What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels)

by Wendy Markham

  “The seller is very motivated. The owner passed away suddenly last summer…” Verna pauses to close the door behind us and fumble for the light switch.

  Jack and I exchange a glance, wondering just how motivated a dead guy can possibly be.

  “Anyway,” Verna goes on, “his nephew, who inherited the house—” Aha, lightbulb moment. So the seller is the nephew, who is apparently very much alive, living on the West Coast and hoping to unload it. According to Verna, “I’m sure he’ll entertain any offer you might want to make.”

  The house is your basic seventies ranch, no frills, but no cat smell or piss-yellow siding, either. White paint inside and out, hardwood floors, rectangular rooms. There are three bedrooms and two baths, as well as a nice screened-in patio off the back, and a deep lot with trees, which I guess don’t qualify as Mature Plantings? Or do they? I’m still not entirely down with this real-estate jargon.

  “What do you think?” Verna asks as usual, when we finish our tour.

  It’s all very basic, very okay, very affordable.

  But like I said, there’s just this…pall. That’s the best way to describe it.

  I’d be willing to bet the dead guy died right here in the house. Who knows? Maybe he’s still hanging around.

  “I don’t know…it’s a little dark,” I tell Verna.

  “Picture it on a sunny day, without the vinyl blinds. It would be so much more—”

  “No, Tracey’s talking about the way it feels, not the way it looks,” Jack cuts in. “Dark as in sad and depressing.”

  So he gets it, too. I shoot him a surprised and grateful look. Good to know we’re in sync—and that houses really do have personalities.

  Heaven only knows house number five does. Meet the plain girl who’s nice enough but just tries too hard to be liked.

  Architecturally, it’s what you draw with crayons on manila paper when you’re in first grade: a simple rectangle with a triangle sitting on top of it. First floor: door centered between two windows, second floor: three windows, each placed directly above a window or door on the first floor.

  Most people would drive by and never give it a second glance if it didn’t self-consciously scream, Hey, look at me! Here I am!

  The outside is painted in an elaborate scheme of greens with tan trim—on what little trim there is, anyway. There’s a wooden shingle by the door—the kind you see on old sea captains’ homes in New England. You know: Josiah Whalen House, Circa 1691.

  This one reads—in that same antiquated font: Bob and Bev Stubiniak House, Built 1986.

  “What do you think?” asks Verna as we walk through the living room, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms and one and a half baths. “Can you see yourselves living here?”

  Frankly, I can’t even see Bob and Bev Stubiniak living here. Not only are they not home at the moment, but judging by their shelves, wall calendar and closets, they appear to be people who don’t read, don’t have a social life, and don’t have clothing, and are passionate about neutral shades.

  Curiously, however, the house smells like someone just finished baking cookies. Potpourri is bubbling away on the stove and scented candles flicker on the tables. The stereo is on and tuned to a classical-music station.

  Clearly, Bob and Bev read every book in print on selling your house and staged their home accordingly.

  “It’s just not for us,” I tell Verna as Jack looks at his watch and wonders about the basketball tournament and what’s for supper. Trust me, I can read his mind.

  “Can we see the last house?” I ask Verna. “And then I think we’ll call it a day.”

  “Absolutely.” She too looks at her watch, wondering whether she can squeeze another pair of house-hunting young marrieds—with a higher price range and a more enthusiastic husband—into her day.

  No, I can’t read her mind, but her agenda is obvious, and can you blame her?

  As she drives us toward house number six, I look over the listing sheet.

  Four bedrooms, two full baths, rocking-chair porch, half-acre lot. Built in the 1920s, a Sears Catalog House.

  “What’s that?” I ask Verna. “Sears Catalog House?”

  “Just what it sounds like.”

  I haven’t got a clue what it sounds like, other than…

  “Uh…it came from a Sears catalog?” I ask dubiously.

  To my astonishment, she nods.

  Granted, I haven’t spent much time with a Sears catalog since I wrote my last Christmas letter to Santa when I was eight. Back then, I pretty much circled everything Barbie, tore the pages from the catalog and stuffed them into an envelope addressed to the North Pole.

