I stayed to watch for a few moments. Seeing how quick she’d been to jump to conclusions about him, I suspected that she’d encountered Gordon before and that it might be fun to watch her accost him. But, instead, she marched over to the outer edge of the yard and stood there, close to the bushes that separated the yard from the road, staring at him.
I shrugged. Perhaps there would be interesting fireworks later.
“How does this sound?” Dad asked, and then demonstrated an owl’s hoot.
“Fabulous,” I said. “If I were a vole, I’d be terrified.”
“I don’t think it’s resonant enough,” Dad fretted.
When I returned to the kitchen, I found that several more relatives had joined the crowd—out-of-town ones who’d never met Michael before, and were inspecting him as frankly as if he were going on sale along with the eight-track tapes and Ronco gadgets outside. I considered asking Dad for the best group noun for an excessively large collection of family members—a chattering of cousins, or an unkindness of relations? But I stifled the impulse. After all, Mother would probably hear about it if I said anything insulting about her family.
Michael was pretending not to notice. Instead, he was looking with a puzzled expression at the impromptu kitchen table some of the family had constructed by propping the detached bathroom door up on some of the bricks left over from the chimney that had collapsed in September.
“Someone was trapped in the bathroom,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Well, we were planning to demolish the quarter bath anyway.”
He sounded calm about the damage, though I couldn’t tell what his face looked like. He’d donned a mask—Groucho never looked half as good—and began giving Claude and Emma the grand tour of the house. The tour was a lot safer than it used to be, now that I’d cleared all the stuff out. Also a whole lot less interesting, at least with me as tour guide. All the decluttering had temporarily dulled my enthusiasm for the house, so my tour consisted of a series of apologies for the house’s present decrepitude; warnings about what not to touch, walk on, or stand under; and a dispiriting inventory of the repairs needed to make the house habitable.
Perhaps I should tag along more often on Michael’s tour, I thought, as I sipped my coffee. If I listened with my eyes closed, I could almost see our future kitchen, with its deft blend of period charm and modern functionality, instead of the battered, dated 1940s room I was actually sitting in. The formal dining room next door certainly looked a lot better in the candlelight of Michael’s imagination, with all its plasterwork and parquet painstakingly restored. He was particularly effective at evoking a vision of our library-to-be. You could almost overlook the fact that the actual room was boarded off until we could replace the floor that had collapsed into the basement a couple of decades ago.
Dad chimed in with his vision of what we planned to do with the yard, though I seriously doubted if we had room on three acres for free-range cows, sheep, and poultry along with the organic vegetable garden and the orchard of endangered heritage fruit trees.
At least Mother wasn’t around to share her decorating suggestions. Presumably she was still working on her beauty sleep back at the Cave, as Michael and I called the tiny, dank basement apartment we were about to leave behind for the new house.
I tried to tune all this out. Not that I wasn’t, at least in theory, equally excited about all these projects—the ones that didn’t involve livestock, anyway—but the sheer number of them overwhelmed me, and the only thing that kept me from panicking was that they were all neatly jotted down in the notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant to-do list. Once they were in the notebook, I could manage not to think of them all the time. And this morning, just thinking about them made me tired.
And maybe just a little worried.
People had warned me that buying a house together was one of the most stressful things you could do to a relationship, and renovating it was another, so doing both together probably constituted a death knell for couples less firmly grounded than Michael and me.
At least I hoped we were firmly grounded. We’d only had a few minor arguments so far. Minor because, after one of us had stormed off—me to my rented forge or Michael to his office at the college—the other had quickly gone running after to apologize, and we’d always mended the quarrel quite satisfactorily by bedtime. Then again, so far we hadn’t gotten very far with the renovations. We’d only gotten as far as working through the clutter.
And what’s this “we” stuff? the cynical part of my brain put in. You’re the one doing all the work.