Best Staged Plans (3 page)

“D’ya think I was kidding?” our Realtor said.

On the way out, I couldn’t resist opening the mammoth refrigerator for a quick peek. Twenty years later I can still taste the smell of the rotting chicken inside.

I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF A DREAM
when Greg came back to the bedroom and woke me. Movie theater–style buttered popcorn had been popping off Mrs. Lanabaster’s ceiling, and the two of us had been taking turns seeing who could catch more in the Barbie toilet paper cover’s skirt. We were giggling like kids. Mrs. Lanabaster’s hand-eye coordination was amazing for her age, but I was holding my own.

“Bummer,” I said. “I liked that dream. Could you keep the noise down a little next time?” I opened my eyes and tried to decide whether I had enough energy to make my own bathroom run or whether my bladder could hold its own through another sleep cycle.

The sound of Greg glugging half a bottle of bedside water made the decision for me. He climbed back into bed and yanked most of my covers over to his side. I yanked back, even though I’d been just about to kick them off and head for the bathroom.

“Hey,” he whispered. “You awake?”

“Why?”

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“Your prostate’s better?”

“No, there’s a girl in our kitchen.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. They’re popping popcorn together. And get this, she’s wearing Luke’s Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt. And nothing else.”

I rolled over in Greg’s direction. “You went down there? God, Greg, you didn’t.” Luke had had a Goth girlfriend his senior year in high school and a gamer girlfriend throughout most of college. From what we could tell, he’d been in a dry spell ever since graduation, possibly connected to the fact that he never left the house.

Greg made a quarter turn toward me. “No, of course not. Jeez, give me some credit, will you? I sat on the stairs and spied on them through the hallway mirror.”

“Oh, good.” I yawned. “Do you think the kids ever caught on to that? I don’t remember it being on Shannon’s endless list of the things she got away with while letting us pretend we had the upper hand.”

Greg yawned. “I’m pretty sure they used it on us, too. Especially at Christmas. Remember, we caught them? The bicycle year, when the two of us were downstairs swearing at each other. Shannon said Luke thought he heard reindeer and she was just keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn’t get trampled.”

“I couldn’t believe you didn’t pay for them to put the bikes together at the store. I was ready to kill you.”

“I had it under control,” Greg said. “You were just being impatient.”

“It was two
A.M.
We’d told the kids they could get out of bed at six. They were too old to fall for the changing-the-time-on-all-the-clocks trick.”

Greg laughed. “That was a good one.”

“Shh. What does she look like?”

“Who?”

“The girl. With Luke.”

“I don’t know. Young. I just hope all that time down in the bat cave hasn’t turned him into a vampire.” Greg rolled toward me and tried to bite my neck.

I pushed him away. “Ha. He should be that trendy.
Young
—you’re so observant. I hope she has her own apartment. And good social skills. And a rich, full-bodied life.”

“What’s a rich, full-bodied life?”

I rolled over. “I can’t remember. Leave me alone. I’m trying to sleep.”

Greg draped an arm across me. “He’ll be fine.”

I didn’t say anything.

Greg massaged the knot between my right shoulder and my neck with a practiced hand. “We’ll get there, Sandy. We’ll get the house sold. We’ll find our next place. Try not to get so stressed-out about it.”

I let him massage the matching knot on the other side, then I rolled away.

“If I don’t get stressed, nothing happens, Greg. Ever.”

I kicked my way out of the covers and headed for the bathroom.

CHAPTER 4

M
Y NEW CLIENT
was in total denial. she was also desperate for her house to sell. My mission, should I choose to accept it, would be to connect the dots between the two.

“Mrs. Bentley,” I began after we finished a silent walk-through.

I waited for her to tell me to call her Jane. She didn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, the good news is I can tell you why your house is still on the market after six months.”

“Five and a half.”

I shrugged. She had icy blue eyes and three distinct vertical lines between them that would have made her look like a bitch even if she wasn’t, which she was.

She ran a dry hand through her flat tan hair. Neither of us said anything. I had half an urge to wait her out and make her speak first. But it was a relatively straightforward job and I’d already decided I wanted it, so I cut to the chase.

