If You Were Here (25 page)

Read If You Were Here Online

Authors: Jen Lancaster

Tags: #Chicago, #Humorous, #Family Life, #General, #Suburbs, #Women Authors, #Illinois, #Fiction, #Remodeling, #Dwellings

BOOK: If You Were Here
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“No,” he agrees, “but they’re huge real estate developers—the biggest in the country, actually. They can’t legally stop their subs from doing work with us, but they can make sure they don’t get any more family business. At least, that’s what Nick was told.”
I clench my fists and rub my eyes with them. “Aw, shit, this is what Ann Marie was worried about when we talked last week.
That’s
why she wanted me to lock someone in with a contract. Goddamn it.”
“You knew about this?” Mac’s eyes fly open in surprise.
I wave him off. “I thought this was just another one of Ann Marie’s wacky conspiracy theories, like how she thought we had termites and how our home inspector was senile.”
Mac’s lips narrow into a tight white line. “We
did
have termites, and according to Nick, Mr. Sandhurst has just been admitted to the Alzheimer’s wing of the Abington Cambs Assisted Living Center.”
I slump down the doorway into a heap on the floor. “Oh, my God, now what do we do?”
He sits down next to me. “There’s a solution, but you may not like it.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll like it more than this.” I reach out beside me and grab one of the thousands of handfuls of dust, debris, and broken nails that are free-range all over our floors.
“Nick knows a guy who can fix our house. His name is Vladimir, and he’s not exactly on the up-and-up, but he’s skilled. I guess he does a lot of work out of town, and he’s so under the radar that Vienna’s family probably doesn’t even know about him. Nick said he’d give us his contact information.”
I perk up immediately. “Great! Call him! Let’s go!”
“Yeah, there’s one thing,” Mac says with some hesitation. “We’ve got to do something for Nick in exchange for his sticking his neck out.”
“What does he want? I’ll get him anything—signed first editions, other authors’ books, an introduction to my agent. Whatever.” I glance around the squalor of our living conditions. “I am willing to do anything.”
Mac’s face twists with a wry grin. “Well, then, in exchange for Vlad’s info, your task is to write Nick a sex scene featuring Amos and Miriam.”
Damn you, Vienna.
Damn you
.

 

I thought about finding some erotic fan fiction and trying to pass it off to Nick, but ultimately I couldn’t put my name on something I didn’t write, even if it was under duress.
I decided the most expedient route was to pay homage to the fridge scene from
9½ Weeks
, only I changed the setting from the kitchen floor to the ground in the milking barn. Instead of strawberries and whipped cream, Amos feeds Miriam friendship bread and dumplings and the very tip of his thumb. And then . . . other stuff happens under the watchful eyes of a barn full of Holsteins and two goats.
I feel dirty and disgusting after I’m done writing.
Then again, that might just be the end result of having our only shower break.

 

