If You Can Get It

by Brendan Hodge

  “Have you discussed what you want before today?” asked Carol, as they returned to the car after yet another house to which the sisters had expressed clashing reactions.

  “I’ve talked and researched,” Katie said. “But someone was too busy at the office to think about it much.”

  By the time they stopped for lunch, tempers were beginning to shorten, and Jen considered suggesting that they call off the rest of the day. However, by the time she allowed for thirty to forty-five days to close, plus time to move, she figured it was necessary to find a house within the first month. And how quickly would Carol put them on her schedule again if they did not find at least one house they could at least compliment?

  The next house was in the old part of Johnson, a neighborhood of two- and three-story Victorian houses presiding over tree-lined streets, where several houses had already charmed Katie but not Jen. This one, however, was a single-story bungalow, its gently sloping roof covered in deep-blue tiles. The walls were brick up to waist height, and then light-brown stucco.

  “When was this built?” Jen asked. “It looks like some of the old houses back in California.”

  Carol consulted a sheaf of notes. “Nineteen nineteen. It’s a Sears kit house. Two bedrooms. Kitchen needs a little work, but it has a new furnace and air conditioning, and it’s priced to sell.”

  There were touches aplenty to warm Katie’s heart, beginning with the sinuous brass-lizard door knocker on the heavy, green front door. Jen noted that the windows, though wood-framed, were new, and that the heating and cooling systems did indeed look modern. These practicalities ensured, she could allow her heart to be warmed by touches such as the deep-set, finished-wood window seats in the identically sized bedrooms—the more so when Carol pointed out that the window seats lifted to reveal built-in cedar-lined chests.

  “Look at the fireplace!” crowed Katie from the other room. Art nouveau tiles set off the smallish firebox, surmounted by a carved wooden mantle on which lizards like the one on the door knocker frolicked among stylized leaves.

  The kitchen, and, to a lesser extent, the bathroom, were the sticking point. The appliances were old, rust beginning to show through white enamel, and no concessions had been made to a more modern taste in layout and storage.

  After spending nearly an hour in the bungalow, the women moved on to see the rest of the houses on their itinerary, but Katie’s heart was clearly won, and every subsequent house was assiduously, and unflatteringly, compared with the bungalow.

  “You would hate that kitchen,” Jen pointed out that night, as Katie was making dinner in the apartment.

  “It’s pretty bad,” Katie conceded. “But we could get a new fridge and stove and fix it up, couldn’t we?”

  “The asking price isn’t much more than the equity I can get out of my condo back in California. It would be easy to keep out enough money for renovations and still have a pretty tiny mortgage,” Jen conceded. “Still, I can’t think of anything I’d like less than having to supervise a bunch of contractors all the time.”

  “I could help!” Katie assured her.

  Through the weekend, the hold of the bungalow on their minds remained firm—Jen’s as well as Katie’s, despite her calmer approach to the matter. When she went running on Sunday morning, she unconsciously directed her steps in that direction and found herself standing outside the low, wrought iron fence, looking up the walk.

  Tuesday, over lunch, she called Carol and asked if they could see it again that night. The sisters took their time wandering all over the house. An hour and a half had passed, and Jen was sitting on the window seat of what she couldn’t help thinking of as “her room”: her legs pulled up, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes looking out on the secluded backyard in the gathering gloom.

  Carol entered, saw Jen, and observed, “It’s such a pretty view. The yard would be just right for you: large enough to have a garden but not so big that it would be hard to manage.”

  Jen nodded. For several moments she remained silent. “All right,” she said. “I want to make an offer on it.”

  Over the next two weeks, paperwork ebbed and flowed: inspections, loan paperwork, proof of employment, equity advance from the relocation company for the California condo. Katie, in a burst of enthusiasm, got a library card and returned home with what appeared to be the entire home-improvement and decorating section. Jen gently mocked this development, especially when Katie brought her new passion into the modern age and started a Pinterest account, but this aloofness did not prevent Jen from quietly contemplating the relative brand value of Wolf versus Viking ranges. Carol assured them that they should be able to close within thirty days. “You can be in by Thanksgiving if you want.”

  Their parents, Tom and Pat, were enthusiastic at the news and promised a visit, which occurred on the second weekend after the offer had been placed. The four of them walked down to view the house, Jen and Katie pointing out its many virtues with the consciousness of impending ownership.

  “I’m glad to see you and Katie getting along so well,” Pat said, as she and Jen were cleaning up the apartment kitchen together that evening. Katie, having made the dinner, had retired to the living room, where Tom was watching the football game. “I was real worried about her when she picked up and moved out, but you seem to have been a steadying influence.”

  This we-are-the-adult-women-talking-together-about-your-sister dynamic was not a familiar one, and Jen was not sure she liked it. “I’ve enjoyed having her with me,” she replied blandly.

  “I keep looking back to those couple months when she was with us after graduating and trying to think what I did wrong,” Pat confided. “How did you get through to her?”

  “I did yell at her to go get a job after she’d been sitting around for the first couple days she was with me,” Jen conceded. “But honestly, she’s matured a lot on her own over the last few months. I can’t take credit for it.”

