Starter House A Novel (2 page)

“You don’t want this house,” CarolAnna said. She looked as if she could say more, but Lacey didn’t want to hear it. After one hundred and eight shoeboxes, she knew a real house when she saw it.

“We don’t want a fixer-upper,” Eric said. “I won’t have time to work on it, and you can’t, not by yourself.”

“Someone’s fixing it up already. Fixing it to sell.”

“You can’t know that,” Eric said, but Lacey knew it by the house’s emptiness. Her someday children would never have appeared in another family’s home. A family would have moved their furniture from room to room, not taken it all away. This house was getting ready for a new life.

The maple cast a green darkness over the lawn, a whisper of busy hands, and CarolAnna shuddered and moved away from it. “There’s a real cute condo in a new development west of the mall,” she said. “With a swimming pool.”

Eric walked backward across the lawn, squinting upward. “Roof looks good.”

“They’re getting ready to paint,” Lacey said. “If we make an offer fast, we can choose the colors. Inside and out.”

If the shutters were green, dark mossy green . . . She wanted a green door, like the door of Grandpa Merritt’s house, which had closed behind her forever when she was six, her last real home. They’d paint the baby’s room sky blue and stencil stars and butterflies on the ceiling. They could do whatever they liked and not have to ask a landlord’s permission or worry about the damage deposit. They would have a dog. She added a golden Labrador to her vision of the someday children on the staircase; then she pulled out her sketchbook and roughed in a drawing of the house’s face and the maple.

The house looked happy in her picture. This was why she preferred to take sketches of the houses, rather than photographs. Snapping a picture was quick and easy, but the drawing told the truth, like the difference between e-mail and real conversation, websites and books.

“You could rent an apartment and wait a couple months,” CarolAnna said. “Come July, there’ll be thirty more in your area.”

“Is there something wrong with this house?” Eric said.

Next door, in the twin Cape Cod, the front door opened and a tall white-headed man came out onto his porch with a watering can. He looked over and said in gentle surprise, “Well, it’s you, CarolAnna Grey. This isn’t Tuesday.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“And how’s little Madison; is she practicing?”

“Not so you’d notice.”

The tall man courteously left a space in the air for CarolAnna to introduce Eric and Lacey. She set her mouth and said nothing. Lacey stepped into the painful silence, folding her sketchbook open on the picture of the house, and said, “I’m Lacey Miszlak and this is Eric. What do you know about the house next door?”

“Harry Rakoczy.” He smiled at CarolAnna. “I’ve known this one since she was tiny, and now her little girl’s taking lessons with me. Violin. You’re interested in the house? I’m getting ready to sell.”

Lacey said, “Yes,” but Eric said, “Maybe. What’s the history?”

“Harry, they don’t want it.” CarolAnna touched his arm. He looked at her hand until she let go. “It’s not right,” she said.

Harry ignored CarolAnna and smiled at Lacey. “It’s been a rental for years. Roof’s two years old, heat pump’s practically new, and I’m renovating.” He waved his watering can at the old bathtub. “Get that thing out of there. It’s time.”

“Harry,” CarolAnna said. She glanced at the upstairs window of the empty house and moved away, as if someone might see her. “Harry, no. She’s pregnant.”

He set down the watering can and smiled at Lacey. “Looks good on you.”

“The second trimester begins today,” Lacey said. “And my due date’s Christmas.” She told everybody she met, now the first trimester was over and it was safe; she wanted the world to know.

“What are you asking?” Eric said. He was never lost, not in a confusing map or a meandering conversation. Eric always knew where he was going.

“A hundred ten.”

Lacey was surprised. The other houses in Forrester Hills ranged from a hundred fifty to over two hundred.

“Harry,” CarolAnna said anxiously.

“Is there something wrong with the house?” Eric asked again. Lacey wished he wouldn’t. The house was obviously perfect. They could deal with anything—termites, mold, radon—but they could never make an ugly house their true home.

“Yes,” Harry said to CarolAnna, “is there?”

