Starter House A Novel (6 page)

He was growing a layer of fur called lanugo all over his body. He was the size of a lime. Lacey cupped her hand. The entire hairy child could fit into her palm, and she wouldn’t even stretch her fingers. And in a month, he’d be big enough to survive on his own—just barely, and two months would be better, or three—she could hardly bear to imagine it, after all that bleeding. Better, safer, to think of other things.

Her mother came up behind her and started rubbing her shoulders. Lacey sighed and let the roots of her neck relax under Ella Dane Kendall’s strong hands. “I can’t find a doctor,” she said. Last week, Eric had taken an afternoon off work to drive her to her old OB in Columbia, but that wasn’t a long-term plan. In all Greeneburg, there had to be one doctor who would take her.

“You should look for a doula and not a Western death doctor.”

“Insurance only covers the Western death doctors. And they don’t want me because, you know, I might die.”

“I know what you need.” Ella Dane stopped rubbing Lacey’s shoulders and busied herself at the stove, making some kind of tea.

“No herbs,” Lacey said. When she went to college, her mother’s life became an unending self-improvement project: cruelty-free cosmetics, organic clothing, veganism, bearded spiritual men. Ella Dane meant well, but what kind of life was it, when the woman’s only long-term relationship was with the world’s nastiest dog? She came to their aid without complaint, keeping their house clean—well, cleanish—even though she refused to use the vacuum cleaner (it scrambled the feng shui, she said). Lacey tried to be grateful, without much success.
She means well, means well, means well
was Lacey’s mantra; Ella Dane threw out all the cleaners and used vinegar for most purposes, oil with a few drops of essential sage for the furniture, and now the living room smelled like an Italian salad. And Bibbits the vegan poodle, whom Lacey remembered as a frisky thing with a habit of nipping, had taken to vomiting in corners and coughing for hours, rolling his bloodshot eyes in the most pitiable way. Lacey wasn’t the only one who needed a Western death doctor, but Ella Dane had shaken off her suggestion of a vet. Her dog didn’t need chemicals. But she meant well. And she had sensed no angry, unwelcoming presence in the house.
A happy house,
she’d said.
You did well.

Then what was that darkness, the thing that had fallen down the stairs? Nothing at all. Low blood sugar. Vertigo.

“I’m going to lie down for a while,” Lacey said to Ella Dane. She’d find a doctor later.

She paused at the foot of the stairs. Something had moved in the living room. She closed her eyes against the gray wash of panic and forced herself to look straight into the room. Her mother, who had refused to spend a winter in a comfortable house because it felt unfriendly, had entered 571 Forrester with a smile two weeks ago, telling Lacey she had never felt a home so glad to be lived in. There was nothing wrong. There could be nothing wrong.

The thing in the chair was Bibbits, turning and clawing the red leather seat, nesting in the shredded remnants of a green and gold brocade cushion. Relief made Lacey furious. “Down!” she shouted. “Off!
Bad
dog.” A thing her mother had forbidden her ever to say, because all dogs were naturally good. The fringe of the cushion hung from either side of Bibbits’s mouth in an extravagant green mustache. “
Bad,
” she said, and swept him off the chair with her hand.

He landed hard, with a yelp of more surprise than pain, and instead of bouncing to his feet, he jerked backward as if something had struck him and shrieked aloud.

“Bibbits?” Ella Dane rushed into the room with her hands full of letters and catalogs and scooped him up. “What’s wrong, baby love?”

In Ella Dane’s arms, Bibbits bared his teeth at Lacey. His body twitched, and he stretched his lips and began to cough, dry and deep. Ella Dane pulled a brown glass vial from her pocket and squirted a dropperful of something into Bibbits’s mouth. His cough eased, though he still panted.

“He fell,” Lacey said. She couldn’t admit having hit him. She hadn’t hurt him; something else had made him shriek. The red leather was clawed and the cushion ruined beyond repair. “Keep him off the furniture, please,” she said, hoping she sounded patient and reasonable, and not like a whining child. She picked up the mail and went upstairs.