“You got big fucking mess on your hands.”
“Thank you for noticing,” Mac dryly replies.
“No, I’m serious. This is big fucking mess.”
We’ve just conducted the whole-house tour with Vladimir, our new contractor. He’s agreed to take the job, and I couldn’t be more relieved.
Mac seems to have his doubts, though. First, Mac noticed Vlad’s 3AKA3 MO CCCP
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Komandirskie watch. Then, when Vlad nudged the downed cabinet with his toe, Mac whispered that his boots were also Soviet army issue. When Mac tried to find out where exactly Vlad is from, it sounded like “Somewhere-istan.” I assume whatever country he’s from no longer exists, in which case I feel like we shouldn’t bug him about it. Maybe he’s sensitive.
Mac has an inherent distrust of all things Soviet, which he claims comes from his army background, but I’m willing to bet originated when Ivan Drago killed poor Apollo Creed in
Rocky IV
. Personally, I don’t care about his watch or his boots, and if this guy wants to totter around in Carrie Bradshaw’s Manolos, I’m fine as long as he makes my house more livable.
“Did you bring a contract with you or do we need to wait for you to draw one up?” Mac asks. Nick explained that Vlad won’t do contracts, but Mac tries anyway.
“No contracts, too much paper trail. I like to stay . . . how you say . . . undetected. Not on grid. Quiet. Is better,” Vlad tells us.
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Mac replies, giving me a plaintive look. I shrug at him in silent response. This isn’t exactly my first choice either, but what else are we supposed to do?
Vlad nods. “I got enemies. Long time back. Is bad situation.”
“I hear that,” I agree.
Vlad suddenly becomes very alert, swiveling his head back and forth over his shoulders. “What do you hear?”
“No, I mean I feel you.” Vlad’s still confused and concerned. “I
understand
you.” Vlad visibly relaxes and I continue. “I get the whole enemies thing. That’s why no one will work with us.” I briefly recap our issues with Vienna just to make sure he’s cognizant of the whole situation. I don’t want him ripping everything up and then deciding midstream he’s too afraid of the Hyatts to continue. As of now, everything’s an enormous mess, but a lot of the rooms are still functional with actual walls and floors. Once renovations begin, there’s no going back or stopping halfway.
“You got money to pay?” Vlad questions.
“Of course,” I reply.“I can give you a deposit right now if you’d like.”
Vlad coolly appraises me. “Then we got no problem. We got big fucking mess, but we got no problem. Tomorrow we come, begin tear everything down. Is good?”
“Is good.” Oh, crap. I’ve already started to mimic his speech. That used to happen to me all the time when I got sick as a kid. I’d be home alone for a couple of days with Babcia, and by the time I was well enough to go back to school, I’d adopted her cadence, telling my teachers, “Yes, have excuse in bag. Very sick. Better now.”
“Okay, tomorrow,” he says, before marching out the door.
As it shuts behind him, Mac says,“I have a bad feeling about this. I get a real ex-KGB vibe from him.”
“Please don’t start getting squirrely on me now,” I beg. “Do you realize what I had to go through to even get his contact information?” Every time I remember what I wrote about Miriam and Amos . . . and the udders . . . and the milking stool, I die a little inside. “We agreed we were going to do this. We have no other options.”
“We still have the one,” Mac argues.
Mac volunteered to quit his day job and work on renovating our house full-time. He’s already drafted preliminary plans about how he’d need to upgrade his garage workshop in order to accommodate the project.
If Mac were interviewing for a job, I’d tell him to bring up the meticulous-planning aspect of his personality if asked about his greatest strengths and weaknesses. If Mac’s properly prepared, he can blow through a task in a heartbeat, like when he mounted a shelf for me in college. The installation took ten minutes, zip, zip, zip, done. Buying the tool belt, gathering all the right screws, selecting the most appropriate hammer, and finding the studs and a lever and the right brackets took two weeks, and I was at the point where I was fine with my books living on the floor. Sometimes I need more execution and less planning, you know? Our infrequent fights almost always boil down to me getting on him to move faster, or him reacting to feeling rushed.
What’s ironic is that as much as he plans and readies his tools, he’s terrible at following instructions, because he secretly believes that he can figure out a better way; ergo, blue stew for dinner.
In order to do our renovations himself, Mac said he’d get his buddies to help him on the weekends.
Yeah,
that
was a selling point, let me tell you. I’m not sure which of those prospects strikes the most terror in my heart. He’s friends with Luke, whom you may have seen on the news last year when he set his garage on fire trying to deep-fry a turducken on Thanksgiving. Then there’s Charlie, who knocked out a Wrigleyville gas main when he attempted to dig out an inground pool with a stolen forklift one night after a Cubs game. How about Phil, who ended up in a body cast after adding a nitrous booster to his riding lawn mower?
Or perhaps he’ll bypass all of the aforementioned and he’ll hit up his fraternity brother Bobby, who seemed normal enough until we set him up with Kara. Remember how cool and romantic it was when an eighteen-year-old Lloyd Dobler stood outside Diane Court’s window with the boom box raised over his head? The scene is decidedly less romantic when a thirty-five-year-old does it, especially after having gone on only one uninspired date, where he spent the entire time crying
132
about his ex. Did I mention he pulled the boom-box stunt in the lobby of Kara’s office at the paper? Every year since then, she’s received a Peter Gabriel CD at her company’s gift exchange.
I am resolute. “Not an option, honey.”
“I don’t like it.” Mac pouts.
“The way I see it, our luck is about to change. Everything that could go wrong has. Things are about to get better. Trust me,” I assure him.
Had Agent Jack Bauer not knocked a hammer through one of the holes in the ceiling right as I said this, I might even believe myself.
Chapter Fifteen
NOBODY EXPECTS THE KYRGYZSTAN INQUISITION
“Hi, Mia speaking.”
“I’ve been outed!”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been outed!” Kara wails. “My parents know about the column!”
I sink heavily onto the floor, as all the furniture is under dustcovers. “Sweetie, are you sure?”
Kara’s frantic on the other end of the line, and I can hear her bangles jangling in the background. “Yes! No. Or I’m not sure, at least a hundred percent. My sister called and said my parents were in a lather about something after talking to my cousin Parvati’s mother. Parvati’s family has been all over her about breaking off her engagement and I think she may have thrown me under the bus to deflect.”
“Parv’s not engaged anymore?”
“No, she caught her fiancé cheating with some chick from work, so she dumped him.”
“That poor kid.” I don’t know Parvati very well, but I like her because she’s so much like Kara—all hugs and kind words and frenetic energy. “Would Parv do that? She doesn’t seem like the type to squeal on you.”
“Not intentionally, no. But if she was under scrutiny, she may have cracked. Like when I got busted smoking in high school and I blurted, ‘At least I wasn’t drinking, like Parvati does!’ Mia, you can’t comprehend what it’s like having my mom or her sister grill you—it’s like waterboarding, only instead of water, they use guilt. The government should have my mother question terror suspects. We’d have bin Laden before she finished her tea.”
“Okay, that may be, but I still don’t follow how you know you’ve been outed.”
Kara’s breaths are quick and ragged. “While I’m on the phone with my sister, I get a voice mail from my mother telling me in no uncertain terms that I
am
coming to dinner up there Friday night, and that we
will
be having a talk. Honest to God, I want to puke right now, I’m so nervous.”
From the clicking in the background, I can tell she’s pacing. I do my best to calm her. “Kara, the simple fact is, you haven’t done anything wrong. Your column helps people. People have problems. They come to you for a solution. You’re providing a public service.”
Her voice is small. “I guess . . . .”
“Think of all the success stories you’ve told me—like that woman who was afraid to let her boyfriend see her stretch marks, or the guy who was too shy to make the first move with his platonic roommate, or the kid who didn’t know how to end her friendship with a mean girl. Happy endings, all of them! Yeah, sometimes you write about sex, but big deal; you do it in a clinical way. Your mom stares at lady parts all day. You think she doesn’t field some of the exact same questions you get?”
Kara warms a tiny bit. “Maybe. Go on.”
“Honey, you’re writing for newspapers—hundreds of them—not
Penthouse
Forum! You do nothing salacious.You never started a column,‘I never thought it would happen to me, but . . .’ If anything, your parents should be proud. Now, tell me what you’re going to do when you talk to them.”

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