by Jordyn White
She’s on board with all that since she can afford to pay her own way, but house hunting has been a challenge for her. She’s just not in the same financial realm as Connor (or the rest of us). He doesn’t care, of course, but he’s looking for houses he can afford. That’s damn near anything in this area, so the relatively modest homes he’s been looking at instead aren’t going to stretch his budget much. He intends to buy outright. Even though this is really Connor’s purchase, he’s been insistent Whitney be happy with it too, since she’ll be living there. She told us girls that she promised to be honest with him about what she likes, and she’s tried to, but still feels her opinion shouldn’t matter as much. “It’s his house,” she keeps saying.
“Okay, lucky for us,” she says, responding to Connors’ correction. Corrine and I exchange glances. “Here, let me pull up the listing.”
“Did you already put in a bid?” Rayce asks.
“Yeah,” Connor says, “but we haven’t heard back yet. It hasn’t been on the market long but there’s been a lot of interest. We actually put in a little over their asking price.”
Rayce raises his eyebrows and we all lean into Whitney’s phone as she shows us the pictures. It really is a beautiful house, with a great open floor plan. The family room has a gorgeous bay of windows that gives a nice view of the coast, and the kitchen is top notch. It has five bedrooms, so there’s room to grow, if that’s what they’re planning. Photo after photo demonstrates what a find the house is, but as Connor and Rayce talk specs and price—Rayce, of course, acting like this is a financial investment instead of a home—I get more and more uneasy.
It’s strange. I don’t know why I’m feeling this way and I don’t like it.
When Connor and Whitney start talking about furniture, I get up to help Corrine. I need something to do. She’s pulled out the fixings for the haystacks, and there really isn’t that much to prep, but I start working on dicing the tomatoes anyway.
“If we get it, we’ll have to figure out furniture,” Connor says.
I frown a bit. Connor has absolutely no furniture, so he’s a blank slate. Whitney has her furniture, but, as she’s now telling us, “My stuff isn’t quite fit for a house like that. It’d be like the Beverly Hillbillies moving in.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” Connor gives her a nudge with his shoulder.
“It totally would.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Connor shrugs. “We’ll get new so it’s all stuff we picked out together. Then you’ll finally have your own furniture back, Lizzy.”
He winks at me and I give a weak smile.
“I bet it’ll be nice to have your own things in here,” Rayce says.
I frown and scoop the tomatoes up with my hand and the knife, depositing them into a bowl. “You don’t even know if you’re getting it yet.” I’m trying to sound casual and really hating how icky I feel. I grab the chives and start slicing them next. “We should stop talking about it so we don’t curse your luck.”
I’m not exactly the superstitious type, I’m just going for any excuse to change the subject, but Whitney clamps her phone to her chest and looks at Connor. “That’s true.”
He laughs and puts his arm around her. “We’ll get it. It felt like our house didn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She softens against him. “It really did.”
“Alright.” Rayce slaps his hand on the counter and glances at the timer for the rice. “We have just enough time for one round,” he says to Connor.
I roll my eyes, but smile. For all the high-powered suit stuff that composes most of Rayce’s life, this is the one thing he’s never outgrown: vintage video games. He keeps it mum from people outside our little family circle, not wanting to tarnish his executive image, I guess. But I think it’s good for him. He and Connor really get into it—of course, Connor’s always been a kid at heart anyway—and it gives Rayce a chance to let loose a bit.
Connor gives Whitney a kiss and the boys disappear into my parents’ game room.
“So are you really happy with the house?” Corrine asks Whitney. She’s finished grating the cheese and dumps some chow mein noodles into a bowl. I’m done with the chives, so that pretty much wraps up the prep for this meal.
“What’s not to love?” Whitney says.
“I noticed there’s no Jacuzzi with the pool,” Corrine presses, knowing that was on Whitney’s wish list, which we had to drag out of her.
“That wasn’t really a deal breaker,” Whitney says, and seems to mean it. “Besides, Connor says we can put one in.”
“So you did tell him you wanted that?” Corrine leans on the counter, toward Whitney.
“Yes. I told him what I wanted. Don’t worry.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” I say, wanting to reassure her, but still wishing we were talking about something else. Why is this bothering me so much?
“Well, I know. But... it’s really been weird giving input on the house he’s going to buy. I mean, it’s not like we’re married or anything.”
Sometimes I forget Connor hasn’t asked Whitney to marry him yet. True, they haven’t been together long, but we all see the handwriting on the wall. They already seem like a married couple. My brother’s love for her is so obvious, and so sweet.
I want to reassure her that a ring is bound to come her way eventually, but something stops me. The truth is, Connor hasn’t mentioned anything to me about it either. Who knows what he really has in mind. I don’t doubt he wants to keep this girl forever, but he walks his own road. It may not have even occurred to him to do something as conventional as making things official. Still, I trust they’ll work it out in the end.
In the meantime, I really need to get off the topic of their potential house purchase. Fortunately, these days I always have a ready topic at hand. While the rice finishes cooking, the three of us end up surfing Pinterest for more ideas for the Cottages. Whitney’s into it as much as I am, actually, so we have fun pinning things and talking about ideas. My unease disappears and I start to forget about my reaction to their news and the puzzling way it made me feel.
