Starter House

Chapter One

IT WAS ALREADY JUNE, and the Miszlaks still hadn’t found a house. Eric wanted guarantees: no lead, asbestos, mold, termites, crime, or trouble. Lacey wanted triangles.

“Triangles,” Eric said, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. They shared the backseat of the Realtor’s Tahoe, he with his binder of fact sheets organized by street name, she with her sketchbook, outside of their one hundred and eighth house. Lacey wanted to like it. She wished she could say, This is the one, I love it, for Eric’s sake, because he was getting anxious as their list of houses dwindled from the twenties to the teens, but she just couldn’t. This house with its square utilitarian front, so naked and so poor—if Eric settled for it, he’d be miserable by Christmas. They’d had enough of square houses, bland rooms no better than the motels she’d grown up in and the apartments they’d lived in together, houses without memory. They couldn’t live that way anymore, with the baby coming.

“Triangles,” she said, shaping one in the air with her hands. “Gables. Dormer windows. Look at that thing; a person could die of actual boredom. What about the one with the bay window?”

Eric flicked through his binder. “Bad neighborhood. Two title loan stores and a used car lot right around the corner.”

The Realtor turned in the front seat. She was on the phone with her office, trying to find another house in the neighborhoods acceptable to the Miszlaks. Although three thousand homes were for sale in Greeneburg County (many of them in the city of Greeneburg itself) this first week of June, the Miszlaks’ requirements limited them to Forrester Hills, on the northeast side of town. Lacey, three months pregnant and planning her baby’s perfect childhood, had mapped the attendance zones of the good schools. Eric drew a circle around his uncle’s law office, so he would have no more than a twenty-minute commute. The circles crossed only here.

CarolAnna Grey, the Realtor, had become steadily less blond over three weekends of driving the Miszlaks from house to house. Lacey felt sorry for her; she kept taking them to houses that failed one or more of their criteria, usually Eric’s. He had grown up in Glenaughtry, Greeneburg’s finest golf neighborhood. He had standards.

“This is my neighborhood,” CarolAnna said. “I’ve lived here all my life.”

“I’m not buying anything that’s walking distance from Austell Road,” Eric said.

“You’re going to have to open up your search.”

“No,” they said together, and Eric turned pages in his binder and said, “What about the blue house around the corner, Lacey? It had those windows you like.”

Lacey fanned her sketchbook and found her impression of the house: a toadstool with fumes rising from its gills. “Smelled of mold.” It smelled like a basement apartment with carpeting so dirty it sticks to your feet. She’d spent too much of her life in rooms like that already.

“Why don’t you just look at this house?” CarolAnna Grey said.

Eric and Lacey got out of the Tahoe. “We could look,” Eric said.

Lacey looked. It was a square, no question. She dug in her purse for the bag of pistachios. In the last three months, besieged by morning sickness, she had gained ten pounds, though the baby itself was smaller than her thumb; she had to eat all the time, dry salty food, to keep the nausea under control. She wandered to the corner, seeking shade.

The neighborhood was exactly right. She loved the way the streets curved. She loved the cul-de-sacs and the big trees, the gardens all flashed with pink and white as the last dogwood flowers withered in June’s green heat. She loved the big lawns prettified with gazebos, fountains, swings, wishing wells. A flock of little boys on skateboards flurried through the next intersection. Their voices hung in the air behind them like a flight of bells. She could live here forever, in the right house.

Forrester Lane curved counterclockwise, an arc of lawns and trees. She poured the pistachio shells back into the bag and walked along the sidewalk. It was broken in places, shattered from below by the heaving roots of oaks and maples. She liked that. It showed that the people who lived here valued trees more than concrete. Here was shade, under the biggest maple she had ever seen, effortlessly shielding two houses at once.

She looked up suddenly, her eye drawn to some motion not quite seen, and there was the house. She looked at it and her heart turned, like a key in a lock. Her house: a Cape Cod, dusty rose, its face naked and bruised. The shutters were piled on the porch, a sheet of plywood sealed the upper-right dormer window, tire tracks rutted the lawn, and a blue Dumpster stood crooked on the grass, filled with rolls of brown carpet and green foam-pad. A rust-stained claw-foot bathtub lay upside down on the porch.