If You Were Here: A Novel

by Jen Lancaster

  I counter,“Yet I’m willing to bet his closet’s filled with cardigans and Rockports and pastel Sansabelt pants.”

  Tracey’s sheepish grin tells me everything I need to know.

  “Maybe you should do your hair like Rita Hayworth tonight. All the GIs from the Greatest Generation loved her!” I call as she heads down our steps and out the heavy iron gate.

  “Screw you and your sheet sign!” she cheerily calls back.

  “Coffee at eleven tomorrow?”

  “It’s a date! See you at Lulu’s!” She gets into her car and pulls away while I wave from the porch. The sheet sign whips in the breeze above my head while I quickly text her, It’s not a date; I’m too young for you.

  I go back inside and gather up all the detritus from our tea, depositing the dishes in the pristine farmhouse sink. After the kitchen’s clean, I go upstairs to work on a new chapter featuring gratuitous barn building and brain sucking.

  The wind must have picked up, and I can hear the sign flapping against the wall outside. Time to take that thing down. I walk over to the intercom and call for Mac. “Hey, honey, church is in session tomorrow and the joke’s getting old.”

  Also? I’m tired of people yelling, “Who’s ORNESTEGA?” from their cars.

  Mac comes up to my office, a parade of dogs and kittens in his wake. We go to either side of my bay window and release the zip ties securing the sheet. Once the sign’s inside, we close the windows. I’ve just turned out the light and I’m about to shut the woven wooden blinds when I spot a shadowy figure moving quickly back and forth in the street in front of our house. What the . . . ?

  “Mac, honey, get back here—what’s going on out there?”

  We see a hooded person on the street swivel his ski-mask-covered face around a couple of times and then pull what looks like a Powerade bottle out of his hoodie. The figure fumbles with something and then sticks a strip of fabric in the bottle. He whips out a lighter, ignites the bottom of the cloth, and hurls the bottle toward our house.

  The first problem is that our fence is higher than the Masked Revenger anticipated, so when he throws his Molotov cocktail, it hits one of the finials on top of the gate and ricochets back toward him.

  The second problem with Señor Ski Mask’s plan is less about execution and more about design. Sports-drink bottles are efficient in their ergonomics because their wide openings allow for quicker refreshment deployment. When one’s body is hot and thirsty for electrolytes, one wants to be able to gulp down that artificially flavored lemon-lime liquid as quickly as possible.

  The thing is, there’s a reason you never see James Bond blowing shit up by slinging a Gatorade container. Not only is a Château Lafite bottle a more elegant solution, but it melts at a higher temperature and its neck is much slimmer. Plus, being glass, it shatters on impact. However, the mouth on a sports-drink bottle is far too wide, and unless one stuffs in, say, an overnight maxipad, whatever fabric is placed inside is going to fall out once it’s in motion and the bottle will melt once the fabric’s ignited.22

  Anyway, the person out front has found himself caught in a perfect storm of stupidity. One second he’s standing there looking all smug and menacing in his ski mask, and the next, he’s covered in turpentine and flaming harder than Boys Town on Pride weekend.

  With the kind of deft swiftness one can employ only when one is, you know, on fire, our assailant whips off his mask, hoodie, and accompanying shirts and, in a single swift motion, hops out of his low-hanging pants. He then runs down the street screaming, clad in nothing but basketball shoes and a pair of colorful jockey shorts.

  We’re both quiet for a moment, taking in the gravity of what we just witnessed. I talk first. “I guess that’s why ORNESTEGA doesn’t wear a belt.”

  Mac nods. “But he has neatly answered the eternal boxers-orbriefs question; I give him that.”

  We silently watch the flames sizzle out when they reach a snowdrift, and finally Mac speaks again. “You realize this means we have to move to the suburbs.”

  “Totally.”

  Mac is pensive for a moment before picking up the phone to call the police. “Of course, before we go, we’ll have to change the sign to reflect recent events.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning now it’s going to read, ‘ORNESTEGA wears Spider-Man underpants.’ ”

  Chapter Three

  I’VE GOT YOUR GPS RIGHT HERE, PAL

  “Turn left here. Left! Here! Turn left right now! The map says left! Left, left, left! Now, now, now!”