  In my adult life, the only thing I have ever personally bought from a Sears catalog—which I borrowed from my grandmother—is a Crock-Pot. Never a house.

  I suppose I might have missed something, but I don’t remember seeing four-bedroom homes for sale between the Craftsman tools and the Kenmore vacuums.

  Must have been a Roaring Twenties thing: get your coonskin coat, flapper dress, gramophone and four-bedroom house all in the same place.

  “Back in the day,” Verna says, “you could mail-order a kit to build a house.”

  Back in the day—not the Jazz Age, but a while back—you could also order a Barbie Dream House from Sears. I remember my father cursing and putting mine together on a snowy December morn.

  Picturing a plastic grid with pop-out pieces and pages of inscrutable instructions, I have to ask, “Are you sure we should bother looking at this one?”

  I’m talking to Jack, but it’s Verna who answers, “It’s a little outdated, but I really think it has potential.”

  Which is the equivalent of saying the wallflower has a nice personality.

  I’m about to tell her to forget it when Jack says, “I’d like to see it. My grandma Candell lived in a Sears house in Mamaroneck when I was a kid.”

  Grandma Candell was not a huge presence in my husband’s life, as she got along with her grown son, Jack Senior, about as well as Jack Senior got along with Jack Junior. Yet in a way, she’s responsible for our dream wedding: we were able to afford the Shorewood reception only because Jack sold the shares of Disney stock his grandmother had given him for his birthday as a little kid.

  I remember feeling sorry for him when I heard that, thinking it would be a blazing hot, sunny January day in Brookside before my grandmothers ever gave me stock certificates for my birthday. They believed in candy and toys and hand-crocheted capes that you were embarrassed to wear to school because when was the last time a cape was in fashion, for God’s sake, but your mother made you wear it anyway because of course Grandma made the cape out of love and you didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  Anyway, if it weren’t for Grandma Candell and her cold hard stock-certificate birthday gift, Jack and I would have danced our first dance as a married couple at the church hall’s basketball-court-slash-dance-floor where I once threw up after too much zau-zage and birch beer at a CYO mixer, instead of in a beautiful ballroom with a view of the shimmering October sunset on the lake.

  And if it weren’t for Grandma Candell and her Sears Catalog House in Mamaroneck, Jack and I wouldn’t have come to see this Sears Catalog House in Glenhaven Park.

  This is it.

  This is the house for us.

  I know it, from the moment we pull up in front.

  For the first time ever, I wonder what Jack’s grandma Candell’s first name was.

  I really hope that it’s something quaint and sweetly old-fashioned like Daisy or Lily, because we most certainly will be naming our daughter after her someday.

  But that’s a different story.

  Let’s get on with this one, shall we?

  CHAPTER 4

  First of all, the house has definite curb appeal.

  White with black shutters, window boxes, a redbrick chimney. There’s a porch on the side with a low forward-sloping roof held up by fat square pillars. No rocking chairs, but I can easily picture the
m there.

  I can easily picture us there.

  I can easily picture us lounging in the living room with the Sunday papers, or entertaining our family in the dining room with its built-in corner china cupboard, or tucking in our children in the two upstairs bedrooms beneath the gabled roof line.

  You know how the dead guy’s house had a pall?

  This place has the opposite aura. There’s a well-loved, happy feeling about it, and no wonder.

  Verna tells us, “The current owners, Hank and Marge—” Hank and Marge. Don’t you love it? Talk about sweetly old-fashioned! “—have lived here since they were married in 1950.”

  “Nineteen-fifty?” I echo as I open and close the doors of the shallow cupboards on either side of the brick fireplace in the living room. The shelves are lined with dozens and dozens of paperback romance novels.

  “Yes, and they raised their six sons here. Now Hank is sick with emphysema, and they just can’t take care of the house anymore. So they’re moving to a condo to be near their daughter and son-in-law up in Duchess County.”

