Everybody’s Out There

by Robert M. Marchese

  I nodded as if I had planned it this way. What the hell did I know about what we were doing? In my mind, we just seemed to be on the verge of learning how to behave like adults.

  Laura’s parents always let me think I was somehow gifted in the art of caring for their daughter. Like I had lived up to the solemn vows I had pledged in front of God and Grandma and Cousin Lou. They never hesitated to celebrate our good fortune or Laura’s contentment, which she would display to her entire family. So I’d receive a clap on the back from Luke, or a warm, inviting smile from Abby, her mother. These gestures were alien enough to me that they would almost always make me blush or secretly recoil.

  The Cadman brothers must’ve felt a sense of relief when we were their only buyers. They were, after all, doing every bit of the work themselves. Laura and I would drive out to the development to check on the progress and behold the sight of two average sized men digging the foundation, laying the concrete, framing the house. And it would be them, they told us, who would be doing the electrical, plumbing, drywall, roofing, flooring. They’d put in twelve and fifteen hour days, so by the time we got to them, they’d be spent, head to toe in sawdust and sweat, and ready to pounce on a couple of six-packs.

  We had mixed feelings about this arrangement; on the one hand, we were glad for the individual attention. Working on a single home allowed the brothers to focus their energies on the slightest of details. They could afford to be fastidious. Yet we were eager to be part of a community and begin meeting our future neighbors. Laura and I looked forward to the days of barbeques and block parties; to friendly waves during evening walks or quick trips to the grocery store; to tying a balloon to our mailbox after the birth of our children and receiving congratulations and offers of gently worn hand-me-downs. And we were looking forward to seeing who these people would be.

  It became comical to enter Grove Garden Estates and behold the half dozen cleared lots with only one house under construction. When we asked the brothers about the lack of interest, they blamed a slow market, but they were optimistic they’d sell more lots by spring. You didn’t have to be in real estate to have faith in this assumption. Grove Garden Estates was a beautiful subdivision, offering well-priced homes in a wonderful town. As for the brothers, they might’ve been eccentrics, but they clearly knew their craft.

  Late one afternoon, with the framing scheduled the following day, Laura and I went to the trailer to sign some papers and cut the brothers a new check for a few grand. Abe and Caleb, standing side by side, each covered in sweat, hovered over us as we read through the fine print. Through the stiff aroma of sun-baked fatigue and beer breath, we could smell their musky cologne. When one of them snatched the check from my hand, we said our goodnights and stood to leave. It was then that Laura noticed the map of the development. Another lot had a black asterisk next to it. Lot number four.

  “We’ve got neighbors!” she proclaimed, walking past the Cadmans and over to the map. “Hallelujah! When did this happen?”

  They told us all they knew about our future neighbors, Glenn and Linda Kilburn. They’d moved out from Maryland and were renting a place in the city for the time being. He was a doctor. An oncologist. As for the wife, they weren’t sure about her. No kids, though. But a nice couple. Laura, as though she was just promised a reunion with dear old friends, was beaming.

  “Neighbors!” she said. “Gray, we’ve got neighbors!”

  . . .

  We met the Kilburns a few weeks later when we pulled up to our lot one early evening to check on the progress. The framing was underway, but had stalled since the brothers commenced on lot number four. The Cadmans were leading Mr. and Mrs. Kilburn around their property - at this point, only the foundation had been dug - pointing to spaces off in the distance and spitting sunflower shells onto the ground.

  “Speak of the devils,” one of the brothers said as we got out of our car and approached them. “We were just talking about you folks.”

  I introduced myself first, putting my hand out to Glenn, who took his glove off and gave me a firm grip and an easy grin. He was tall and lean with a smooth face and large, bright eyes that looked like a swirling blue concoction of kindness and mischief. Laura shook his hand as well before he introduced us to his wife, Linda. Hugging herself against the chill of the air, she was bundled in a heavy, black cashmere coat and matching gloves and hat. Forcing a smile at us, she mentioned how she was cold. A pretty woman, Mrs. Kilburn had colorless eyes and the kind of fair skin that made me guess she was the type to arm herself with silk scarves and expensive creams against the sunlight. She looked older than her husband. She looked like a doctor’s wife.

