Homebody: A Novel (4 page)

"Excuse me but I'd better get downstairs," said Cindy.

The first step she took informed her that she had twisted her ankle a little when she stumbled. She winced and limped.

"You hurt yourself," said Don.

"Nothing, a twist, I'll walk it off."

"Let me give you a hand."

Cindy had such contempt for women who flirted by leaning on men at every opportunity that now, when she would have liked very much to have a hand getting downstairs—especially his hand—she found herself refusing him by reflex. "Really, finish up here and join me when you're ready, I'll be fine."

Don took her at her word, dammit. But in fact she was right—by the time she got out onto the porch, her ankle was working fine again. No pain. But also no Don. His arm must be muscled like iron under that sleeve. He could toss me in the air like a baby.

It didn't take long for the men to get downstairs. Don wasted no time. He did ask if her ankle was all right, but as soon as she assured him that she was fine, he came straight to the point. "If the price is right, then it's worth the work to me. House is solid but I've got to strip out almost everything and start from scratch. So I have to hold on to enough capital to do that."

"If you need time to make an estimate," she began.

"Don't need time," he said. "I already walked the outside of the house and counted the floors and multiplied the square footage. Before I called you. The price has to come in under fifty."

She raised an eyebrow. "Am I to take that as an offer?"

"I don't dicker," said Don.

"That's the truth," said Jay. "He can't play poker because he doesn't even bluff. If he bids on a hand, fold, because he doesn't bid unless he's got a sure thing."

"I don't play poker," said Cindy. "I just sell houses."

"What I'm saying," said Don, "is that I'm not saying under fifty so you'll come back with seventy-five and then we'll settle on sixty-two."

"I know," she said. "You're saying under fifty because if it goes over fifty you aren't taking it."

"If it goes over fifty I have to go to the bank for part of the money and then pay interest the whole time I'm working on it. And I'll be working on this one for most of a year. Biggest house I've ever tackled. So I can't afford to borrow. Cash or nothing."

"You have fifty thousand in cash?"

"I said
under
fifty."

"I hear a mistake being made," said Jay.

Cindy looked at him in surprise. "You mean the house isn't sound?"

"Sound as a dollar," said Jay. "Or a yen, or whatever. I just don't think he's going to make back what he's putting into it. Not in this neighborhood, not this year."

"If he's putting in less than fifty thousand—"

"But he's putting in twice that by the time he's done," said Jay. "Plus a year of a highly skilled carpenter's time. Call it a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And I'll bet nothing in this neighborhood sells for more than a hundred."

Cindy smiled her killer smile at Jay. He was out of his expertise now and into hers, and she was going to enjoy showing off a little. "Actually, most things around here have lately been going in the one-ten to one-twenty range. And part of what's keeping them
that
low is this house—runs down the whole neighborhood. Besides which, this house is something special. Look around. The house next door is the
carriagehouse
to this one, for heaven's sake—and it's the second-nicest house on the street. So when this one comes on the market, it'll sell for at least thirty above the rest of the neighborhood. If you find the right buyer."

"Which is where you come in, no doubt," said Jay. His cynicism infuriated her.

"Yes, Jay, that's where I come in. Because I am to real estate what you are to engineering, except that I can do it without making little dirty references to members of the opposite sex. So when it's time to sell this house, I won't even offer it to anyone looking for a bargain. I'll offer it to someone looking for a jewel and willing to pay top dollar for it. And
if
Mr. Lark is as good as you seem to think he is, I'll bet you right now that the selling price for this house is within five thousand dollars of two hundred thou."

"You'll bet?" asked Jay.

"Stop this," said Don. "I don't use agents to sell my houses. Can't afford the commission."

"If I don't meet that price," said Cindy, "then I won't take a commission."

"That wouldn't be right," said Don. "Your work is worth the price. So I won't have you doing the job unless I pay you for it."

"I've made a bet," said Cindy. "Are you men or what?"

"I'll take the bet," said Jay.

"You've got nothing at stake," said Cindy.

"My reputation as a judge of real estate values."

"You don't have a reputation," said Cindy, "or I would have heard of you."

Don laughed out loud. More of a bark, really, a couple of barks. Almost a warning. I'm amused, but stand back because I'm still ready to bite at any moment. But Cindy liked the laugh. Or at least her hormones liked it. Angry at herself, she realized he could probably take his shoes off right now and she'd probably get all excited by the smell of his socks. Get a grip on yourself, girl.

