“Okay, let’s go, gorgeous.” Marie reaches out and takes my hand like she used to when we were kids. Her eyebrows are knitted together, and she doesn’t make eye contact with me at all. “Caroline went insane down there, just so you know.”
I laugh. “I never suspected anything else.”
“Okay, stop gabbing, there is a party downstairs that is happening without you, and you are the main attraction.” Hedy scoots us all out of Caroline’s bedroom and we go down the wide staircase. When we get to the second floor, Caroline, looking perfect and radiant in a Tiffany-blue swirly chiffon number, claps her hands.
“You’re spectacular! Here.” She reaches forward and hands me a bundle of deep purple and mauve calla lilies. She looks me dead in the eye. “You ready?” she asks pointedly.
“Ready.”
“And you’re absolutely sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She nods, her forehead furrowed in query, her mouth a wan half smile. “Okay, then.”
We head down the second flight of stairs. When we get to the landing, I can see all the people, about twenty of them, looking up and smiling at me. Caroline’s husband, Carl, has his big camera, the one he uses when they travel, and he’s taking pictures of me as I come down the stairs. The whole thing is surreal, and shocking, yet I’m feeling weirdly really happy. And light for the first time in forever. Whatever my best friends think they know, no one knows my heart the way I do, and this feels right, and safe, and shockingly real. Caroline has filled her living room with flowers and candles, all of the antique chairs from her dining room are swagged in wide ribbons, and I’m genuinely happy as I float downstairs to meet my future.
1
We can’t thank you enough, Anneke, it’s just perfect,” Claire says, her eyes sparkling.
“Really, Claire is understating, we’re over the moon!” John pipes in, sliding an arm around his wife, and pulling her close to him. “It’s a dream come true for both of us.” Their easy affection speaks to a lifetime together.
“It was my deepest pleasure, I’m just glad you’re happy.” I’m keeping things professional and calm on my surface. “Live a very happy life here.” I hand John the keys, on a custom titanium key ring engraved with their address, accept awkwardly the hugs they both offer, and quietly head out the front door. As soon as it latches behind me I hear a loud whoop from inside the house, followed by effervescent giggling. I turn and get a peek through the window, John is spinning Claire in the living room in a jubilant waltz, her head thrown back in laughter, and I’m able to let go of the tears that I was suppressing.
I’m not generally demonstratively emotional; in fact my girlfriends tease me about it all the time. Hedy will call me Iceberg Anneke or Proud Stroudt when she thinks I’m being distant or unaffected. Marie will shake her head and sing “It’s All Right to Cry” from Free to Be . . . You and Me with a smirk. Caroline will just reach over and squeeze my hand. Whatever. I can’t help it that my besties are all sappy and tenderhearted and can produce a flood of tears at a goddamn AT&T commercial. Whenever we have chick flick night and the three of them are unabashedly weeping, they all look over to see me on the couch, dry-eyed and skeptical as Bette Midler sings about the wind beneath her wings to her best friend’s orphan.
For me, I can’t really understand why they are so upset at the fictional death of an actress on-screen. I just saw Barbara Hershey in People magazine four days ago, for chrissakes. I can’t get it up for what is basically a decent makeup job, some convincing coughing, and swelling strings in the background. It’s just not how I’m wired. Which, while it may occasionally be a pain in my personal life, is a good thing in my line of work. The design/build industry is still very much a man’s game, and they can smell weakness from ten miles off. I know that tears are not in and of themselves a sign of weakness, but the boys I work with do not. So my ability to keep it together is very important to me professionally. It doesn’t matter what happens, if the cabinets show up the wrong size or the painter drops a full bucket of Magnolia White down the newly carpeted stairs, my response at best is pragmatic and at worst is pissed off. I will cajole. I will swear. I will yell. I will question the fidelity of one’s mother specifically, and the relative intelligence of the human race in general. I will punch something hard, or laugh like a hyena, or go into total crisis control mode. But I will not cry.
Except on days like today.
