If You Were Here (28 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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The younger, shorter one addresses me. “Ma’am, does a Mr. Bauer live here?”
“Come again?”
The older one takes over. “Mr. Bauer, does he or does he not reside at this residence?”
I am beyond confused. “Agent Jack Bauer?”
“Yes, ma’am, Mr. Bauer.”
“You know Mr. Bauer is a cat, right? Not a person?” Then I’m suddenly consumed with dread. “Is he okay?”
“So you confirm he does live here?” demands Officer Younger.
“Yes. Do you have him? Has anything happened to him?” I worry that not only might Agent Jack Bauer be hurt, but that someone could have had an accident avoiding him. We live up on a bluff and the roads back here are winding. One wrong turn and someone could find himself down a ravine or in the lake.
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The younger one flips open a notepad before he continues. “We’ve had a complaint about your cat. He was seen at eighteen hundred hours urinating on a neighborhood lawn.”
“He got out a couple of hours ago and I was tied up and couldn’t chase after him. But how would you know that? Wait. Someone called you guys? Because a cat peed outside? Are you kidding me? Is this a joke?”
“Vandalism is no joking matter, ma’am,” says the older cop.
And that’s when I snap.
Or go all Swayze.
142
I can’t stop what comes out of me next. “Do I seriously pay thousands of dollars in property taxes so you two can harass me about my cat getting outside? Is that where my money is going? I’m sorry; is it illegal for creatures to relieve themselves in this town? Are you going to buy all the squirrels tiny little diapers? Gonna give the chipmunks catheters? Hey, wait. A bird crapped on my windshield! Better call nine-one-one! I think that’s a hate crime! I’m not kidding ; this is singularly the dumbest goddamned—”
“Language, ma’am,” says Officer Older.
Rage bubbles up inside me. “Forgive me. What I meant to say is that this is singularly the dumbest
gosh-darned
thing I’ve ever heard. You tell Lululemon and Citizen Cane and Elbow Patches or anyone else in this neighborhood who has you two rent-a-cops in their pocket that I will not be harassed any longer! I live here! I’m not leaving! But you? You are wasting my time, you’re wasting taxpayers’ time, and I’m about to commit my own hate crime if you don’t get out of my way so I can use the bathroom.”
I stare them down so hard that Officer Younger finally says, “We’ll get Mr. Bauer for you.” Then he goes to the backseat and plucks one seriously confused kitten out of it before handing him to me.
“What, no shackles?” I demand.
As they begin to back away, the older one says, “One more thing, ma’am?”
“What?!”
“You really can’t keep your bathtub on the front porch.”

 

After Mac and Luke convince the police not to Taser me, they all turn into fast friends over a conversation about their sidearms. The cops impart some wisdom on how to properly seat a toilet on a wax seal, and only then do we finally get something accomplished. Now, like Agent Jack Bauer, I shall whiz indoors exclusively.
Right before I go to bed, I finally think to check my messages. I have an increasingly panicked string of texts from Kara beginning at five fifty p.m., ending with the final one that says simply:

 

where were u?

 