Lacey had been thirteen when Ella Dane picked Bibbits up from the side of the road. His vet bills used up Lacey’s birthday present, all the money Grandpa Merritt sent—it was one of those times when Ella Dane was in grudging contact with her father, though she wouldn’t let Lacey talk with him—and for years Ella Dane maintained the fiction that Bibbits was Lacey’s dog. How many friends’ houses, garage apartments, basements, and motel rooms had the Kendalls been evicted from, because of Bibbits. . . . That dog had made her life miserable.

Ella Dane loved him. Lacey went upstairs, carefully, two feet on each step, gripping the banister hard. Downstairs, Bibbits began to cough again.

Chapter Seven

ERIC SAT AT HIS DESK
looking at his lunch. It was the most depressing sandwich he had ever seen. Nobody else at Moranis Miszlak brought their lunch to work, but whenever he went to a restaurant, the money he’d spent over the last month sprang up and seized his throat. They had good reasons for every cent, and yet the more reasons he thought of, the weaker they seemed. He felt like the criminal defendant who wouldn’t stop explaining why he walked into the drugstore with a gun. Because his girlfriend’s ex was threatening him. He forgot it was in his pocket. He was going to the pawnshop to sell it and only stopped for a Coke. It wasn’t even his gun, he’d never seen it before.

So Eric bought furniture because it was on sale, and they needed all those things anyway, and a pregnant woman on bed rest couldn’t sleep on a futon, and it was all delivered for one fee, and, and, and.

Because. Because Lacey looked so small in the hospital bed. Because of the long, long ten seconds before the doctor found the baby’s heartbeat. Seven thousand dollars on the Discover Card. Because he walked into the house and it was empty except for the bloody footprints, and one small handprint, still sticky, on the lowest step.

He bought the furniture so the house would never be so empty again.

Seven thousand dollars, and then the hospital bill. Eric’s uncle created this job for him when the firm could have gone another year without hiring. Uncle Floyd and many of his clients had lost money when Eric’s parents’ investment firm, Foothills Financial, went bankrupt, so Eric’s salary was maybe half what it should be, and Floyd expected Eric to be grateful.

Lunch at the desk. It was nice of Lacey’s mother to make his lunch. He wished she wouldn’t. She was a gluten-free vegan, and what looked like cheese in his sandwich was actually some kind of pressed fermented soy by-product, and the bread was made of turnips and rice. Lacey had warned him Ella Dane would light candles and sing strange chants, but it wasn’t that bad, apart from the food. And that rotten little dog.

Voices washed through the front office as the personnel of Moranis Miszlak returned. They brought a wonderful smell, becoming even more wonderful as it approached his office. Uncle Floyd opened the door. The old man was fabulous in his pink three-piece seersucker suit, green bow tie, and white shoes. He shoved Eric’s untouched files to the side of the desk and set down a white Styrofoam box. “Brought you Abernathy’s orange bourbon ribs. Baked potato.
And
”—he indicated the slice of orange, twisted and stuck into the ribs with a toothpick—“salad.”

“Thanks, Uncle Floyd.”

“Heard from your parents lately?”

“No.” After the Foothills pyramid collapsed, Eric’s mother had gone to Indiana to stay with her sister, and his father was still in jail. Eric wondered if Floyd had given him the job to find out if there was money hidden somewhere. If only. “Mom wrote once, but not Dad. I guess he’s ashamed.”

“He should be.” Floyd reached across Eric’s desk to finger the files. “Loaded you up with judies, huh?” Those were the clients who picked Moranis Miszlak because they saw the ads on afternoon television, airing during Judge Judy: cheap cases, hardly worth the cost of his time. People suing each other over undocumented loans, minor car accidents, and of course the low-income divorces. These cases belonged in small claims court, except for the clients’ inflated value of their own pain and suffering. The divorces were people who had seen trouble coming and married it anyway. “Poor people need lawyers too,” Floyd said. “You’ll get better cases soon.”