Despite my inner stoicism about life globally, I almost always let myself shed a tear or two on key days. When you get to look at the people for whom you have sweated over the course of months, or sometimes even years, and hand over the keys to their personal kingdom, that hits me where I live. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a small bathroom remodel, or a complete empty-lot-to-dream-home build from the first shovel to the final nail. The satisfaction of getting the job done, of making dreams come true for people, of creating home for them, it makes the long hours, the lost weekends, the damage to personal relationships completely and utterly worthwhile. Even though I’ve effectively been doing this for over half my life, it never gets old. It’s always worth a quiet moment of self-satisfaction and a tear or two for someone else’s joy that you made possible.
This had been an especially fun project. John and Claire lived in their bungalow for over twenty years, saving their money for a complete renovation, which happened to coincide with their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It included finishing both the basement and attic, effectively tripling the square footage of the place. We created a wonderful, bright master bedroom suite in the former attic space, with his and hers walk-in closets and a spa-like bathroom with a steam shower for John and a huge tub for Claire. In the basement, we gave them a large comfortable space for entertaining, a small office for John, an updated laundry room, and a guest room with an en suite bathroom. On the first floor, we renovated their 1970s-era kitchen, opening it up to their formerly cramped dining room and living room for a large, open-concept space. We were able to honor and highlight the Arts and Crafts details they loved about their 1919 house, while making all of the systems pure twenty-first-century functional.
My favorite kind of project, to be honest. The kind of thing that has spoken to me ever since I was thirteen and my stepdad, Joe, took me to one of his work sites, the renovation of an old Victorian brownstone, showing me the magic in how houses used to be constructed. I thought the intersection of architecture and artistry and archeology was extraordinary, the perfect arrangement of imperfect stones to create the foundation, old solid bricks supporting wooden lath and hand-applied plaster. I came home with sawdust in my hair and cement crusted on my sneakers, and new love in my heart. Both for Joe, who was the only thing I ever had in my life that could be considered family in a positive and rational way, and for old houses that needed to find their full potential.
I jump into my 1967 Ford F-100 pickup, formerly Joe’s and part of my inheritance from him. Lola is a classic, with the original turquoise paint, now pitted and scratched and dulled from the years, and an engine that purrs like a lion cub. She’s hauled endless loads of drywall and lumber, schlepped salvaged bathtubs and brand-new dishwashers with ease, and despite her nearly 250,000 miles, has never let me down. Plus, I get major street cred with the subcontractors. They’re used to women architects and designers teetering around job sites on inappropriate shoes, and trying to climb ladders in miniskirts. I am, it goes without saying, not that kind of girl. I usually have paint on my face and grout under my stubby fingernails, and 94 percent of my wardrobe is covered in permanent filth.
I steer Lola through the icy streets of Chicago, heading back to the MacMurphy offices for a final debrief with my bosses. As much as I love the work? The job itself is craptastic on a good day. I knew when Joe retired that I wasn’t ready to go out on my own. I didn’t have enough experience under my belt. I knew I needed to work for a firm where I could get a wide variety of projects, where I coul
d build relationships with subcontractors and tradesmen and suppliers. MacMurphy seemed like the perfect place. They do everything from small single-room projects to quick and dirty house flips to multimillion-dollar custom-home builds. They appreciated that I’m a general contractor who is also an architect, since they can charge the client for the two separate services but just pay me once. I sometimes think that one of the reasons I cry on key days is because it means I have to briefly spend some quality time at the office instead of out on the job site, and I hate the office.
The day is typical blustery December, overcast and dreary, with a biting wind. I pull into the lot on Clybourn, parking next to Liam’s brand-new F-150. He gets a new one every other year. Always shiny, showy red, always completely kitted out with bells and whistles and every possible add-on. In-dash GPS navigation screen, upgraded Bose sound system, custom leather interior. Mud flaps with chrome shamrocks. They shouldn’t say it has EcoBoost; they should say it has EgoBoost.