"Won't take the bet," said Don. "I'm not a betting man. But I will think about giving you a shot at it. Not till after you see my finished work, though. Right now you're buying a pig in a poke."

"She's not buying anything," said Jay. "Realtors take houses on consignment."

"On commission," said Cindy. "If you don't know the difference—"

"Let's not fight," said Jay. "Let's just agree that we don't like each other but we both love Don so we have to get along for his sake."

What did he mean by that? Immediately she put on her business face. "I'll tell my client your offer is forty-six five. You may not like to dicker, but he does. When he settles for forty-nine I'll call you to set up a closing."

"You think he will?" asked Don, looking surprised.

"I know he will," said Cindy. Then she gave Jay her fullcourt smile, which she knew would almost blind him with the dazzling sarcasm of it.

Jay ignored her and turned to Don. "It's your money and your life, Don. If you call it a life."

"I don't," said Don. "But it's the only life I've got." He turned back to Cindy. "When should I call you?"

"Tomorrow at five and we'll set up an appointment for the closing."

"Are you really that sure?" said Don. "It could change the kind of fix I do on that front door."

"Fix?" It took her a moment for her to remember that he had broken into the house with a wrecking bar.

"I mean put up a new hasp, only fastened with a slotless head and inlaid so it can't be pried out the way I did. Or just put on a new frame and door, which is what I'll do if I'm actually buying it."

"Put up the new door," said Cindy.

"And what happens when the owner says no?" asked Jay.

"If the owner says no," said Cindy, "I'll pay for the door."

"Thanks for your help, Cindy," said Don. "Sounded to me like you went to some trouble doing research on the place."

He noticed! "I did."

"Maybe at the closing you can tell me more about Dr. What's-his-name—"

"Dr. Calhoun Bellamy." She couldn't help sounding cold; she didn't like being patronized.

"I'm not doing a restoration here, just a renovation. I'm not trying to get the house back the way he first built it."

"I didn't think you were."

"I'm fixing it up so I can sell it at a profit. But as long as you understand that, then I'd like it if you told me about him."

"I'll do that," said Cindy.

Don brought his fingers to his forehead as if to touch the brim of a nonexistent hat. Then he walked briskly back to his truck and drove away.

For a moment Cindy was annoyed when she realized she had been left alone with Jay. But what was he going to do, really? And he knew Don. He could answer questions.

"How many houses has he done this with?" she asked.

Jay shrugged. "About one every four months for—I don't remember now—however long it's been since his wife died. Two and a half years?"

"Four months. Is he that fast?"

"The other houses were smaller."

Only then did the reference to Don's wife register with her. "He really misses his wife?"

Jay shook his head. "I should have said his ex-wife, complete with ugly court battles over custody of their baby daughter. She claimed Nellie—that's the little girl—she claimed Nellie wasn't his. He said she was a drug-pumping drunk."

"Nasty."

"Yeah, but he was right on all counts. The baby was definitely his. And the wife was high on about five different drugs when she piled the car into a bridge abutment. The little girl—she was almost two by then—the mother had her in her safety seat."

"But it didn't help?"

"Might have, except that the safety seat wasn't attached to the car. You can't expect a mother to think of everything."

"My Lord," said Cindy. "He must have been crazy with grief."

"Rage is more like it. We thought at first he might kill himself. Then we were afraid he might go out and kill the judges and lawyers and social workers who decided a baby needs its mother and they shouldn't be judgmental about lifestyle differences when the drug use hadn't, after all, been proved in the criminal courts."

"A baby does need its mother," Cindy said softly.

"A baby needs good parents, both of them," said Jay. "Don't get me started."

"What if I just want to get you stopped?"

Jay looked at her, a bit nonplussed. "You were the one asking about Don."

Cindy looked back at the house. "He does these fix-ups to be alone?"

"Oh, he wanted to be alone. Some of us were clinging to him so tight that he finally told us to leave him alone, he promised not to kill anybody, including himself, if we'd just give him room to breathe."

"Good to have friends, though," she said.

"Yeah, well, friends aren't replacements for a lost child, I can tell you that. And there was Don, bankrupt from the expense of fighting to get Nellie back. He barely had enough to bury her. Lost his contracting business. So he borrows to buy a rundown house out in the county, a two-bedroom ranch that wasn't quite as good quality as a mobile home. But Don's good at what he does so... here he is now, no debts, cash in the bank, and this is the house he's going to fix up."

