He handed Parker a hammer. “We’re all trapped in a house that needs fixing. Rip out the molding, reframe that window to keep out the cold.”
Parker shrugged: “If you gotta, you gotta.”
Steve grabbed a roll of plastic weathersheeting, duct tape. He would have dashed up the two flights of stairs to the bedroom level except Ali floated up the steps with that long-legged languor Steve didn’t want to miss.
Louise blinked: No, that wall didn’t just pulse.
Bob led her to the basement while their spouses climbed to the third floor with its wide-open stairwell bordered by a railing-protected corridor. Steve looked down the huge open shaft. Felt the vertigo of its inviting depth.
He and Ali worked on the smallest bedroom first.
“Like a cage in here,” said Ali.
Steve spun the rolled weathersheeting so an end flopped down.
Ali lifted a utility knife from the tool belt she’d strapped onto this muscled man who seemed less boring than her husband. She cut a translucent sheet, held it over the only window. Cold air blowing in from outside flapped the plastic and goose-bumped her flesh. She heard Steve ripping free strips of duct tape from where he loomed behind her hips.
Why did I think of it like that? she wondered.
Felt him brush against her as he bent to tape and seal all the edges.
“We’re done here.” Steve stared at her. “This is a kid’s room.”
She felt her goose bumps receding as the now-sealed room warmed, wondered if he noticed her nipples had yet to go down under her sweatshirt. Then she heard herself share a secret out loud: “Kids cut into your chances.”
“And all you can do is screw them up.” Never even told Louise that, thought her husband, Steve, as he led Ali to the second bedroom.
Where, in the dust and cobwebs stirring with the drafts from two windows, the bed was big enough for a surging teenage boy.
Ali said, “Feel the furnace? Like it started blasting more heat.”
Steve swallowed as she slid the zipper on her hooded sweatshirt down, down, spread her arms wide as she took it off.
For no reason she knew, Ali shook her blond hair free from a ponytail so it fell across her blue denim shirt with its pearl-white cowboy snaps.
Steve shook his head. I want “driving down the highway, white hash lines coming at the windshield,” and it’s the going, not the getting anywhere.
White pearl snaps.
They plastic-sealed the two windows against the howling wind.
Work together, Ali thought. It’s harder for the world to win if it’s more than just you. She felt like she was back in the trailer park, a girl hearing Gramma turn up the radio for some “Sealed with a Kiss” song. Ali knew how to do that, had done it and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that kiss.
Ali said, “We should . . . keep going.”
“Yes,” answered Steve. Yes. White hash lines. White pearl snaps.
They walked the corridor along the third-floor railing. Rising from the living room came the whump-ruh sounds of Parker ripping out molding.
As Ali led Steve into the third, the last, the master bedroom.
Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.
That bedroom door slammed. Closed. With them inside.
“Old houses—always settling,” repeated Steve.
“Sure,” said Ali. “Sure.”
Covering the first window, Steve held the plastic in place while Ali taped it to the wall.
The heat swelled in that closed room. Steve shed his outer shirt. Its flannel smell sweetened the air for Ali as Steve savored the whiff of coconut shampoo from that morning at the motel when she’d showered naked.
Ali went between Steve and smudged glass to seal the last window.
Feels like I’m stoned, she thought as she finished. Her hips brushed Steve’s loins. She turned. Her breasts brushed his arm. Don’t think yes.
Like a tear, a bead of sweat trickled down from her temple.
Steve saw his fingertips catch that drop on her cheek.
She sucked in his finger.
Then he was kissing her, she was kissing him. White pearl snaps popped like machine-gun fire as he ripped open her shirt No! she said pressed his hands to her swollen breasts. Oh she pulled open his jeans Don’t want he whispered as she leaped onto his neck like a vampire while he pulled off her jeans and panties, her legs thrashing them down to her still-on boots. They crashed onto the bed. Dust billowed. His mouth devoured her she knew she’d never come like this over and over again Stop she pulled him deep into her and it was like he’d never been this good, had this so good Want Highways and Not Him and they cried out came collapsed on the bed.
Knew that in this house, they’d do that again and again and again, like running their hands along the bars of a cage until their fingers bled.
Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.
“Listen,” Bob in the basement told Louise. “Guess Parker can work.”
“He’ll do what it takes to get out of here.” She positioned a sheet of drywall against the wooden studs of an insulating wall.
“Yeah.” Bob reached for a hammer. “Took fifty years, but his dad ran out of the money he inherited with this place a few weeks before he died.”
“We could fix the house up to live here,” came out of her mouth.
“Who?” Bob drove a nail through the drywall to the stud. “All of us? Forget that. Me and Ali? Sticking us in Nowhereland isn’t our deal. You and Steve? The only thing he’d want about this place is the hundred miles of highway between here and any job he could get, and one day driving that much road, he’d just keep on keeping on.”
“Somebody’s gotta live here!”
“Damn, Louise, what’s your problem?” Bob hammered in a nail.
“I . . . don’t know. I felt like . . . Somebody’s gotta keep this place going.”
“That’s not our flip.” Bob hammered in counterbeat to the noise upstairs in the dining room, the only noise that was close enough to hear.
Louise knew that look on Bob’s face as they positioned new drywall. That was his ain’t-I-cool look that paid off only if he confessed.
“What’s going on, Bob?”
Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.
Bob worked his hammer, too. “I was going to tell you guys when we got back to Denver. If I’d told you before, you might’ve settled for less than the big payoff.
“Didn’t you wonder,” he said, “who’d want to buy this nowhere place from us for enough cash to make us fixing it up worth our while?”
He hammered Sheetrock into place.
Said, “You know the Nature Preservation League?”
“You’re on its national board of directors.”
“If the economy’s going green, green is how you gotta go.”
“What did you do?”
“Our names aren’t on the deed, just the limited partnership for a place that’s being rehabbed as a ‘luxury getaway home.’ Figure the stats of a mansion, pictures of rehab happening, and the ‘paper worth’ becomes what it could be if this was what it’ll never be, which is paradise.
“In five weeks, NPL will announce they’ve bought the land all around here for a new edge-of-the-mountains preserve. Of course, a house smack in the middle of that fucks up the NPL plan, so the board—”
“Which you’re on.”
“—so the board will offer the owners of this being-fixed-up mansion a buyout of what the place would be worth—”
“If this place were that paradise,” said Louise. “Board member you will make sure it happens. And the rest of them will never know.”
“Everybody gets what they want! We’re doing well by doing good. This house gets rehabbed back to nature for people to love forever.”