  For a moment, I’m struck with a bittersweet pang as I imagine Jack and me, married almost sixty years, him with emphysema, unable to care for our house, me plowing through stacks of romance novels, and us having to move to a condo in Duchess County with our as-yet-unborn daughter Daisy or Lily and our son-in-law.

  Or maybe I’ll be the one with emphysema. I used to be a smoker. The older I get, the more difficult it is to believe that I went all those years puffing away without worrying the least bit about the deadly damage I was doing to my body.

  Or maybe I did worry, somewhere in the back of my mind, but not enough to quit. What an idiot.

  Now all I want, desperately, is to live to a ripe old age with my husband.

  Oh, and the other thing I want, just as desperately? This Sears Catalog House.

  Don’t get me wrong—there are some drawbacks.

  The house reeks of stale cigarette smoke, and is filled with wallpaper, brown paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting in shades of brown and green.

  The kitchen is tiny and outdated—yet I can see past the ancient appliances, worn orange-brown linoleum, harvest-gold laminate countertops, and tan and brown-flecked wallpaper that’s bubbling a little behind the sink and grease stained above the stove.

  There’s no master bedroom—the two downstairs are tiny, and the two upstairs, while bigger, have such low slanted ceilings that Jack bumps his head twice. But who’s to say we can’t knock down a wall or two and/or raise the roof?

  Well, okay, Jack’s to say.

  Because when I mention doing just that, he says, “What? We can’t go around knocking down walls and raising roofs!”

  First of all, there’s only one roof, and second of all, I’m not suggesting that we go around knocking down walls, as in door-to-door with a sledgehammer. Just one or two walls, right here in our own home.

  I mean, future home.

  “Sure we can,” I tell Jack. “We can reconfigure the first-floor bedrooms, or put cathedral ceilings in upstairs so that you won’t give yourself a concussion every time you get out of bed in the morning.”

  “How are we going to do this work?” he asks succinctly.

  “You’re pretty handy,” I say.

  He raises an eyebrow, undoubtedly noting he’s not the least bit handy.

  Which is exactly what I’m thinking.

  But there are times when flattery can get you everywhere. Or at least, to Glenhaven Park.

  Then again, Jack doesn’t look flattered. He looks confused. And a little annoyed.

  “I think the downstairs bedrooms could be opened up to make a scrumptious master suite,” opines Verna. “And with this spacious backyard, there’s plenty of room for a nice deck off the kitchen.”

  Ooh, great idea. A nice deck off the kitchen to go with the rocking-chair porch off the living room. I gaze out the window and envision myself lounging there with the romance novels I’m going to be reading when I move here.

  And there in the spacious backyard, nibbling the low-hanging budding branch of a Mature Planting, are a graceful doe and her spindly-legged fawn.

  “Jack, look!” I spaz out, clutching his arm. “Deer! There are deer out there!”

  Wow. This is so perfect. Too perfect. Next thing you know, a whistling cartoon bluebird will land on a bough.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d think Verna had hired the woodland creatures and staged the whole bucolic scene.

  Wait, did she? Because she’s following my gaze out the window wearing an iffy expression. For all I know, there’s a guy out there crouching in the azaleas with a clipboard and a headset saying, “All right, Ed, cue the fairies and sprites.”

  “There are a lot of deer in Westchester,” Verna says almost apologetically.

  “This is so amazing. I mean, to be surrounded by nature instead of concrete…it’s just so incredible.”

  “Yes, we love our deer here in Westchester!” she gushes right back at me, so I must have been imagining the apologetic tone. Of course I was, because why would she be apologetic over Bambi and friends?

  “We have to live here,” I say, partly to Jack, but mostly to Verna, who is, after all, the fairy godrealtor who can make it happen.

  “So you’re interested, then?”

  “We’re interested.” Belatedly, I add, “Right, Jack?”

  “What was the asking price again?”

  Verna tells him.