“Mrs. Bentley, your home is lovely, but it’s a bit stuck in the eighties. I’d recommend a combination of updating and staging.”

I followed her eyes as they scanned the black tubular dining room furniture, the mint green and pale pink sectional, the matching glass-and-brass coffee and end tables. I wondered if her kids still had their banana hair clips and slap bracelets.

“Slipcovers over the sectional and the dining room chairs,” I continued. “We’ll change out the tables. I’m thinking dark wood, some eclectic pieces to give the decor depth. I’ll poke around and let you know what’s out there. We can rent, or you can buy and take it with you.”

“Do you have any idea how much I paid for those tables?”

I opened my eyes wide. “Do you have any idea how much I paid for my shoulder pads? And all the hairspray for that big eighties hair?”

She glared at me. It could have been my imagination, but it looked like a fourth frown line was sprouting between her very eyes.

I gave her a moment to fume before I continued. “I mean, look at you. Your hair and makeup are totally up to date. And see how beautifully you’re dressed.” This was actually a slight exaggeration, but it was for a good cause. “So many of us forget that our homes need to change with the times, too. We’ve looked at everything in them for so long we can’t even see it anymore.”

Mrs. Bentley crossed her arms over her chest. “What else?”

“We’ll switch out the heavy drapes for bamboo blinds, replace the brass hardware in the kitchen and baths with brushed chrome. Neutral paint on the walls, maybe Benjamin Moore Pismo Dunes. China White trim throughout.”

I walked over to one of the three silk ficus trees that had invaded the formal living room. I shook a branch and released a cloud of dust. “We’ll get rid of these.”

“But—”

I cut her off with a sneeze. I didn’t even have to fake it. “Do you have a tissue?”

Mrs. Bentley pointed to the box.

I blew my nose dramatically.

When I finished, I smiled my most dazzling smile. “For all the rest, we’ll use items you’ve already got to make your house pop.” I looked around but couldn’t find any examples, so I just let it go. “And then we’ll have you out the door and into that cute little condo in no time.”

Mrs. Bentley just stood there, as if chewing on her lower lip long enough might make me go away.

“How much?” she finally asked, and I knew I had her.

WHEN WE BOUGHT
the big white house, the rotting chicken came with it. Greg gave two guys he knew from around town fifty bucks for Saturday night drinking money to take the refrigerator to the town dump.

One of them came back the next day while Greg and I were dragging a filthy hunk of blue shag carpeting down the front steps. He parked his rusty pickup, kicked the truck door open, and slid out until his feet hit the driveway. His hair was sticking up all over the place, and his T-shirt was on inside out. But who was I to criticize, since my family and I didn’t look so hot ourselves. Greg and I had each tied a bandanna around our heads and another one over our mouths. The kids were running around their new yard in mismatched, outgrown Garanimals.

We threw the carpet into a rented Dumpster. Our little boom box was sitting on the edge of the driveway, and Cyndi Lauper was belting out “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” It was Shannon’s favorite, so we had to listen to it at least eighteen times a day. I squatted down to lower the volume.

“Hey, man, how did it go at the landfill?” Greg yelled.

The guy pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes. “Whoa, keep it down, will ya? We really tied one on last night.”

“Glad we could contribute to the cause,” Greg said.

The guy nodded. “Yeah, so, nobody told us about the law that ya have to take the doors off the fridge before they let ya dump it.”

Greg and I looked at each other. “We didn’t know,” Greg said.

The guy uncovered his eyes. “It was friggin’ hell, but we finally got the friggin’ doors off.” He turned his bloodshot eyes to me. “Pardon my French.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

He scratched his belly with one hand. “Then I puked all over the chicken.”

“Eww,” I said.

He coughed, then reached for a cigarette. “Friggin’ chicken smelled so bad everybody started jumpin’ back into their cars and drivin’ away before they even finished unloadin’ their trash.”

Greg apologized, gave him another twenty we couldn’t afford, and thanked him again.

He blew a cloud of smoke in our direction and grinned. “Anytime.”