Chapter 5
Brett
After confirming with Rod that he didn’t hire me to work on the Cottages because of my mother, I made her promise not to show up on site. I don’t know that she would have anyway, but better to be safe. You never know with her.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve only grown more and more happy that I took this job. It’s a great project and has been absorbing enough to give me a semi-decent distraction from the problems with my ex (we’re a mere four days from our next hearing, thank God). Other than when I have little Max with me, I’ve been putting in plenty of hours and we’re clipping right along. Rod and I have finished drawing up the first draft plans for most of the cottages, save those that have been occupied this entire time by long-term renters. It’ll be awhile before we can get inside them, so we’re going over the plans we have now so we can get started on the actual work.
Rod, Elizabeth Rivers, and I are gathered around a big, lacquered table in cottage six. The table’s in a state of organized chaos, stacked full of preliminary plans, photos, and detailed price quotes. Each cottage is a little different from the others, so the plans for each are necessarily unique. Plus, Elizabeth wants a variety of offerings. Some cottages will have enough rooms to be suitable for groups, while others will be spacious romantic getaways for two. Regardless, because the layout of these structures are so outdated, they’re all getting gutted to one degree or another and rebuilt from the shell up.
“I want to assure you,” I say as we spread out the plans for cottage one, “we’ve kept these documents top secret. No conspiratorial madwomen have been allowed to look at them.” For some reason, the few times I’ve seen Elizabeth, I’ve felt the need to poke at her a bit. I maybe shouldn’t, except that underneath her straight-faced reactions, she doesn’t seem too ruffled by it. In fact, she usually returns my serve with a lob of her own.
“I’m mor
e concerned with the conspiratorial madman who drew them up,” she says.
“You’re not including me in that, are you?” Rod asks dryly.
“She definitely meant you,” I say, and Elizabeth rolls her eyes.
“Are you done,” she asks, “or can we go over this now?”
I smile, but in short order we get down to business. There’s plenty to discuss, and I don’t forget that Elizabeth Rivers is our client and we need to make sure she’s happy with our work. We spread everything out on the table, showing her plans and photos for one cottage at a time. She sinks into focused concentration. With all the self-assurance you’d expect from a Rivers, she gives clear indications of what she does and does not like.
For the most part, she approves of things, and even praises us for doing good work at one point, but we get hung up on cottage seventeen. It has a funky layout and some other strange things going on, so the necessary remodeling is more or less going to wipe out much of the historical character it had on the interior.
“What about the alcove?” she asks. “I thought we’d agreed to keep it.”
Rod explains all the complications we ran into and why the alcove has to go. He and I had discussed it at length. She doesn’t look any happier about it than we are.
“There has to be something we can do.” She’s pressing her fingers to one temple and scanning the blueprint more closely.
Even as she’s saying it, I get an idea. “Wait.” I cock my head a bit. I put both hands on the plans and turn them a bit, starting to visualize an adjustment to what’s on the paper. God, could it be that simple? How did we not see this before? “What if we rotate all this?”
“How do you mean?” Rod asks.
My idea is crystallizing more with each passing second. “What if we put that wall here instead of there?” I draw my finger along the plans to indicate. “That would enable us to save the alcove and expand the bathroom.” It’s really more of a closet than a bathroom, so expansion has been a must all along and one source of our frustrations.
They both lean in, taking a closer look.
“Huh,” he says, as if to say, Well, I’ll be damned.
“Um... where would the other two bedrooms go?” she asks, tilting her head, apparently struggling to envision the rotation of the layout I’m suggesting.
I pull out a drafting pencil and draw straight, neat lines to indicate.
“Oh.” She sits back a bit and nods at the paper. “I see. Rod, what do you think?”
“The supporting wall is over here,” he says pointing, “so it would still work.” I nod in agreement. He glances at me. “Then all we’d have to do is scoot the electrical over a foot or so right here.”
“Exactly. And we could keep the alcove,” I tell Elizabeth.
She smiles. “I love that about this cottage.”
“Me too.”
“Though, the plumbing for the bathroom would get a little tricky,” Rod says. He explains what he’d have to do differently from the plan that’s in front of us.
“So it’s not tricky as much as it is costly,” she says when he’s finished. “Is that about right?”
She’s pretty astute, I’ve noticed.
He nods. “Yeah. About.”
She grabs the price quote for this particular cottage and looks it over. Because of all the strange things about cottage seventeen, the cost for getting it up to code and functional for the resort’s purposes is already high. This is one of the more expensive quotes. Much higher than Rod or I would’ve liked.
“Anything else about this change that would drive up costs?”
“No.” He looks to me for confirmation and I shake my head.
“What would the price difference be?”
Rod punches out some numbers on his calculator, then gives her an estimate.
