I flipped through the charms again and again, feeling the weight of them. Meredith looked very proud. “They’re mostly from the forties and fifties,” she said. “I thought Maxie might like playing with it. And I also thought, when she grew up, you might give it to her to wear when she has her own kids.”

  We put it on my arm, and I shook it a little. It made a great rattle. “Maxie’s going to love it,” I said.

  “I’m really sorry I disappeared,” Meredith said.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  After Maxie woke up, we sat out in the backyard on a blanket. Maxie found a spot in the grass and tried to eat every fallen pecan she could get her hands on. Meredith tried to bond, poking at her and saying things like “Hey there, little person.” Meredith told me she’d quit her job at the antiques shop because our boss had refused to hire anyone to replace me, and Meredith was starting to lose her hair under the strain of doing two jobs at once.

  “Literally,” Meredith said. “You should have seen the shower drain.”

  “Why wouldn’t she hire anybody?”

  Meredith just looked at the sky and shook her head.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “I have an offer from the guy at that place on Nineteenth Street.”

  “Do you want to work for him?”

  “No,” Meredith said. “But I do want to work.”

  We brainstormed other people we knew who might be looking for help before I had the idea I should have had months before.

  “Come with me,” I said, picking Maxie up and heading toward the garage.

  Meredith followed me inside. “Oh, my God.”

  She wanted to know what had happened, so I gave her the whole story of Gardner and how I’d let him get away. That got us off the topic of my idea for a while, and Maxie started to fuss after we’d been in the garage too long, so Meredith came with us on a little stroll around the neighborhood.

  “You have to find him!” she said.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “He must have a cell phone,” she said.

  “But I don’t have the number. I never even had the number to his house.”

  “Can’t you call information and find his parents?”

  “I tried that,” I said. “There are sixty-five John Gardners in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.”

  “Let’s start calling them!” Meredith said.

  I shook my head. “I sent him a letter. He knows how I feel. If he wants to see me, he’ll find me.”

  “You’re so Zen,” she said with admiration.

  “I’m just tired,” I said, which brought me back to my idea. “Why don’t we go into business together?”

  I was too tired to run a shop. But I wasn’t too tired to help out. We could be partners, fifty-fifty. Meredith could run it and do the books, and I could own and maintain the building. We could both hit estate and garage sales on the weekends. “It’s perfect,” I said.

  Meredith did not hesitate. “We’ll need a sign,” she said, and she knew just the guy to make one. And we were in business.

  The next weekend, we started hitting the estate sales to build up inventory. Maxie came along in her stroller, wearing a fabulous polka-dot wool cap and mouthing frozen sticks of organic yogurt. We found great stuff right off the bat: a red rotary telephone (that worked!), a box of random old family snapshots, a rocking chair, a collection of paint-by-numbers art, an old fish crate, a red tricycle.

  Meredith kept strict records
of everything, and we marked it all up to ridiculous prices. Meredith believed that boutique prices made things seem more valuable. She believed in the power of display. She said you had to create an atmosphere of swankiness. And so she did just that. She played swing music around the clock. She put zinnias in antique planters out front. She made curtains out of bark-cloth tropicals. She kept the doors open and fresh air breezing through—winter in Houston, unlike summer, is a great time for fresh air. Everything felt bright and clean and fabulous. Even my mother walked in and said, “Adorable.”

  Christmas came and went. Maxie wore a little Santa suit on the big day, and she got a set of books from my mother, a little cart to push around from me, and a burnt-orange T-shirt with the University of Texas longhorn on it from my dad. “That’s Bevo,” he said to Maxie, who grinned her four new teeth at him. He tried again. “Say Be-vo.”

  “Mih-meh,” Maxie said.

  “Be-vo,” my dad said. “Bevo.”

  The shop opened for business the first week in January, and three weeks after that, the local paper sent a reporter and photographer to do a piece on us. We were a little bit of a phenomenon.

  And in all that time, I didn’t hear from Gardner. But it was okay. Sort of.

  32

  I kept busy. My dad took to coming by on Sunday evenings for a little visit with Maxie. My mom still came by at least once a day. I saw Claudia every Saturday at the zoo, and also many evenings for walks around the neighborhood. We still had our once-a-week mommy group. I signed Maxie up for a baby gymnastics class and made some new mommy friends that way.

  Meredith worked at the shop all day, and Maxie and I helped out when we could. It was great to see so much of Meredith. Dr. Blandon, who followed Meredith around like paparazzi, became the shop cat and took to sleeping near her by the register in a leopard-fur-lined kitty basket with the word PURR-FECTION written on it in rhinestones. Meredith was so pleased to have him back in her life that she couldn’t resist buying him gifts. He even had a rhinestone collar to match his bed.

  “He’s the Liberace of cats,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Meredith admitted.

  Meredith also had trouble resisting gifts for Maxie. Sunglasses. Mittens. Tiny flip-flops.