Even with the refrigerator and the chicken gone, the house was in rough shape. It had been on the market for two years when we made our ridiculously low offer. We should have been scared away when the owners just said yes, but we couldn’t believe our good luck. This was the kind of house rich people lived in.

The couple we bought it from had been using it as a ministry for wayward boys. That explained the pulpit, and possibly even the shotgun shells. The owners had tried to get tax-exempt status as a church in Massachusetts, and when they couldn’t, they’d decided to move to Vermont.

Our Realtor assured us that the house would be empty and clean before the final walk-through prior to the closing. We never even got a final walk-through. When we showed up, the sellers simply refused to let us in the door.

The Realtor called a lawyer. The lawyer called the sellers. The lawyer called our Realtor back.

The Realtor turned to us. “Crazy people can get away with a lot of things,” she said. “Do you want the house or not?”

Everything we owned had already been loaded into a moving van. We’d just closed on the sale of our three-bedroom ranch an hour before. It was the way we had to do it. Without the money from the first house, we couldn’t buy the second.

“How bad can it be?” I said.

We went to our second closing of the day. After a lot of arguing, and a minisermon by the minister, the Realtor got us a six-hundred-dollar escrow to cover the cost of cleaning and removing anything that hadn’t already been removed by the sellers. Twenty years ago, that was a lot of money.

But not enough. The movers managed to cram everything we owned into the garage. We piled ourselves into Greg’s mother’s rumpus room until we could make our new home livable, all four of us sleeping on one big mattress on the floor.

Each night we had a painfully repetitive dinner conversation with my mother-in-law. No matter how we tried to redirect the conversation—current events, local gossip—she always brought it back to two topics: the kids not eating their vegetables and the kids not sitting still at the table.

“When you were their age, Gregory, we could take the four of you anywhere. You’d sit at the table like little angels.”

“Ma,” Greg would say, “what are you smoking?”

“Don’t smoke, Grammy,” Shannon would say.

“Don’t you remember, Ma? We used to slide down the banister in our cowboy boots, and jump on those big dusty drapes at Grammy and Grandpa’s house and try to swing across the room on them? Grandpa would chase us around, yelling, ‘I’ll get you little bastards,’ and Grammy would back him up with a frying pan.”

Luke would look up from furtively rolling his grandmother’s salty canned peas one by one off the tray of his high chair. “Bastards,” he’d say.

“See what you just taught him,” Greg’s mother would say. “
My
children never swore.”

“Damn right we didn’t,” Greg would say.

Everybody but my mother-in-law would crack up. And the next night, we’d do it all over again.

After dinner, Greg would head back over to the new house to get a little more work done. I’d give the kids their baths and put them to bed. Then I’d hide out in the rumpus room until Greg came back, a prisoner in someone else’s home.

One night, just for something to do, I looked up
rumpus
in an ancient dictionary I found on the knotty pine bookshelves. Noisy clamor. Disruptive commotion. Confused disturbance. Din; tumult; stir; fuss.

We’d entered our rumpus years.

CHAPTER 5

I
UNSCREWED
the last kitchen cabinet door and stood back to take it all in. If eyes were the windows to your soul, then doorless kitchen cabinets were the portholes to your life. The last two decades lay before me, totally exposed.

The white bowls with the turquoise and chocolate stripes that we’d bought at the Dansk factory outlet on a trip to Kittery, Maine, were so old they were back in style again. I lifted them up and sponged the shelf clean, then arranged them into a snazzy little triangle.

Way in the back of a cabinet, I found a box of artificial sweetener packets, circa 1990-ish. I’d bought it for a diabetic neighbor of the same decade who used to stop by for coffee, and no one else had ever touched it. I hadn’t thought of this neighbor in years, and hadn’t even been all that crazy about her, but I had a sudden urge to track her down and send the rest of the box off to her. I pitched it instead.

I packed up a collection of Danish modern stainless serving trays to send to Shannon. They’d go perfectly with the sleek, contemporary look she was shooting for in her new house. They’d been wedding presents, but I had no urge to ever serve another appetizer again. If I changed my mind, I’d find something else to put them on.