  “You must be doing something right,” Pat persisted. “When she was staying with us, she was staying out late without telling us, coming in drunk some nights. I was terrified I’d get a call from the police some night that she’d been pulled over DUI.”

  “Nope, I never had that happen,” Jen said, having no intention of telling her mother about Katie’s court appearance. “I think after she had some space for a while, and thought about things, she found her own reasons to mature,” she added, with truth.

  “I feel sometimes like I failed her as a mother. But it’s so hard to make up that ground now. I wish I’d done a better job when she was younger. I wish I’d known the sort of things that go on at secular colleges these days. Maybe if I’d pushed her to go to a Catholic college, she would have had better influences. You were so responsible in college, but not everyone has the strength to resist peer pressure like you.”

  Jen shrugged, divided between the drive to argue with her mother and the desire to move the conversation on to another topic. “You know, Mom, I probably did a lot of stuff you wouldn’t approve of when I was in college and afterward. It’s just that I kept my grades up and never moved back home. Honestly, Katie’s a good kid. It’d be easiest on both of you if you stopped trying to bring her up and just tried to know her better the way she is.”

  Pat dashed at her eyes with an elbow as she finished loading the dishwasher, and Jen feared the conversation was in danger of taking a maudlin turn. “How have you and Dad been doing?” Jen inquired. “It’s good to see you guys. I know I’m terrible about calling.”

  “Oh, we’re doing all right. Actually . . . I was wanting to tell you . . .” Pat looked around as if guilty over imparting something that was supposed to remain secret. “The latest contract negotiation at your father’s work hasn’t been going well. You know how things are these days. They’ve announced a buyout for people between fifty-five and sixty-five who are willing to take early retirement, and Dad’s been thinking about it very seriously.” She nodded sagely.

  “Wow. Is Dad reall
y thinking of retiring? He’s not that old.”

  “Sixty-two next year, honey. That’s not old, but he’d be glad not to have to go out with the trucks anymore. And his knee has been giving him a little trouble lately. He says if he’s going to keep working, he’d like it to be on something he cares about. If he took the retirement offer, he could look into something like teaching a shop class part-time at the high school or the community center.”

  “Wow. Dad retired and teaching shop classes part-time. I guess I really am a grown-up.”

  “Well . . . And I’ll tell you something else.” Pat paused dramatically. “Your father’s been talking for ages about what a big yard we have for two empty nesters. And the house is really bigger than we need and so much work to keep clean and decorated. With you girls back nearby, we’ve been talking about whether it’s time to put the house on the market and move somewhere smaller. Maybe even somewhere nearer to you girls. You know that nice young priest we had at our parish for a couple years? Father Larry?”

  “Mom, I haven’t been to your place in three or four years.”

  “I must have told you about him on the phone, though, hon. You should hear him speak. He gave a Bible study on the Epistles last year, and there were a hundred people crowding into the parish center every Tuesday night just to hear him talk. Well, we were all so sad when he got reassigned this spring. But where do you think it was they sent him? Saint Anne’s, right here in Johnson. I told him when he left, ‘It’ll be a long drive, but Tom and I will come out and see you sometime.’ So when Katie told me the job you were interviewing for was in Johnson, I knew it was meant to be. And here you are!”

  Jen did not venture an opinion on the providential nature of this coincidence. Pat tried to entice her to come to Mass with them the next morning with the promise that she would be able to meet Father Larry and that his sermons were short but always made her think, but Jen passed on the opportunity, slept till eight, and got in a run while her parents were gone, returning in time to help Katie make breakfast.

  The closing date for the house was set for the Friday before Thanksgiving. The sisters were united in their desire to host Thanksgiving dinner at the new house, both to show off their new home and as an act of independence. This deadline created certain logistical difficulties, but these were solved by sending Katie back to California to supervise the movers’ packing up the old condo while Jen stayed in Johnson to sign paperwork and meet office deadlines.

  Left to herself, Jen succumbed to her own form of house fever and visited a kitchen showroom to order glistening stainless-steel replacements for the old stove and refrigerator. The prices would have drawn shocked indignation from Katie, but Jen assured herself she was investing for the long term and that the savings of picking a KitchenAid fridge over the Sub-Zero justified the expense of the Wolf stove in all its red-knobbed glory.

  The great day came. Katie, jet lagged from her trip back the night before, dozed in a chair while Jen went through the rituals of assuming ownership.

  “This document says . . . Please initial each page and sign here.”

  At last, they left the title agent’s office, Jen carrying a large, legal-size folder full of papers and the keys to the house. They drove straight there, let themselves in, and wandered slowly through the empty, echoing rooms.

  “Let’s stay here tonight,” Katie said, bursting into Jen’s room, where she had been sitting on the window seat, quietly daydreaming.

  “There’s nothing to sleep on,” Jen pointed out.

  “We could get a couple sleeping bags or air mattresses or something.”

  The idea had an unquestionable allure. The next day, their furniture would arrive, but the house was hers now, and Jen couldn’t help seeing a night spent anywhere else as a waste.