  Mac glances at me in the rearview mirror, raising a single eyebrow. Okay, would everyone stop doing that? It makes me very self-conscious.

  “Why are you not turning left? The blue line on this map is the most direct route to where we’re going,” I yelp. “Go! Left! Leeeeefffttt!”

  Calmly, Mac replies, “Because I trust the GPS system more than I do your cartography prowess, and because the line you’re looking at is a river.”

  Mac, Liz, and I are navigating our way up to see houses in the exclusive suburban town of Abington Cambs. We chose to concentrate our search in the Cambs23 for a couple of reasons, but mostly because . . . this is Shermer! I’m so keyed up I can barely stay in my seat.

  Abington Cambs was not only Hughes’s inspiration for the fictional town of Shermer, but so many of his outdoor scenes were filmed here. We’ve already driven past the little stucco-and-beam shopping plaza from Ferris Bueller, and I’m pretty sure I just spotted the McCallister house from Home Alone. I mean, how perfect is that?

  This is the most beautiful community I’ve ever seen; that’s probably because it’s also one of the wealthiest. Forbes magazine recently called Abington Cambs “the Hamptons of Middle America.” Everything here is landscaped and manicured and tidy, exactly like I remember from the movies. I’m pretty sure if ORNESTEGA wrote his name on anything, the zoning board would publicly execute him on the bucolic grounds of the market square.

  Naturally this is where stupid, undeserving Vienna grew up, and, yes, that fact kills me a little inside.

  Anyway, when I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I was dying to see the Cambs firsthand. As it so happened, my first job was in sales, and I ended up servicing some hospital accounts close to here.

  I’d often head to the Cambs after my meetings just to spot landmarks, and sometimes I’d stop to hit their McDonald’s. The first time I went there, I almost missed it. Instead of sporting the familiar red-shingled roof and a big golden-arched sign, the McDonald’s in the Cambs is a pretty green wooden building with cream trim and shake shingles. Were it not for the tasteful little sign at the parking lot entrance, no one would know it wasn’t a beautifully appointed—albeit oddly placed—barn.

  From what I’ve read, the town is maniacal about more than just fast-food joints. Mr. T lived here in the eighties, and when he cut down his oak trees, the locals’ outrage made the New York Times. Residents called it “The Abington Cambs Chain Saw Massacre.”24

  When the weather was nice, I’d opt to drive back to the city down the picturesque stretch of Meridian Road instead of the expressway. I’d go really slowly, making sure to take in all the mansions bordering Lake Michigan. Balustrades! Crushed-shell driveways extending half a mile! Sculpture gardens! Proud as I was of my first studio apartment by Wrigley Field, seeing those grand old homes on the water made me dream big. Matter of fact, I came up with the plot to Valley of the Faceless Dolls on that ride one warm spring night.

  Between my blurting directions and Mac’s ignoring them, we reach our first showing. We pull up to a diminutive taupe Cape Cod in a pretty subdivision far west of the lake. The trees in the neighborhood are bare save for a coating of snow, but I can already tell how pleasantly shaded this street will be when winter’s finally over. Liz deftly works the lockbox, quickly extracting a key. She calls over her shoulder, “Let’s have a peek.”

  The door opens into a sunny, inviting entry hall with plenty of room for coats and umb
rellas and all the other detritus associated with living above the arctic circle.25 I lean on Mac while I kick off my snowy Merrell clogs and slide on a pair of blue flannel elastic booties. “You really don’t need to wear those if you’re in your socks,” Liz tells me.

  “Eh.” I shrug. “I don’t mind.” The hardwood is made of thick planks of polished oak, stained to a lovely cherry color. There’s a solidly protective level of varnish on top of it, so I already know the floor will stand up to years of muddy paws and throw-up kitties.

  We first step into the small living room—or rather, I skid, as the combination of socks and booties turns the floor into a hot skillet and my feet into pats of butter—and we admire the picture window and the view. “There’s not a crackhead to be seen out there,” Mac remarks with more than a little awe.