“Well.” She looks over the plans and considers things for longer than I would’ve thought. If the rumors are to be believed, money really isn’t an object for this family. At the same time, I’ve yet to see her do anything to waste it. She doesn’t seem to throw it around like I’ve seen some wealthy people do, as if they’re trying to make a point about something. It’s not what I’d previously expected from her, to be honest.
“The layout itself works either way,” she says, seeming to think aloud. “The only reason we’d be switching things around would be to try to save some of the historical character, is that correct?”
Rod and I both nod.
She sighs, then looks between the two of us with those bright, green eyes of hers. “That definitely puts me outside the margins for this particular cottage. It was already pushing it, but...still. I think it’s worth it in the long run. That alcove has such great personality, and I’d really hate to lose all that history.”
I’m relieved to hear her say it. I’d hate to lose that history, too.
“You sure?” Rod asks.
She nods. “Yes. Let’s do it. Good thinking,” she says to me.
I smile, pleased. “I figure I need to earn my keep. I can’t just sit around annoying you all the time.”
“But you’re so good at it,” she says, without missing a beat. She just might mean it too, but I grin at Rod, who shakes his head at both of us.
It’s supposed to be Jessica’s weekend with little Max, but she called at 2:15 on Saturday afternoon to tell me to come get him because she’s had an “emergency” come up. I was forty minutes into a movie matinee at The Flicks, an old theatre that shows a mix of mainstream and Indie films. Watching a movie solo is one of those pleasures I discovered back in my single days, and it used to be one of my favorite things to do when there’s not a soccer game on. I haven’t been here in months and Jessica is the reason why. Half the time when I make plans, she finds a way to screw them up. I think that’s why it’s easier to just keep myself occupied with work. I can leave at any time and it’s not a big deal.
I’m standing at the front door to her boyfriend’s house, trying to comfort Max, who’s upset because his mother promised him a trip to the park today. He’s young enough that he still gets his hopes up over her promises, no matter how many times she’s broken them.
Hell, I did the same thing when we were married, there at the end. I was a lot older and should’ve known better, so I can’t fault this little guy for wanting to trust her. He should be able to trust her, just like I should’ve been able to.
No, the person I fault is Jessica. She’s in jeans and a worn Queen t-shirt. She’s always loved Queen (but who doesn’t?). Her hair, which is currently purple with blue streaks, is pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her asshole boyfriend is lounging on the couch, the TV blaring the Packers game. He looks annoyed, as he usually does.
When she called, she spun me a rather entertaining yarn detailing her supposed “emergency.” She’s gotten better at lying over the past few years, thanks to her frequent practice, but I’ve gotten better at spotting it too. My guess is her boyfriend doesn’t want to “deal with” Max today and she’s giving in. Hell, maybe she doesn’t want to deal with Max either. She looks worn and flustered.
I always have mixed emotions when she pulls stunts like this. On the one hand, I’m more than happy to have Max with me because then I know he’s being properly looked after. I never know what the fuck might be going on when he’s with her. And all she’s doing is giving me even more ammunition. I have a long list of scenarios where she’s bailed on her parenting schedule, and having another incident just three days before she’s facing the judge can only work in my favor.
But on the other hand, it kills me to see Max get the raw end of the deal. He’s a pretty energetic, easy-to-please kid, but stuff like this is really hard on him. That, too, works in my favor when we’re standing in the courtroom arguing that it’s better for him to be with me, but when I’m here, with my crying boy clinging to my leg, it just sucks.
“We can still go to the park, Max,” I tell him. Still hiding behind my thigh, he shakes his head hard, his mop of th
ick, curly hair shuffling too. “We can kick your soccer ball around. How does that sound?”
“It’s broken,” he says.
“It got a nail in it and went flat,” Jessica says dispassionately.
“I told him to keep it out of the weeds,” Kurt pipes up from the couch, eyes still on the screen.
“It was an accident,” Max says.
I’ve seen that backyard and it’s damn near all weeds. I don’t know how they expect a four-and-a-half year old to keep a ball out of it. I try to be careful about what I let him bring over here, because of the number of items that have been damaged or lost while he’s in their care, but balls are inexpensive to replace and he really wanted to be able to take his to the park.
“Flats happen sometimes, buddy.” I rub his shoulder. “No worries. If we can’t fix it, we’ll get another one.”
This has only a marginal effect on his mood, which is still pretty distraught. I’ve learned through long experience that if I can’t distract him to get him to calm down, there’s usually another reason why. “Has he had lunch?”
“We haven’t gotten to that yet,” she says defensively.
It’s damn-near three o’clock. “Jesus,” I mutter, but not loud enough for Max to hear. It takes an epic amount of willpower sometimes, but I try not to argue with his mother in front of him, or say anything negative about her when he’s in earshot.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Can we get McDonald’s?” He looks up at me with his round, blue eyes, starting to settle a bit.
I try to keep the fast food to a minimum, and over the past several months finally started keeping a few quick meals on hand at home precisely because she doesn’t always feed him Sunday dinner like she’s supposed to. But as far past lunch as it is, I’m not inclined to make him wait the twenty minutes it’ll take to get back to my place. There’s a McDonald’s just a few minutes from here.