  They went out and laid in cleaning supplies, a pair of air mattresses, and a six pack of beer. They spent the afternoon cleaning the house—hard, grubby work, which neither of them had ever enjoyed as much before, nor would again—and at last, tired and feeling far less fresh than the newly scrubbed house but deeply gratified to look around at the glistening floors smelling of Murphy Oil Soap, they sat on the floor of the empty dining room and relished a dinner of pizza and beer.

  “Was it like this when you bought your condo?” Katie asked.

  Jen tried to turn her mind back to those days. She and Kevin had started dating during the weeks she was waiting to close on the condo, and he had helped her move her things from her old apartment. There had been no need for a day of cleaning then; the newly built condo had been utterly pristine when the agent at last gave her the keys and showed her around. Still, there had been a headiness to placing furniture and unpacking boxes together, which, no doubt, had speeded her invitation that he move in.

  “No,” Jen said, dismissing the memories. “The condo was different. I was excited, and it’s always fun the first time you go into your new place, before the furniture comes. But it was brand new and perfect, like being shown into a hotel room. I ran around barefoot so I wouldn’t get anything on the new white carpet and showed my boyfriend where each piece of furniture would go.”

  “I wish I was doing that,” said Katie with a gusty sigh.

  “What?”

  “Showing a boyfriend around the empty house. Running into every corner. Kissing. You know . . .”

  Jen laughed. “Sounds a little awkward with me here.”

  “Well, of course I mean if it was my house, and my boyfriend, and I had my life together. Sheesh, fine—make a joke of it. Maybe you’re just way too together to ever feel this way, but sometimes . . .” Katie trailed off for a moment after this outburst, assessing whether she wanted to go on in this confessional vein. When she spoke again it was a quieter tone, and she drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them defensively as she spoke. “It’s just stuff like this that makes me feel so desperate to be living a real life in a real relationship. And then I wish I could just grab some guy and—” She paused again. “In my head it’s always just some random guy. Which I guess is how I know it’s just desperation talking, because with any real guy I knew I’d be thinking about him as a person and I’d be nervous and never just grab him . . . unless I’d had an awful lot to drink first to give me courage.”

  Jen laughed again, but this time her laughter had a wistful edge.

  “What?” Katie demanded.

  “You won’t always be the bundle of hormones you are at twenty-three. The loneliness stays, though. Loneliness is worse.”

  “Oh, Jen, I’m sorry!” Katie gave her sister an impulsive hug. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Sometimes I just say whatever comes into my head.”

  It grew dark outside. The evening was cold, and the furnace gently growled in the basement, exhaling warm air through decorative brass grilles. Jen had picked up a case of fire logs at the store. They lit one in the fireplace and sat talking in the living room until late. At last, each went to her own room, where they had made up the air mattresses using bedding borrowed from the apartment.

  Jen snuggled under her blanket and looked up at the unfamiliar ceiling. The moon was nearly full, shining its blue-white glare in through the curtainless window, and the trees in the backyard cast strange, dancing shadows across the walls. She heard the click-click-whoosh of the furnace starting up again in the basement. Then, as the ducts warmed, the sighing of the air moving through the house, and the pingings and creakings of the ducts changing temperature. A floorboard creaked. There was a strange, quiet rattle somewhere in the house. Jen pulled the blanket up over her head like a child and felt wide awake. She found herself wondering if anyone had ever died in this nearly hundred-year-old house. This line of thought only magnified every sound in the empty house, and she found herself wishing very strongly that they had waited until the furniture arrived before spending their first night in it. Her furniture would tame it. The still-bare house still owned itself, with all its history and secrets, the two of them as yet just a tolerated
intrusion in the structure.

  She heard footsteps, and the door creaked open.

  “Jen?” said Katie in a very quiet voice.

  “What?”

  “I know this sounds really stupid, but the empty house sounds spooky. Can I get in with you?”

  Sharing an air mattress with another adult did not promise a very comfortable night, but the ominous sounds of the house had already receded to nothing with the arrival of another person.

  “Sure.”

  Katie crawled in under the blankets next to her, curled up, and fell asleep almost instantly. It was some time before Jen drifted off, but with the warm presence next to her, the night held no more fears.

  The movers came early the next morning, and all was chaos from there on out. The truck arrived from the kitchen showroom, and yet another set of workmen entered to carry out the old appliances and bring in the new fridge and stove. Such was the madness at that point that neither sister had time to stop and wonder at the glistening stainless-steel appliances until the movers had gone.

  Nothing is quite as comforting as breakfast, and so, when they were alone at last that night, Katie fried up bacon and scrambled eggs while Jen unpacked dishes and put them in the cupboards.

  By the end of the weekend, they had most of the everyday accoutrements of life unpacked.

  Jen went back to the office for the three days before the holiday, while Katie laid in extravagant supplies for Thanksgiving dinner and simultaneously embarked upon painting her room. She finished in the small hours of Thursday morning, and Jen (who had nurtured reservations about Katie’s do-it-yourself abilities) was forced to admit that it looked professional.