"So he turns his loneliness and grief into the restoration of beautiful old houses."

"The ones he started with weren't all that beautiful. You make it sound romantic."

"Not romantic, but maybe a little heroic. Don't you think?" asked Cindy.

"I think Don figures that as long as he can't be dead, he might as well do this."

With that, Jay gave her one last cheesy smile and headed back to his minivan. Cindy went for her car, too, not caring that the house was left unlocked behind her. Don would be back to put on a new door. It was his house now. She'd make sure of that.

It was already almost dark. The wind had picked up and there were clouds coming in over the trees to the west. Autumn coming at last. Real autumn, not just turning leaves but cold weather, too. Cold rain. She hated the cold but she also looked forward to it. A change. The end of the old year. Christmas coming. Memories. People she missed. Melancholy. Yes, that was it, melancholy. That's what autumn was good for.

But a man like Don, it was always autumn for him, wasn't it? To lose a child and know that if only a judge had decided differently, if only the law was different, your daughter would be alive.

At least he knew that he had spent everything he had to try to get her back. But would that be consolation to him? Cindy doubted it. She thought of her father. A peaceable, law-abiding man. But he worked with his body, his muscled, powerful body. And there were times when she could see that it took all his strength not to hit somebody. She never saw him hit anybody, but she saw him want to, and in a way that was almost more frightening, because she knew that if he ever did, it would be the most terrible blow.

If Don Lark really was anything like her father, it must eat him alive inside, always wondering if he shouldn't have just said screw the law and kidnapped his daughter and gone underground. Even if he got caught, even if he went to jail for it and she got killed anyway, he could live with it better if he knew he had done
everything
to try to save her. Men think like that, Cindy knew. Some men anyway. Take upon themselves the burden of the world. Have to save everybody, help everybody, provide for everybody. And when they can't do it, they can't think of any other reason to live. Was that Don Lark? Probably. A man who had forgotten, not how to live, but why.

Doors

Back when Don was a housebuilder, the best part of the job was the beginning. Standing there on a wooded lot with insects droning and birds flitting and treerats scampering up the trunks, he saw the slope of the land, the way it would look in lawn and garden, and where the house would crown the lot. He imagined the plan of the house, where he might put a cellar that opened to ground level in the back yard, or how a deep porch might be especially nice on a hot afternoon. He saw the roof rising among the trees—he always saved the best of the trees, because that kept a house from looking naked and newborn. A brand-new house had to look established, had to look as though it had roots deep into the ground. People couldn't feel right about moving into a place that looked like it just came to rest there and might blow off again in a year or two, the next bad storm. Tall old trees gave that feeling of stability even on a house finished just the day before.

Once building began, then the peace of the woods was broken, the dirt torn up and flung into the air as a fine dust that clogged everything. The naked frame showed its origin as cut trees—almost obscene to put them up among the living timbers, as if to cow them into submission by showing them what could happen to trees that didn't cooperate. Even when the house was nearly done and Don got his own hands deep in the finish carpentry, the pleasure of working with the wood and of watching it all take shape under his hands, that still wasn't as much of a joy as standing there on the building lot imagining the house inside his head.

Kind of like getting married. Kind of like watching your child make your wife's belly swell. Imagining, wondering, building the finished family in your dreams.

Don didn't build new houses anymore. At first he had no choice. The lawyers' fees ate up his business, his home, every asset he owned except the little bit of insurance that paid for his daughter's funeral. He found a wreck of a property that was worth less with the house on it than it was as bare land. A couple of friends lent him the closing costs and the token down payment and Don moved into the place, a ramshackle four-room farmstead out near Madison, and began to work on it. Three months later it was transformed into what the realtor called "a spic-and-span charmer of a cottage in the woods," and after repaying his friends and the bank and the unbelievably patient credit manager at Lowe's, Don walked away from the place with nine thousand dollars in capital. Three thousand a month. Except it wasn't income, it was another down payment and the expenses involved in fixing up the next place.

Now he had enough that he could build new houses again. He could put Lark Homes back in business if he wanted to. There were people who still left messages for him, passed word along that they weren't going to build their dream house until Don Lark could build it for them, that's the kind of reputation he had. Once Don even went and stood on a building lot, a lovely hill in a development tucked away in an ell of a cemetery so it would always be surrounded by forest. But standing there, he saw nothing at all. Oh, he saw the flies, the birds, the squirrels. He even saw the slope of the land, the drainage. His eye picked out the peripheral trees that would be worth saving, and how the driveway would have to go.

