Eric came up behind her and touched her arm to pull her away. “Look,” she said. It spoke to her. Its brokenness and emptiness called her, and the discarded carpet was a mark of hope. This house had been someone’s home; it had suffered and been damaged, and it was ready to be a home again. “Look, this is our house,” Lacey said.
“It’s a mess.”
“You’re not looking.” She pointed to the house on the left. Also a Cape Cod, it gleamed immaculate in the shadow of the big maple. Its siding was a yellowed cream, the shade of egg custard, and the shutters were golden caramel. Three white rockers sat at friendly angles on the porch, under hanging ferns. Someone had mowed the lawn in perfect herringbones. “They’re just the same. It could look like that, if we took care of it.” She couldn’t turn her back on this house; there was something in its expression, the angle of the dormers, so quizzical and innocent and appealing. It needed her. “It’s just so cute.”
“Cute? Be serious. The down payment, it’s all the money we have.”
The porch steps were broken. Lacey got her left knee onto the porch and hauled herself up, ignoring Eric’s protests. The front door, scraped of its paint, swung open to her hand, and she walked in.
The entrance was surprisingly wide. To the left, an open arch led to the formal living room: two big windows and a gray marble fireplace. The floor was bare wood, with a sander standing in the middle. Lacey was glad the carpets were gone; they must have been horrible. To the right, another open arch, and a smaller room, with the same big windows. A roll of carpet stood in one corner, its underside stained in broad circles of brown and black. Straight ahead was the bright heart of the house, a staircase beautiful even under its mud-colored Berber. A porthole window, a quartered circle, shed yellow western light down into Lacey’s eyes. The last six steps broadened and curved out and back, with the lowest step describing a complete circle around the banister post.
Lacey could see her someday children there. They would sit on that round step in the sunshine. She saw a boy folding paper airplanes, which he meant to throw from a bedroom window. She saw a girl leaning against the post with her head bent over a book. The girl tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She read as Eric did, biting her upper lip, her eyebrows tucked into a frown. The light hid their faces from her, but she already knew them. Someday, here. They had chosen their home in this house.
Eric took Lacey’s elbow and pulled her out of the house. “You can’t just walk into someone’s house,” he said. “You don’t even know if it’s for sale.”
Lacey let Eric help her off the porch, where CarolAnna Grey caught up with them. “This is the house I want.”
“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.