CarolAnna licked her lips, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at the bathtub on the porch and said to it, “People died here.”

“People die everywhere,” Lacey said, though the words gave her a shiver. Poor house, no wonder it was lonely. “When did it happen?”

“A long time ago,” Harry said. “It was very sad.”

“If it doesn’t bother you,” Eric murmured, and Lacey shook her head—she didn’t care at all. These houses were thirty, forty years old. People must have died, had babies, gotten engaged, married, divorced, hurt each other in a thousand ways, reconciled and forgiven, passionately hated and desperately loved; if you abandoned a house whenever something significant happened, people would live in tents. This house had known life.

“Ninety-five,” Eric said to Harry. “Pending the inspection.”

“Ninety-five,” Harry said thoughtfully, as if he might actually consider the offer—it had to be worth a hundred seventy at least. Lacey felt she should tell him so. Just then a green Hyundai pulled into his driveway. “Here’s Lex and the baby, I’ve got to go. CarolAnna, send me the offer and we’ll talk. And you tell your Madison, ten minutes of bow exercises every day, and I’ll know if she hasn’t done it.”

A tall man got out of the Hyundai and unbuckled a baby from the back. He stooped under her weight, and she seized two fistfuls of his colorless hair and pulled his face up. The baby’s voice pealed in a high wordless cry of greeting, bright as a bird.

Harry shook Eric’s hand again and hurried back to his own front door before Lacey had a chance to ask about the bathtub. She loved old-fashioned furniture, and the claw-foot tub was beautiful. She wanted to know if it was rusted out, or if it might be refinished and reinstalled. While Eric and CarolAnna returned to the Tahoe, Lacey picked a few flakes of white enamel off the tub and rubbed the rusty iron beneath. The tall man stared at her from Harry Rakoczy’s front porch, the baby squalling impatiently, until Harry urged him inside.

The Tahoe honked. “Come on,” Eric said. “She says there’s a new subdivision zoned for Burgoyne Elementary.”

Lacey patted the bathtub. She already knew everything that mattered about the new subdivision: small lots, no trees, the houses all alike. “You stay right here,” she said to her house. “Wait for me.” They’d have to be quick; if Harry meant to accept Eric’s offer—ninety-five thousand, practically giving it away—they’d have to grab the chance. There was no time to waste on condos and subdivisions.

Chapter Two

SEVEN WEEKS LATER,
on the first Tuesday in August, the Miszlaks moved into 571 Forrester Lane. CarolAnna Grey got over her inexplicable reluctance to sell the house when Harry Rakoczy added an extra percentage to her commission. He told the Miszlaks he needed to sell because he had retired from the orchestra and would soon be moving to Australia to be with his son’s family. Lacey was disappointed. She’d been looking forward to taking her baby next door for violin lessons with the old man in five years.

Though Eric called it their starter house, Lacey planned to live in it for ten years and maybe forever. She wanted her someday children to attend the same school from kindergarten through fifth grade, to have teachers who’d seen them grow and friends whose toddler birthday parties they’d attended. Her own childhood had been furnished with cardboard boxes and duffel bags, always moving, always ready to move. Lacey had attended eight different schools, and she couldn’t count the moves or even define them. There were times they’d slept in the car. Was it
moving
if they parked in a different spot? Did a shift to another room in the same shabby motel count as a move?

She knew what she wanted for her baby. She wanted the home that had been hers when she was six, when she and her mother had lived with Grandpa Merritt in the white house with the green door and the big magnolia tree. Grandpa Merritt’s house, like 571 Forrester Lane, had a smiling face, a sense of welcome. She wanted to be able to walk in the dark and recognize the sound and texture of every room.

Everything would be different when they were settled in the house. She hated moving, but if she had to do it, it might as well be in August, her New Year. For Lacey, a teacher, January was the trough of the year, when the children faced her across a barricade of desks, both sides exhausted beyond compromise. Now in August, the crayons were fresh in their boxes, bright as the children themselves. Every year, she bought new sketchbooks, leaving the last pages blank in the old ones. As soon as they moved in, she’d go from room to room, sketching doors and corners, making it her own.