  Laura asked Mrs. Kilburn which model home they had chosen. The Cadmans offered five different models, all variations of a Colonial. There was the Sheraton, the Marriott, the Radisson, the Windsor, and the Hilton.

  “The Radisson,” she said flatly, her voice like a bored hypnotist’s.

  This was the most expensive of the models. Boasting nearly six-thousand square feet, some of its extras included a plush master suite with a propane fireplace, a large bonus-room above the garage, a first floor office, a sun-porch, and a private bathroom for each of the additional four bedrooms. The Marriott, our choice, was the most modest.

  “Congratulations,” Laura said. “You must be excited.”

  “Anything will be better than Port Deposit,” the woman said. “If you’re at all interested in a town whose claim to fame is that it has no claim to fame, then that’s your spot.”

  Glenn nodded his head and assured us they were happy about the move. Then he said he had a fine idea: He said their business with the Cadman brothers was just about over, and when it was - as well as ours - he and Linda would love to meet us for dinner at a quaint spot they had discovered in town. Mrs. Kilburn looked a little surprised over her husband’s conviviality, but commented again on the cold and said she was eager to be indoors. She began walking towards their sporty silver coupe, which was parked alongside the trailer. She called over her shoulder to her husband, telling him he could finish up with the brothers and that she’d be in the car.

  We spent a couple of hours with the Kilburns at the restaurant, a little place on the front street called the Blue Rose Café. We chatted and ate and Glenn and I had a few beers apiece while the women drank red wine. We joked about the Cadman brothers, laughing over their machismo. Glenn even did a spot-on impersonation of the two of them arguing with one another.

  In between sips of his beer, Glenn told us about the position he had accepted at Northwestern Memorial. As he spoke about his schooling and recent transfer, he served up his words like they were fine, crystal wares for me and Laura to marvel over. Clearly, he enjoyed being the young, handsome, sought-after physician, who had just moved to the Windy City while awaiting his expensive suburban home to be built. Mrs. Kilburn, meanwhile, seemed to grow bored with her husband’s hubris; she would either interrupt him with non sequiturs or gesture to the waiter, indifferent over the malaise she was clearly exuding.

  We talked about filling those additional bedrooms in our eventual homes. Laura told Mrs. Kilburn we were trying to start a family. Glenn raised his glass and made a toast to this. But never did he, nor his wife, mention their own plans to do the same.

  The Kilburns weren’t our type of people. They golfed and wore expensive jewelry and perplexed common run-of-the-mill snobs like me and Laura, whose snobbery was private and necessary as a means of propriety.

  I remember that afternoon vividly. I remember Laura kicking me under the table whenever Glenn’s talk about his golf game or collection of vintage beer steins became boastful. I remember Mrs. Kilburn barely smiling and never actually touching anyone’s glass when her husband made a toast to new neighbors. I remember my chicken was overpriced and undercooked. But what
stands out most clearly was what Laura said to me in the car as we were driving back to the city.

  Leaning against the headrest, she laughed to herself and said, “Well, there’s still hope for lots one, two, five, and six. Isn’t there?”

  My thoughts exactly. The truth is that her comment would prove ironic for more than one miserable reason. As we waited for our Marriott model to be built, we continued to work on starting a family. Both of these feats proved to take longer than we had imagined. The Cadman brothers were working on lots three and four. One week would be devoted to each house at a time, while the other, during that period, saw no progress. The brothers, true to their word that they would oversee every detail, did just that. Two men constructing two homes with no outside help. This arrangement caused tensions among Abe and Caleb to soar. Each time Laura and I visited the property, the brothers would be at odds, debating costs, calculations, and methods of construction.