Liam? Is a total douche. In case that is unclear. I’m sure he thinks the slight lilt of an Irish accent makes him charming, but I like to remind him that he hasn’t set foot on the olde sod since he was six, and it just makes him sound stupid and affected.
Liam is the first cousin of Brian Murphy, one of the company owners and my direct boss. Brian, Murph to his friends, runs the build side, while his partner, Marcus “Mac” McPherson, runs the design side. Liam and I have the same title, senior project manager, but somehow he always gets his pick of choice jobs and cool clients. Which is why I loved working with John and Claire so much. Usually I get the problem children, the cranky, the indecisive, the ones with questionable taste or insanely limited and unrealistic budgets. This one was just fun and easy and a real treat. Joe always said that if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life, and while it always still feels like work to me, there was much happy in the last nine months.
“Hey, Anniekay!” one of the Barbies says as I come in the door. Mac and Murph hire an endless series of buxom blondies with limited vocabularies to man the front desk and do basic secretarial work. There are usually three or four of them teetering around on those platform stilettos that look like high-heeled hooves. They all get titles like customer relations specialist or office manager. I’m always eye level with a wall of silicone and perpetually erect nipples. None of them lasts much more than a few months, and none of them can ever pronounce my name, Anneke. Ann-uh-kuh. How hard is that?
“Hi. Is Murph ready for me?”
She grins a blinding smile, veneers sparkling strangely bluish behind thickly glossed and plumped lips. She looks like a deranged grouper. “He said to give him fifteen minutes,” she says breathlessly, bosom heaving, nipples aimed at me in a shockingly accusatory fashion, with the top button of her tiny shirt straining against the effort. I better extricate myself from this conversation before it gives way and blinds me. I would not be cute in an eye patch.
“Great. I’ll be in my office.”
I head down the hall to my tiny windowless closet of an office, barely big enough for my desk and one chair, books and floor plans and blueprints scattered everywhere. Stacks of finish samples teeter in the corners, and empty plastic water bottles are erupting out of the wastebasket. I’m something of a slob. But messy, not dirty, I like to tell myself, as if this is better. Liam? Has an office three times this size. With a window. And a private bathroom. Apparently the previous office occupant was a three-man law firm, so there are three offices with en suite baths. It was empty when I started, but I still got the “one step up from coffin” all the way in the back near the alley where I get hot-garbage scent all summer, and Liam, who started after I did, slid right into the choice digs like shit out of a goose.
“How’d it go with the Osbornes?” Liam arranges his lanky frame in my door, dark curly hair artfully rumpled, piercing green eyes shining behind long, thick, dark lashes.
“Great. They couldn’t be happier, the place really turned out even better than expected.”
“Good to hear. You must be glad to get that one put to bed.”
“Always bittersweet. Glad to have a job finished, sad to let it go. But I’m happy that they’re happy. How are things over on Fremont?” Liam is in the middle of my most hated kind of project. A wonderful old building with clients that are keeping the façade and doing a complete gut on the inside. All the original hardwood floors, beautiful cabinets and built-ins, claw-foot tubs, mosaic tile work, even some historic hand-painted silk wall coverings, all ripped out in favor of new new new everything. The couple, young trust fund babies both, wanted to build from scratch, but couldn’t find a double lot on one of their seven preferred Lincoln Park streets on which to erect one of those horrible places that all look like banks, so they settled for mangling this beautiful turn-of-the-century brick home instead. I’m grateful for only two things. One, they didn’t decide to tear it down completely, and two, I was able to spend a long, exhausting weekend with some of my guys salvaging everything that was salvageable and moving it to my storage unit. If I don’t use it myself, I’ll be sure that it all finds future useful life.