Shit.
Chapter Seventeen
SPANISH TILE
“It’s a jungle out there.”
“You got that right,” Mac agrees from behind his
American Rifleman
’s annual “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” edition.
I come up to him at the table and bend his magazine down. “No, it’s a jungle out
there
.” I point out the window. “You promised me you were going to take care of the yard.”
He sips his coffee before returning to his reading. “I will, as soon as I finish fixing the light.”
Instead of letting any of the fight grenades in these statements explode and have the shrapnel ruin yet another day, I simply walk away. I’m tired of being angry. Yet I’m not sure which frustrates me more—the yard or the goddamned light.
A couple of weeks ago we had to discontinue the landscaping service because we can’t afford to keep paying ninety dollars a week for a little mowing and some light weed whacking. A lot of our property is woods, so our place doesn’t require nearly as much upkeep as one might think.
143
We have some flowering perennials out front, and I’ve done a fine job
144
of keeping them up myself. When I get blocked in my writing, it’s nice to go outside and take my frustrations out on the weeds.
Given my current level of frustration, those beds are impeccable.
However, we do have lawn on the side and in the back of the house, and it’s almost up to Daisy’s shoulders now. The grass doesn’t look like single blades anymore so much as short stalks of wheat and corn. One more good rainstorm and the yard might swallow her whole. As is, I can barely get her out there. I’ve been quietly resenting the yard for a while now, especially since the novelty wore off for the dogs. Sometimes I think they’d be happier back in the city, because the smells there were so much more interesting.
Mac’s been promising to run the mower, but it rained most of last week and he didn’t get the chance. Then he was supposed to do it a couple of days ago, but that’s when the light on the garage blew out. I asked him to change it because the fixture is below the peak of the roof between the two garage doors and he’s better on a ladder than I am. I’m not afraid of heights so much as I am particularly susceptible to gravity.
Mac agreed to change the light before tackling the yard, and I estimated this project would take, what? Eight minutes start to finish if he actually put the ladder away and six if he didn’t.
But no.
Nothing is that simple in this goddamned house.
“The four-packs of floodlight bulbs are in the hall closet,” I told him.
“I’m not using a regular bulb out there,” he replied. “I’m installing an EcoSmart LED light. I figure if I’m going to all that trouble of replacing it, I want a bulb that’s long-lasting. I’ve got to go to Home Depot to pick one up.”
“Can’t you just save yourself a trip and stick in a regular bulb and take that time to cut the lawn?” I asked, mentally adding at least an hour and a half to the task, since he’d involved the Depot.
145
“Being able to see the garage is a priority. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said.
Two hours later, Mac arrived home and was, ostensibly, ready to tackle the task at hand. However, I had to wait another fifteen minutes while he “strapped on his bags,” because God knows you can’t change a lightbulb without donning thirty pounds of tool belt. There’s got to be a joke about how many do-it-yourselfers it takes to change a lightbulb, but my sense of humor was such that I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it had I heard it.
When he was finally ready to climb the ladder, I positioned myself at the bottom, primed to hand him stuff as needed. While he removed the glass around the lantern and unscrewed the old bulb, I inspected the new one. That thing didn’t look like the regular kind of bulb you’d see popping up in thought bubbles over cartoon characters’ heads when they got bright ideas about how to best roadrunners and wascally wabbits. Instead the bulb had a flat glass surface in the middle that was surrounded by what appeared to be white plastic gills or spokes. Odd.
“What’s so special about this?” I asked.
“This bulb is extra bright and environmentally friendly, and it’s guaranteed to last five years. According to the manufacturer, it should save us two hundred dollars over its life span. That’s why it costs a little more,” Mac told me.
My ears instantly pricked up. “How much more?”
“A lot more,” he admitted.
I did not care for the sound of that. “How much?”
Mac appeared to be very interested in the fixture when he answered me. “Forty-five dollars.”
I practically crushed the bulb with my bare hands when I heard that. “Are you shitting me? Forty-five dollars? For a frigging lightbulb? Are you high or do you just hate money? I could buy groceries for the week with forty-five bucks! For two of these bulbs, I could pay for a week of landscaping! Forty-five dollars is insane!”
Mac steadied himself against the garage. “Can you stop shaking the ladder, please? We need it, it will last, end of story. My dad always says buy cheap, buy twice. This may not sound like a great idea now, but when we have five full years of a clear, cost-effective lighting solution, you’ll thank me.”
I snorted. “Yeah, talk to me in five years about that.”
“Hand it up, please; I’m ready for it.” I did and then he screwed the Hope diamond of lightbulbs into the socket.“Okay, now go into the garage and flip the switch.”
What I thought was,
Oh, I’ll flip something, all right.
What I said was, “Got it.”
I entered the garage, located the yellowed switch plate, and flipped the first switch on the right. “Done.”
I walked back out as Mac called to me, “Mia! Flip the switch!”
“I did.”
“Clearly you didn’t, because the light’s still off. You must have hit the wrong switch.”
“No, I did the one on the far right. You probably just have a bum bulb.”
With a tad more condescension than I’d deem appropriate, Mac said, “Mia, Home Depot doesn’t sell defective forty-five-dollar bulbs. Now please get back in there and flip all the switches.”
So I did . . . and nothing happened.
Mac didn’t believe me, so he got down from the ladder and kept trying all the switches himself. “I don’t get it,” he said, and then he snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait. I figured it out. This fixture has got to be thirty years old. I’m sure that’s the problem. I’m going back to the Depot to buy a nice new wall-mount outdoor lantern. I’ll be back soon.”
“What about the lawn?” I asked, trailing behind him.
“I’ll do it as soon as I’m done with this,” he promised, and I mentally braced myself for the inevitable arrival of the “You Need to Either Mow or Buy a Goat” petition.
Another hour and a half went by before Mac finally returned with a new lantern. “What do you think?” he asked, proudly displaying the two-hundred-and-thirty-dollar Beaumont fruitwood fixture.
“I think you should try a regular bulb before you go to all the effort of installing a new lantern. My way costs four dollars. Your way costs, so far, two hundred and seventy-five bucks. Not including labor.”
“I’m not having this discussion with you,” he fumed, stalking off toward the garage. So I went back to my office to work.
146
From my vantage point, I observed him burning all the available daylight in trying to get his fancy new light/lantern combination to work.
Yesterday he spent his morning installing a new switch that cost only four dollars but took three hours. After this bit of fecklessness, he replaced the whole junction box with zero success, and today he plans on rewiring the whole garage.
You know what? I’m just going to mow the lawn myself.
I change into old sneakers, cutoff sweatpants, and an ancient sorority T-shirt, stick in my earbuds, and select my sounds-of-the-nineties playlist as I plod down to the garage. I glower at the lantern and it’s all I can do not to throw a couple of landscaping rocks at it.
We inherited a lawn mower with the house, and like everything else here, it’s completely antiquated. Mac cleaned the blade and filled it with gas and he says it works, but considering it looks like a prop from the movie
Road Warrior
, I’m a bit skeptical. I wheel it down the driveway and let myself into the gated part of the yard.
I bend across the rusty motor and give the toggle dealie a tentative yank. I don’t want to pull too hard, because I feel like the rope will break. Nothing happens, so I pull harder. The engine sputters to life and then dies, so I probably have no choice but to tug harder. I yank the toggle with all my might and the mower roars to life. And I do mean roar. Even with my iPod up full blast, I can’t make out a single word Alanis Morissette is singing, so I turn it off. I don’t need to hear her to understand exactly how ironic this whole situation is. I do leave the earbuds in to protect my hearing.

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