  One evening we found the Cadmans walking towards the trailer, one brother several yards behind the other. They each stormed past us without a word, and we saw that they were both disheveled beyond normal and had split lips and bloody fists and faces.

  When fourteen months had passed, there was still much work to be done. The brothers promised we’d be closing on the house after one year, which meant around Christmas. Clearly, this would not be happening. As for the Kilburn’s home, it was just behind being neck-and-neck with ours. We surmised that Glenn, in some suave display of smiting the bourgeois, handed over an envelope stuffed with cash as an incentive for the brothers to remember that money talks.

  Meanwhile, baby-making wasn’t any easier. We were tenacious about it, yet our futile efforts were beginning to wear us down. Still refusing to call in specialists, we opted for an existentialist approach. So without ever saying it, we resigned to the belief that perhaps we weren’t meant to be parents. It was through sober glances at one another after yet another negative pregnancy test. Or even how during our repeated love-making we’d sneak looks at one another that revealed worry and sorrow. Even the Old Man got in on the disappointment.

  “How about a grandkid, Gray?” he said one evening over the phone. “For Christ’s sake, the two of you are building that big house with all those rooms. What’s the point?”

  Laura and I, pragmatists to a degree, had of course considered this. Then, in the middle of May, the Cadman brothers, with a great deal of work to be done on both homes, ceased all activity and flew back to Pennsylvania. They explained to us in a rambling text that their father, Abe Sr., had suffered a stroke and that they needed to be with him at once. They would seal up the properties and be in touch with us as well as the Kilburns.

  Progress ended up being delayed for months. For the first few weeks, we heard nothing from them. Then after a month we received a phone call from a woman back in Harrisburg, PA, who said her name was Janice and she was the Cadman’s secretary. Abe Sr. had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, she told me. He eventually developed pneumonia and died. The family, she said, practically whispering into the phone, was devastated. I offered my condolences. Janice asked if I wanted the address to the funeral home in case I wished to send flowers. I told her I did and then pretended to look for a pen and paper.

  The brothers, she told me, would be tied up for another week, but would be fulfilling their obligations after that. They ended up returning a little over a month later. Abe called us in the middle of the night to report that construction would be delayed further. In a slow, gravelly voice, which sounded nothing like I remembered, he explained that there had been quite a bit of vandalism to both houses. Windows had been smashed throughout each, and the kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures, which had been delivered, stored, and locked in the garages of the homes, had been spray painted. Equipment, too, he said, had gone missing. Hand tools and electric saws and boxes of nails and even bags of lawn seed and mulch. I told him Laura and I visited the house just a few days before and everything was exactly as they had left it. I thought I heard him crying on the other end of the line. But he didn’t say anything for a long while. Finally, he told me he or his brother would be in touch before he hung up.

  Nearly two weeks went by and we heard nothing from the Cadmans. Our texts and calls went unanswered. One night, an hour into a dinner party we were hosting, one of the brothers showed up at our place. It was Laura’s mother, Abby, who answered the door to a weary and frayed looking man. Clearly drunk, he sidestepped Abby and entered the condo, asking no one in particular if the princess wanted him to enlarge the size of her walk-in closet. He could do this, he said. And it would be no trouble or additional cost. He said he knew princesses liked walk-in closets and his brother didn’t need to know about it. She deserved an extra large walk-in closet, he announced. He kneaded his eye sockets with his fists and swayed back and forth as he spoke with slurred speech. We ended up filling him full of coffee and calling him an Uber. Laura’s father, Luke, suggested we hire an attorney.

  It became typical for the brothers to schedule appointments with us at the lot and then fail to show up. If they did make an appearance - usually buzzed and reeking of hard liquor and pot - they’d scowl at us as though we were putting them out with the questions or concerns we had. During one such meeting, one of the brothers, as they rushed us hastily through our house, projectile vomited on the plywood flooring in the dining room. Matters escalated when it came to monetary issues. They would demand payment for work that hadn’t yet been done, or for work they’d already been paid for weeks earlier.