“You know. Couldn’t be more generic. Open-concept main level, eat-in family room slash kitchen with homework station blah blah blah. It’s going to look like a Restoration Hardware catalog.” I give Liam credit for only two things. He does appreciate the old school and old world and hates to see people destroy things as much as I do. And he’s as big a perfectionist as I am in terms of quality. Joe’s first lesson to me was to focus my energy on doing everything the right way. “You know what I call the building codes?” he used to say. “A start.” I’ve spent the better part of my career convincing people to spend more money than they want to on infrastructure, and micromanaging subcontractors who insist that something is just fine “at code.”
“At least you won’t have budget issues,” I say to Liam, wishing he would put his arm down so that I can stop staring at the swath of exposed six-pack where his thermal shirt is hiked up, stop wondering about how he might have gotten the thin white vertical scar below his rib cage. I’d love to tell him to go away, but it’s become clear that Murph fully intends to hand him the management when he retires, which he threatens to do more and more, and while I’m far more qualified for the job and should be considered, I know it won’t happen. I’m not enough of a suck-up. I like to think of my style as honest and straightforward, but apparently, according to my annual reviews, I’m “abrasive” and “disrespectful.” At least once every few months Murph calls me in for a dressing-down because I’ve pissed somebody off. I can’t help it if I’m going to call his buddy the plumber out on reusing pipes from a previous job and charging for new, or if I tell a client that I absolutely will not come back after inspection to build out a bonus mudroom that they can’t claim on the permit drawings because it adds illegal square footage.
“True. That is something. You ready to jump onto the Manning job?” He smirks.
“Please. Don’t remind me.” The Mannings, new-moneyed distant cousins to a storied Chicago scion, with all of the entitlement that implies, are my next primary clients. And the design for their new dream home, an up-from-the-ground build in Bucktown, looks like Carmela Soprano decided to buy a place in Connecticut and hire Dolly Parton and Ralph Lauren as her decorators. Waspy, but with weird spangly twists. Never thought I’d see design plans that included both a room upholstered in padded tartan-plaid silk with a gargantuan gold-plated chandelier dripping crystals, AND a custom-paneled library with leather-tile floors and a window seat covered in magenta ponyhide. The whole place smacks of Martha Stewart’s Acid Trip Dream House. The budget is pretty astronomical, but they still want to score a bargain wherever possible, and seem to always have a “contact” who can “get a better deal.” Warren Manning, who seems to have made his money in a strange combination of flatbed trucking and school buses, is a squat, sweaty man with a badly dyed comb-over and a per
manent sneer. His wife, Susie, is a pinched little round woman, who crams herself into ill-fitting designer suits, which she pairs with cheap shoes and expensive handbags. They both like to bark orders and make grand pronouncements, and they name-drop like Perez Hilton has them on retainer. I hate them and their stupid house already.
Liam grins. “Yeah, have fun with that.”
Barbie Two peeks under his arm, platinum blonde extensions tipped in hot pink, because her colors are Blush and Bashful, and a skirt short enough to see her daddy issues. “Hey, um, Annamuk? Brian will see you now.”
Liam shakes his head and smirks. “Better not keep him waiting, um, Annamuk.”
Seems like everything is in order,” Murph says.
I’ve long ago given up on getting actual praise from him for a job well-done. And I was really good on this one. No fights with subs, no complaints from clients, no reprimands at all.
“Keys handed off today.”
“You got the pictures for the portfolio?” Mac asks, always wanting to pad out the website content.
“Yes, and the testimonial sheet.” I preempt the next question.
“Good,” Murph says, turning his attention to his cell phone for something terribly important, like a “Which car would you be?” quiz or something.
“And you gave them their handbook?” Mac says, conveniently forgetting once again that the handbook was my idea, and is the only thing I brought with me to MacMurphy that they have adopted. Whenever I finish any build, I put together a three-ring binder for the owners. It contains manuals and warranties for all of the appliances, care instructions for fixtures or finishes, and a one-year calendar cheat sheet for upkeep schedules. Mac and Murph thought it was such a great idea they insisted all the project managers start to do it, and even printed up custom binders to contain the paperwork. I think they just like to slap their logo on anything that isn’t nailed down.
Recipe for Disaster Page 2