  He nods thoughtfully, rubbing the spot where his beard would be if he were able to grow one. “Well, we’ve just started looking, so we’re not going to jump on anything, but when the time comes, I think this is what we have in mind.”

  “When the time comes? Jack, the time is now.”

  “Tracey—” he sounds kind of stressed and casts an eye toward Verna, as if to say let’s not talk about this in front of her “—we don’t even know that we can afford—”

  “Yes, we do. I preauthorized us for a mortgage, and—”

  “What? Where? When?”

  “Who? How?” I quip.

  Jack is not amused.

  “At the bank,” I tell him, sticking with the original questions, “the other day during my lunch hour. And believe me, it wasn’t easy getting out of the office to do it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Why didn’t I tell him?

  The truth is, I’m not sure.

  Maybe I was afraid I’d be forced to admit to Jack that we wouldn’t qualify for as much house as we need.

  Maybe I was afraid that talking to the bank would make it seem too real to Jack, and he’d be scared away.

  Or maybe I’m a control freak and like to handle the details on my own, because if I wait for Jack, things tend not to get done.

  But I don’t want to say any of that.

  So I shrug and tell him, “Because I’ve barely seen you all week, between your work schedule and mine. I didn’t think it was worth waking you in the middle of the night to tell you, and I was going to tell you yesterday, but Mitch was around.” To Verna, who can’t help but listen in, I add, “Mitch is Jack’s best friend.”

  “Best friend?” Jack rolls his eyes. “That makes us sound like eleven-year-old girls.”

  “Sorry,” I say, and amend it to, “Mitch is Jack’s sidekick.”

  To which Jack mutters, “What are we, superheroes?”

  “No, but he’s definitely your sidekick.”

  “I thought you were my sidekick.”

  “I’m your wife.”

  “Oh! So that’s why you keep turning up,” he says teasingly, “day after day, night after night, in good times and in bad…”

  “No, that would be Mitch,” I shoot back. “I’m the one who’s rarely home. He’s the one who’s always there. But I guess he won’t be if we move up here, will he?”

  “We’re moving up here to get away from Mitch?”

  “No!” Not just Mitch. The rats and the roaches and the circus fr
eaks and the Mad Crapper, too.

  Especially the Mad Crapper.

  And Mitch.

  “We’re not moving up here to run away from anything, really,” I tell Jack. “It’s not that. It’s more that we’re running to something. The next phase of life. A home, neighbors, parenthood…”

  “You want to have a baby?”

  “Not now!” I tell him, exasperated. “Someday. Yes. When we’re settled. When it’s right. I think we’ll just wake up someday and know it’s time for that. Just like we realized it’s time right now for this.”

  Verna—who remains silent—removes her cell phone from the pocket of her cute Kelly-green kilt-type skirt, which I can’t help but think might look slightly ridiculous on anyone other than Verna, a bagpiper or a JV cheerleader.

  She flips her cell phone open and checks it—or at least pretends to. Then, looking up at me and Jack, she says, “I have to return a call. I’ll step outside for a few minutes if you don’t mind.”

  We assure her that we don’t mind, but I personally doubt there’s a call to return. My guess is that Verna smells a commission and wants to leave us to discuss delicate financial matters in private.

  The minute the door has closed behind her and we’re alone, I say to Jack, “We have to get this house. I love it. Don’t you?”

  “It’s a nice house,” he admits. “But I wasn’t thinking we were going to come up here today and snatch up the first house we look at.”

  “This isn’t the first house we looked at.”

  “All right, the fourth.”

  “It’s the sixth.”

  “Who buys the sixth house they look at?”

  “Who walks away from the sixth house they look at even though it’s perfect just because they feel like they should look at a hundred more?”

  “I didn’t say we should look at a hundred more, and it’s not all that perfect, Tracey.”

  “No, I know. It needs work…”

  “And being pretty handy, I guess I’m the one who’s going to do this work?” he asks dryly.

  “Look, I know you stink at handyman stuff, but—”

  “I stink?” he interjects, looking wounded.

  “Only when you Dutch Oven my head,” I crack.