  One August evening, Laura and I visited the trailer to discuss landscaping. This seemed inane to us, considering the skeletal state of the house’s interior. But it was an appointment to discuss progress, a principle that had eluded the brothers. So we kept the meeting and even showed up ten minutes early. After our repeated banging on the trailer door, we were met by a feisty, half-naked brunette with the stub of a lit cigarette squished between rust-colored lips that looked like bear traps. The smoke filled her eyes, causing her to squint through it as she asked us who we were and what we wanted. We told her we had an appointment and that our house was being built by the Cadmans. She scratched her exposed stomach, which was trim and tanned, and looked past us towards our lot. I decided she probably had a few ex-husbands, several tattoos, and a custody battle she secretly didn’t give a shit about.

  Studying Laura as though she could be unwanted womanly competition, she yelled for Caleb. When he didn’t answer, she said he was unavailable, that it had been one hell of a night and he was sleeping it off. She told us he had officially moved into the trailer, so we shouldn’t have difficulty tracking him down. Flicking her cigarette over Laura’s head, she sniffed hard, scrunching her face like some wrinkled rodent, and slammed the door in our faces.

  By the time summer had ended, we contacted David Bell, an attorney and old college friend of Laura’s. We weighed our options, which we soon learned were slim. The wording in our contract precluded us from recouping any capital we put down after the initial stages of construction, which, according to the fine print, was the clearing of the lot, the pouring of the foundation, and the basic framing of the house. Moreover, the parameters on the closing date were left wide open. If the Cadmans were so inclined, they could’ve opted to drive a single nail every other day for the next ten years without breaching a word of what we now regarded as an absurd contract.

  We were left with two choices: We could walk away, losing a great sum of money, or we could hold out, pray for enough emotional rehabilitation for the brothers to finish building, and hope to have a housewarming party prior to dementia setting in. Before we could decide, something unexpected occurred. The Cadmans began working again. They put in a flurry of twelve-hour days. In one week alone, they finished the lighting, plumbing, and flooring in both houses. Their pace was astounding, their focus remarkable, their craftsmanship
flawless. Conscious to not disrupt the mad geniuses, we tiptoed around this newfound luck in hushed hopes that it would continue. Upon receiving a second call from Janice, the brothers’ secretary, we were to soon learn it would not. She was crying on the other line. The Cadman family was devastated, she told me. Another tragedy. After an all-night bender, Abe, in a blinding fit of rage, torched the trailer in which his younger brother slept. I was speechless. It happened the previous night, she added. Upon daybreak, Abe, contrite and forlorn, had turned himself in to authorities. Janice cried in soft static bursts like some forsaken lover trying to salvage her dignity. Because I didn’t know what else to say, I asked if Caleb was all right. There was a momentary pause.

  “He’s in critical condition,” she said.

  As I sat there, listening to this faceless woman reveal to me the dysfunction of the Cadman family, all I could think of was how I was going to break it to Laura that our house would be delayed even further. Shameful and insensitive, but these were my thoughts nonetheless. Janice, probably sensing my apprehension, pulled herself together long enough to tell me that despite this misfortune, Cadman Builders intended to honor their commitment to us.

  “That’s a guarantee, Mr. Loveland. An absolute guarantee.”

  This promise was spoken with such maudlin pride that it embarrassed me to even respond.

  “Fine,” was all I could muster.

  “We’ll be in touch and get you squared away.”

  Before we hung up the phone, she asked if I wanted the necessary info to send my condolences to the Cadman family. I told her no, I did not.

  A week and a half later, we received a call from a man named Joel Sandburg, who claimed he was the Cadman’s right hand man for their Harrisburg operations. He was calling from the site of the new trailer, placed just fifty feet from the old one, which, at that point, was a charred mound of ash and twisted metal. With him, he mentioned, was a crew of four more men, all ready to go to work.