Eric straightened the picture of Lacey in its clear plastic frame. She stood beside the bumper cars at Myrtle Beach, with a snowcone in her hand, her hair blowing across her face in wavy strands of brown and gold. When Foothills went down, two weeks after Lacey and Eric got engaged, she kissed him and comforted him and promised to get him through law school. And she did it. Now she lay in bed with her feet elevated, wearing an adult diaper to catch the trickling blood.

“I’ve got enough to keep me busy,” Eric said.

Floyd took the picture from his hands. “It ain’t good enough to be busy. You got to be smart.” He laid the picture on the desk, facedown, and took the orange slice off Eric’s ribs and ate it, peel and all. “You know why they call this a doggy bag?”

Eric nodded. This sounded like the beginning of an Uncle Floyd life-skills seminar, and the quickest way through it was to nod and smile.

“Because you are that little girl’s bitch is why,” Floyd said. “Women all over God’s earth have babies and they don’t whine and carry on.”

Eric couldn’t let this pass unchallenged. “She put me through law school.”

“Good for her. Now she’s putting you through hell.”

Eric pushed his keyboard away and tore a rib off the rack. It was still hot. These weren’t leftovers. Floyd must have ordered for him just before leaving the restaurant. He was such a terrible old man, and then he had moments of disarming generosity.

“You got to be ready,” Floyd said. “You were smart about the house, not spending much; she’ll get half, but in a few years you’ll hardly notice.”

“She’s my wife. I love her.”

“There’s never another wife like the first. My Marian, I still dream of her. Doc gives me Xanax for it. That girl of yours, her mother’s some kind of witch.”

Eric and Lacey had a courtroom wedding; Floyd Miszlak and Ella Dane Kendall, their witnesses, had made a bad impression on each other. Ella Dane interrupted the ceremony to invoke the four elements and the four directions to bless the young couple, bringing them fertility, abundance, harmony, and joy. Floyd followed her incantation by declaring it the deepest pile of crap he’d ever stepped into, including the summer he’d worked cleaning the elephant habitat in the Greeneburg Zoo when he was sixteen. “It prepared me for the law,” he concluded, “but it didn’t prepare me for this.” He never missed a chance to remind Eric that all women turned into their mothers.

“Thanks for the ribs,” Eric said.

“Best barbecue in town. I’ll swear it on my deathbed.” Floyd left the room.

Eric wiped his hands. On the surface, Floyd was all chicken-fried grammar and happy fat charm, like a rustic chair with bark on the wood, but under that were layers of cunning; the man could write a contract that would make Satan weep. But he was wrong about Lacey.

When Eric told her there was no money, that his parents had drained his trust fund to string their clients along, she took off her engagement ring, a one-carat marquis barricaded by ramparts of smaller diamonds, three carats total. She put it in his hand.

“You don’t want to get married?” he said. It had been his first thought when he heard the news on morning television.
Upstate investment firm closes its doors
. He turned toward the television, toaster waffle steaming in his fingers, to see the Foothills storefront with its doors chained, and a crowd of clients—people whose accounts he’d handled during his internship last summer, when everything was fine—milling in the parking lot, funneling their hands and peering in the windows as if they might see boxes of money on the desks.
Lacey’s gone,
he thought. The ring flashed in his hand.

“Do you still want to?” she said. “Things won’t be like we thought.”

He nodded but could not speak.

“So return this ring. Get me a little topaz, and use the money for tuition.”

He put the ring on her hand, sold the BMW his parents had bought for his sixteenth birthday, and applied for student loans. While applying, he learned his parents had stolen his identity to open several lines of credit, so Lacey took out extra loans to cover his tuition. She finished her degree in three years and started teaching fourth grade, also after-school tutoring and summer school. A dozen divorces a month passed over Floyd Miszlak’s desk, but he didn’t know everything. He saw only the failures. Nobody came to the lawyer on their twentieth anniversary to file a legal declaration that they were happy and faithful.