What he couldn't see was the house. He couldn't imagine the future anymore. That part of him had been cut out and buried with his daughter. If the truest dream of your life could be taken away from you and then killed, what were all these houses for? Didn't people know better?

It wasn't Don's job to tell them. But he didn't have to build their houses, either.

So he stayed with the old houses. Abandoned, weathered, derelict houses, or rundown rentals that no one had cared about. Houses that spoke of dead dreams. It was a language Don could understand. And what he did in those houses was not build—someone else had already done that—but rather eke a little more life out of the old place. Make the aging timbers hold another life or group of lives for some brief span of time. Not ready for the boneyard yet.

Now he was starting yet another house, the most ambitious project so far. A house that had been built as a mansion. A house thick with old dreams cut up into tatty little nightmares and finally put to sleep and now his job was to wake the place up again.

The Bellamy house was solid. Jay Placer saw it too, but maybe he hadn't worked with enough old houses to understand how remarkable this one really was. Built in the 1870s, and yet there was no bowing or sagging anywhere. That was more than a matter of good workmanship. This house was a testament to the meticulous care of the original builder. The foundation had been deeply and properly laid. The backfill had been porous and the cellar had stayed dry. Therefore there was no settling. The sill rested on masonry high enough out of the ground that no rot had set in even after more than a century. The walls were solidly tied together and made of the finest tempered wood, and even the roof showed no sign of sagging. Many new homes showed carelessness in the building and it was obvious to Don that most houses being built today would be lucky to be standing fifty years from now. But this one had been built to stand until... until what? Forever.

If other people had Don's eye for quality, there's no chance this house would have been available at the price; no way would it have been left abandoned for so long. But what other people saw was the shabby face of the house, the seedy yard, the boarded-up windows, the smell of cheap old carpeting and thick-laid dust. It would take a year and thousands of dollars to get the place back into livable shape again. Other people had neither the time nor the money for it. But Don had nothing but time, and it wasn't half so expensive when you did the work yourself. As long as you knew how to do it.

No doubt about it, the Bellamy house had once been a beauty and it would be a beauty again a year from now. It would go on the market as the leaves were turning. Don would see to it that it looked like a dream of the lost American past. Everybody walking into it would feel like they had come home at last. Everybody but Don himself. To him this place would feel no more or less like home than any other. Walking into it now, the bad smell of it, the dust, the squalor, did not make him shy away; walking out of it a year from now, with gleaming floors and walls and ceilings, with his beautiful finish work everywhere and the autumn-shaded sunlight dancing through the windows, it would not make him yearn to stay. It was a job, and he would live here because he didn't want to waste money paying rent when he already owned a roof and walls that would be good enough.

Not tonight it wouldn't, of course. There was the little matter of the closing, and then the hooking up of water and power. But in a few days he'd move in and sleep where he worked. Better than the back of the truck.

If Cindy Claybourne had known
that
, would she have given him the time of day? Maybe. Some women were drawn to a little bit of wildness, even in a middle-aged man. Trouble was, most women didn't know how to interpret the wildness of men. Don had seen it even in high school. How the brutal guys who thought of women as an easier way to jerk off always seemed to have a pretty girl close at hand. What were these women thinking? He finally came to understand it in a biology class in college, before his dad's death took him out of school and put him in the house-building business. These women weren't looking for danger, they were looking for the alpha male. They were looking for the guy who would subdue the other males, rule the pack. The man with initiative, drive, a will to power. The trouble was, civilized men didn't express their drive the same way the brutes did, and a lot of women never caught on to that. They saw the masculine display, the casual violence, and thought they were seeing just what the estrous female wanted. What they got was only another baboon. While the real men, the kind who built things that lasted, who cared for those under their protection, those men often had to search long and hard for a woman who would value them.

Don thought he had found one. It wasn't until four years into their marriage that he suspected she was having an affair. Only the lover wasn't a man, it was coke, and when she couldn't get that, it was booze. She far preferred what she got from drug dealers and bartenders to what Don had to offer. She called it "having a good time."

Women who were attracted to wildness didn't interest Don. In fact, it had been a good number of years since Don had been attracted to any woman at all. Well, that wasn't strictly speaking true. He noticed them, all right, the way he noticed Cindy Claybourne, how she kept sizing him up, how her smile got extra warm when she spoke to him, how she hung on his words even when he knew perfectly well that what he was saying was empty and boring or so filled with the jargon of his profession that she didn't understand a bit of it. He noticed women, but when he thought of actually trying to see one alone, talk to her, start establishing a relationship, it just made him tired. Sad and tired and a little bit angry even though he knew that not all women were unreliable child-stealing chimps.