They’d driven the route a dozen times in June and July, viewing the house, meeting with the Realtor, the bank, the lawyers, Harry Rakoczy, and the painters. They’d both driven it yesterday, coming up in two cars to leave Eric’s Mitsubishi in the Greeneburg U-Haul parking lot. It had always been an easy drive; they’d never seen traffic like this.

Highway construction delayed their arrival until seven thirty. Eric had planned for noon. Being late put him in a terrible mood, and if they didn’t deliver the empty U-Haul by nine, they’d be charged an extra day. “Let’s get started,” Eric said. “We can pile everything on the lawn for now. Just get the van empty.”

“Can’t we pay the fifty bucks and do it in the morning?”

“I’m not paying just so we can park overnight. Come on. I’ll get the books and furniture, you get the light stuff. Forty minutes and we’re done.”

“Can we give it a rest, this once?”

No, they could not. He was right and she knew it; she wished he wouldn’t be so completely right, all the time. He backed the van into 571’s driveway. The west was fat with gold, and most of the houses on the street already had a few lit windows. Harry Rakoczy’s house was dark and his car was gone. Lacey had hoped Harry could talk some sense into Eric, but they were on their own.

“I’d rather unload the futon and finish in the morning,” she said.

“We can do this.” Eric yanked at the van’s back door. It accordioned up into its slot and stuck halfway. He started pulling out boxes and laying them on the lawn. “Get the light stuff,” he said.

Lacey leaned into the van, breathing the smell of their lives, the years of their young-married student poverty: clothes washed with never quite enough cheap detergent, the orange Formica dinette, the futon Lacey bought for fifty dollars from an old roommate. The smell of garage sales and thrift shops, old textbooks, off-brand coffee, slightly irregular sheets worn thready at the hems.

She grabbed the nearest box, which gave a glassy jingle. She balanced it on her belly bump long enough to get her right hand under it, turned toward the house, and tripped over the curb. As she stepped high to get over it she could not see, a bell rang. Surprise made her stumble, and she caught her balance, the box chiming in her arms; she hoped nothing had broken. A child rode a bicycle along the sidewalk. She hadn’t heard him coming until he rang his bell, though the ticking of the wheels was loud enough. He had sprung out of the grass in the tree’s shadow. Her heart closed and opened. She took a breath and talked sense to herself:
Just a kid on the street, settle down
.

Her teacher’s eye said
Nine, but small for his age:
a boy with fair, wavy hair and a gray T-shirt stained with long rusty streaks. Trouble at home. Something about the way he stared straight ahead, something about the grip of his small fingers on the handlebars. She hoped he didn’t live too close. He rode his bike along the sidewalk to the edge of Eric and Lacey’s new property, still marked with a row of orange survey flags—he rang the bike’s round bell once,
ting,
and then turned and rode to the row of flags on the other border. He braked by jamming his heels into the sidewalk and rang the bell again.
Ting
.

Lacey started across the sidewalk and there he was again, suddenly, pedaling in front of her. His shoulder brushed the box, and she dropped it. Salad plates and dinner plates, bowls and coffee mugs, hit one another in one great shout of destruction. “Do you have to do that?” Lacey cried. “Right here? Do you have to?”

The boy stared at her, a look of challenge, like a dog too long chained:
Come closer and see if I bite
. “Who asked you to come here talking to me?” he said. The strange ferocity of his response made her step back and raise her hands.

Eric ran to the box. “I said leave it alone!” He opened the box to a mass of splinters and shards, with one intact dinner plate on top from the stoneware set they had bought at the Dollar King last June, on sale for nine dollars (marked down from fifteen). “These were good plates. They could have lasted us for years. Look at this, all this waste.” He laid the pieces out to match the bigger parts together and see if some of them could be saved. White ceramic dust drifted in the bottom of the box.