  We then wander into the dining room, which feels extra cozy with its raised hearth surrounded by built-in bead-board shelves. “Lovely,” we all murmur. The walls are covered in wallpaper—normally my nemesis—but it’s so rich and understated that at no point do I begin to look for loose corners to tug. We move on to the family room.

  One of the rules I’ve learned from watching the home-buying shows is that you’re not supposed to base your opinion on the homeowners’ possessions; rather you’re obligated to look beyond their stuff to see the real features, like double-paned windows, or the real problems, like a water-damaged ceiling. A professionally staged living room is great, but it doesn’t matter if the furnace is on its last legs and the house is located in a floodplain.

  Of course, the home-selling shows are all about staging, because it’s a fact that well-presented houses sell faster.26 And even though my head understands that staging is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, my heart can’t help but leap when I see their furniture. “Oh, my God,” I exclaim. “They have the Lancaster sofa set from Restoration Hardware! That’s what we have! We already know exactly what it would look like if we lived here!”

  We pass through the breakfast area (sunny! airy!) and the well-appointed galley kitchen (a warming drawer! double ovens!) and into the narrow mudroom with the spanking new front-loading washer and dryer. Mac gets a faraway look on his face, lost in a daydream about all the towels and jeans we could wash in a single load.27

  “Shall we check out the backyard?” Liz asks.

  We put our shoes back on and step out onto a tidy stone patio that overlooks half an acre of young trees, all enclosed by a new fence. “The dogs would have so much fun out here,” Mac remarks.

  “Yeah, not really. Daisy would pee on the patio and then demand to be let back into the house, and Duckie would do nothing but stand in the farthest part of the yard and protect us from falling leaves and squirrels with his nonstop barking. Then I’d have to wade through snowbanks in my slippers to get him to stop, because he never comes when he’s called,” I reply. “No, thank you.”

  “We have plenty of room to put in a pool,” Mac says.

  “And now I’m back on board with the yard.”

  We return inside, stomping off snow and reapplying the sockcondoms. We check out the cute basement and find it more than suits our needs. The ceilings are high and the windows well positioned to eliminate glare when setting up the home theater. There’s a wee office off the main part of the basement, and the second we step inside, Mac shouts, “Mine!”

  Off the office, there’s an additional storage area where we stumble upon a litter box. Okay, this? Is the biggest selling feature of all. Even though our current house is huge, there aren’t a lot of good places for the kittens’ boxes. No matter where I place them or how often I change the clay, the open-concept layout means the stink wafts through the whole place to the point that when visitors come over, they don’t notice the crown molding or cherry floors. Rather, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth is, “How many cats do you have?” Shameful.

  After a thorough basement inspection, we move up to the second floor. The first room we see must be the owners’ little girl’s room, because it looks like Easter has thrown up on a Disney film. Everything is either pale pink or mint green. Pink-and-green gingham ribbons suspend white wooden blocks spelling out SOPHIA over the big window. The floor is covered in a floral pastel rug in shades of green and gold, and a white chair rail divides the walls in half. The bottom part of the wall is ballet-slipper pink, and the top part is covered in pink toile wallpaper. Only rather than the traditional eighteenth-century pastoral scene of oxen and farmers and straw-roofed huts, the lime green line drawings are of bunnies and frogs in repose.

  “Obviously you’d want to change this,” Liz notes.

  Obviously.

  I mean, I’d need to find blocks that spelled out MIA.

  The other bedrooms are large and well laid out, and some come with attached baths where the fixtures are new and the water pressure impressive.

  According to the MLS listing, the whole house has been recently renovated and everything’s brand-new—the floors, the furnace, the water heater, etc. The house is compact, but it’s move-in ready, and all we’d have to do would be to replace the owners’ sturdy leather family room set with our own.

  As we put our shoes on again and take one final glance behind us, Liz says, “The house shows really well and it’s priced right. But what do you think?”

  Mac and I glance at each other. In theory, this house is what we want. Granted, it’s smaller than what we have now, but it’s in a nice neighborhood, and it wouldn’t require a single tweak before moving in. The best part is, we’d never have to deal with Vienna again.