Besides, what Cindy Claybourne saw as wild-ness in Don wasn't vigor and violence at all. There was no man-of-the-woods in Don, no wind-blown hair on the bike or in the convertible. Don was a minivan kind of guy, a child-safety-seat-toting list-following husband-who-always-says-we-instead-of-I kind of guy who just happened to be living out of the back of a pickup truck because noticing a minivan or a child safety seat or an actual lived-in family house made him lose control of his emotions all over again and so he stayed away from things like that. He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.

Don imagined asking Cindy Claybourne: Do you really want to get involved with a man like me? And she would say, Oh, yes! because women said things like that, but when she got to know him she'd end up saying, Oh no! What have I done!

So Don would spare Cindy and himself the time and expense of several dinners out and a feeble attempt at dancing at the Palomino Club or whatever they might do to simulate fun. He would sign off on the purchase and never see her again unless maybe this time he decided to list the house with a realty. And yet, despite this decision, Don found himself thinking of her off and on as he worked on securing the doors.

A guy who lives in a truck can't be sure that his cordless power tools will be charged when he needs them, so Don always did his lockset work with a manual auger. Since he wasn't going to keep these doors, he had no compunction about ignoring the old lockset and installing a new deadbolt higher than any builder would ever put one. Why shouldn't he? He was the only one who would use these locks—when it came time to sell the house, there'd be brand-new doors. Don was tall; for him the deadbolt was no higher than the normally placed lock would be for a woman of, say, Cindy Claybourne's height.

And thinking of Cindy Claybourne's height made Don think about just how tall she was compared to him. The crown of her head couldn't be any higher than Don's shoulder, which meant that he'd really have to bend down to kiss her and... damn!

He put together the deadbolt on the front door, lined up the strikeplate, screwed it in, tested it. Lock, unlock. The key moved smoothly. The door felt solid.

As he stepped off the porch to walk around to the back yard, he saw someone peer at him from a window in the carriagehouse next door. What he was doing on the front porch had to be the most interesting thing that had happened on this block in a while. With the house and yard abandoned for so long, everybody would be grateful to see him working on it—happened every time, and Don didn't mind the waves, the smiles, even the greetings and the "about time" comments. He just hoped nobody got too neighborly and decided that what Don needed was conversation while he tried to work. He didn't like explaining himself to people.

That had always been one of the nice things about working with houses. The guys you worked with were pretty serious about the job. Men in suits, they were usually shmoozers, talking sports, networking, couldn't leave you alone until they figured you out. But the contractors and workmen, they looked to see how you did your job and if you did it right, they respected you, and if you paid them on time and stuck to your schedule, they even liked working for you. The ones who worked in groups, they could go to Cook-Out together for lunch and they knew each other's wives or at least knew about them. But as the general contractor, Don wasn't really part of that. His free time was for his family, for his handful of friends, for his own thoughts.

Like the Duke Power guy when he showed up. No shmoozing, just a little weather talk and then he's looking at the line in. Underground, that's good. Not a very heavy line, that's not good. Then down into the cellar to the fuse box, saying no more than was needed. Don led the way down with his big flashlight, but of course the Duke Power guy had his own light and pinpointed exactly the things that Don had noticed. The ancient knob-and-tube wiring was clearly visible among the floor joists overhead, and the thirty-amp fuse box was a joke.

"Good thing this house wasn't occupied," said the Duke Power guy. "Somebody runs a hair dryer, the place goes up in flames."

"I won't be running any power through the old lines."

"Good. You want a hundred amps?"

"Already got the panel box I need. I'll put it up when you tell me where."

For the first time, the Duke Power guy showed some pleasure. Almost a smile. Probably wasn't used to people doing part of the work. Or maybe he expected Don to do it wrong and it amused him. But Don wouldn't do it wrong, and it would save him work, so it didn't matter what he thought, and the best thing was, he didn't say what he thought, just kept it to himself and that was right. He went right on and asked the next question. "Might as well run the line in through the same hole, as long as you got no need for the old cable."

And Don answered him. "Good enough for me."

By the time the cable was ready to hook in, Don had the panel box up and the old fuse box out of the way. When the guy started to attach the cable Don stepped back out of the way.