  And yet now that we’re standing here in the handsome foyer with the good closets and indestructible floor, something about the place doesn’t feel right. There’s no opportunity for us to make our mark on it, because everything’s already been done just so. I mean, I don’t want to do major construction, but updating things a bit would be a lot of fun.

  Nothing particularly draws me to this house. At first, I thought because they had our sofa, that was a sign, but upon closer inspection, they’ve got the Maxwell model, not the Lancaster. The difference between rounded and squared-off arms is subtle, but crucial.

  This house is like meeting a guy who’s totally into marriage, comes from a fantastic family, has a well-paying job that makes him happy, and whose favorite hobbies include buying you designer handbags and watching reality television. I mean, where’s the challenge? Where’s the struggle? Where’s the satisfaction that comes from finally breaking Mac—I mean him—of his bad habits?

  “Liz, I have kind of a weird question. Is it possible that sometimes a house can be too perfect and it’s kind of a turnoff?” I ask.

  She smiles back at me. “I see that all the time. Remember, purchasing a house is more than just figuring out numbers. You buy with your gut, too. And if your gut says this isn’t the one, then we have plenty more to see.”

  We walk out to the car and Liz asks me again if I wouldn’t rather sit in the front seat.

  “Nope,” I reply. “If I do, Mac will try to make me use the navigation system.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” he calls over his shoulder.

  “Listen, I did not spend all that time last night poring over my map just to have some officious German voice second-guess me. My map kicks ass. My map is bank.”

  Mac chuckles at me. “Still trying to make ‘bank’ happen?”28

  “Of course.” I have a running bet with my college roommate, Ann Marie. It started when I was convinced I’d come up with the expression “all that and a bag of chips.” She didn’t believe me, claiming I’d heard someone say it on Oprah.29 I never forgave Ann Marie for crushing my dream, so ever since then we’ve had an ongoing challenge on who can make the Next Big Expression happen. She’s been trying to get “sweet baby Ray!” into the collective unconscious, while I’ve been pushing “bank.”

  Despite being a blond-bobbed soccer mom from Connecticut, Ann Marie is vaguely terrifying. She once instigated a coup at a Pamp
ered Chef party . . . and it wasn’t bloodless. Ann Marie works as a prosecuting attorney, and I sat in on one of her cases once. She showed up to court that day in a tangerine print shift, a padded headband, and a triple string of pearls. I had to laugh when the defense visibly relaxed upon spotting her. They had no idea they were about to be hit by a Lilly-clad guided missile. As the shell-shocked defendant was led out in cuffs, he kept repeating, “What just happened here?”

  My point is that even with my international audience of socially networked teenagers reading my term, she’s more likely to make her expression mainstream first. I’m pretty sure I heard a random person exclaim, “Sweet baby Ray!” at the grocery store last week, but I’m going to pretend they were looking at barbecue sauce.

  Still, you have to admit that “bank” kicks ass as a turn of phrase. It’s short for “bank on it” or “you can take that to the bank,” kind of like how Vince Vaughn30 described everything as “money” before he got all famous and bloated.

  I tell Mac, “I was thinking I’d work ‘bank’ into my next book, maybe have Ezekiel say it after a particularly successful barn raising or something.”

  “Do the Amish even use banks?” Mac wonders.

  “No clue,” I admit.

  “Wait. You write about the Amish,” Liz interjects. “Shouldn’t you know? Wouldn’t that have come up in your research?”

  I shrug and smooth out my map. “Why would I research them? They don’t read my work, so it’s not like I have to worry about my inaccuracies offending the Amish community. Or the zombie community, for that matter. What are they going to do, download my books on their Kindles? Read my Twitter feed? Does the milking shed have Wi-Fi? Seriously, you think Stephenie Meyer spends her time researching vampires’ banking habits? Doubtful. She’s probably too busy taking money baths.”31

  Liz wrinkles her brow.32 “I’m curious, then: If you haven’t done any research, then how do you know so much about the Amish?”