Starter House A Novel (10 page)

Chapter Eleven

ERIC HATED TO ADMIT IT,
and he’d never say it to Lacey who loved the house so much and had been determined to buy before the baby was born, but the Realtor had been right. They should have rented for a year or two. Yes, it was a bargain, ninety-five thousand for a house that would be worth twice as much in five years, but he couldn’t afford problems at home; he had to focus. There was the stickiness of the air at the threshold, the house’s resistance every time he entered, the sense of a complete life, compact, hidden, self-sufficient, going on without him.

Lacey needed the house. All pregnant women nested, and it had hit Lacey hard. And he was the same—he’d bought the furniture, he’d summoned Ella Dane Kendall to live with them. They’d rushed into everything together, on the run from the families that had failed them, wanting the marriage, the house, the baby all at once. They should have waited.

Too late; they were committed now, and they’d have to see it through. Even though he had no money, less than no money, he went out to eat with his uncle and colleagues. He needed better cases, and so he had to stay in communication with the firm, not lurk in his office like a guilty secret shut away in the dark. It was better than going home, where every day he felt less necessary and less welcome—Ella Dane made little shrines on plates, here a lavender candle on a layer of rock salt, there an amethyst crystal in a dirty old bird’s nest, and she was furious if he moved them. And now that Lacey was sleeping downstairs, her memory dwindled from the bedroom along with the light rose-citrus scent of the sachet in her lingerie drawer. It was no longer
their room,
it was any room; he slid his shirt hangers into her side of the closet, put his razor by one of the double sinks and his toothbrush by the other, and it was as if she’d never lived there. Her room downstairs was a different world, smelling of dog and Ella Dane’s spices. Some days, Lacey didn’t even brush her hair. Who was this woman?

Uncle Floyd had a standing reservation for Abernathy’s large corner booth. For the third evening in a row, Eric joined the rest of Moranis Miszlak for beer and wings. “Good work today,” Uncle Floyd said. “It helps when the judge is a moron.”

“Can’t count on that,” Eric said. He’d argued in family court on behalf of a client who had discovered his six-year-old wasn’t really his; surprisingly, the judge rescinded the child support order until the ex-wife located the child’s biological father.

Floyd mused on Eric’s victory. “You’ll lose on the next hearing. You get a judge with an IQ higher than room temperature, which is at least half of them, and he’ll slap your guy with child support. Back child support. With interest.”

Eric had already warned his client. “Maybe the biological father will pay.”

“Maybe pigs will fly out my ass. How many clients you got?”

“Hundreds,” Eric said glumly. “They’re all judies. It gets me down.”

“They’re the peanut butter in your sandwich, boy.”

Eric’s mind slid to his new client, Lex Hall, whose bill was being paid by Harry Rakoczy. He’d depose the pediatrician. Maybe he could get together with the wife’s lawyer. “What do you know about some guy called Cambrick MacAvoy?” he asked.

The lawyers and paralegals laughed, and Sammie the receptionist’s Bambi eyes got even bigger and darker. “Here’s a joke,” someone said from across the table. “How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Depends on how many Cambrick MacAvoy can drag in there.”

“Who is he?”

“She,” four voices said from various points across the table.

“Ex-wife,” Floyd said. “Mine. You’re up against her?”

Eric was surprised. His family hadn’t been close with Floyd, seeing him only at Thanksgiving. When Foothills Financial collapsed and Eric’s father went to prison, it was Lacey who called Uncle Floyd and asked him to hire Eric. Eric didn’t remember the name Cambrick. Could he have missed an entire marriage and divorce in his uncle’s life? It was too bad. He should have sent a card. Maybe two. “It’s a divorce. A judy.”

“Not with Cambrick on the other side. Trust me, that woman will hang your kidneys on her Christmas tree. Don’t tell me there’s custody.”

“There’s custody. I was hoping to work something out.”

“Could be, could be,” Floyd allowed. “If you give her your kidneys right off the bat, she might could let you keep half a lung and a pound of liver.”

The food arrived. Floyd had ordered a variety of wings with names ranging from Sweet Caroline to Inferno. “I’m serious,” Eric said, as the lawyers passed the plates. “I need to talk with her.”

Floyd raised his voice and yelled across the bar, “Cambrick MacAvoy!”

Eric dropped the wing on his plate and hastily wiped his hands. “She’s
here
?”

“You’ve got a little something,” Sammie murmured, leaning across the table to dab at the corner of his mouth with her napkin. Sometime in the last few minutes, her blouse had mysteriously slipped lower on her breasts.

“Thanks, I’m good,” Eric said. He reached for his beer. If she kept lunging at him, he’d have to spill it on her. An image of Sammie with her pink blouse soaked in beer crossed his mind, and he quickly amended the thought: he’d have to spill it on himself.

Floyd chimed his beer glass with his knife. “Cam-
brick
!”

A tall white-haired woman in a blue dress slid over to the table. “I see you’ve gained weight,” she said to Floyd.

“Looks like you overdid the Botox, darling.”

“That’s my natural expression when I see you. Rigid horror.”

“You go to court in that rag?”

“Only if I’m meeting the judge in chambers afterward.” Her white hair was wound into a Sunday-grandma pouf of a chignon, and the blue dress showed a body that made Sammie look like a middle schooler playing dress-up. Her gaze wandered around the table. This might be the perfect moment to spill beer on himself. Then she said, “I’m looking for some larval Miszlak thing.”

“That would be me.” He looked directly into her face, ignoring all distractions; and then he recognized her. “Aunty Marian?”

“He remembers. Do you know, once I divorced your uncle, I never heard from any one of you Miszlaks again? It was like I fell off the earth.”

“I was only eight.” He stood up to kiss her cheek, as he had been trained since infancy—
kiss your aunty, kiss your grandma
—though she felt not at all like the usual sort of aunt. Something dreadful had happened to her. “You’re looking great.”

“I dropped three hundred pounds of ugly fat; that’ll do wonders for a person. You’re representing some nut, I hear.”

“Lex Hall, Aunty Marian.”

“I’m not your aunty anymore, and I’m not Marian either,” she said. “It’s Cambrick, as in, what the hell just hit me upside the head, some kind of brick? Lexington Hall! He’s got dirt in his past, and his dirt will bury him. Remember.”

“Yes, ma’am.” That childhood training again. “I surely will remember.”

She tousled his hair as if he were eight years old and she the aunt who showed up once a year with a can of cranberry jelly. “You want to discuss Jeanne Hall’s spousal maintenance and child support, call me. You make an offer, make it worth my time.” She handed him a business card with a dogwood embossed in gold.

“Yes, ma’am,” Eric said stupidly. She rippled away.

Floyd gave him another beer. “Boy, you done good.”

Eric wiped his burning face. “I done what, I mean, I did?”

“Never seen her off her game like that; the Botox must have worked its way in through her skull. Numbs the cerebral cortex something fierce, they tell me. She gave you something, and you gave her nothing.”

“What did she give me?”

“Your guy’s got a past,” Floyd said. “Don’t ask him, he’ll never tell you. They never do. Pure as woolly baa-lambs, every one. Use an intern. Sammie, get on it.”

Sammie looked around the table and shook her head. Her gold hoop earrings swung against her cheeks, and all the lights in the room flashed along the flying curves. “I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust these clowns to track a car title.”

“Thanks,” Eric said.

“Don’t thank me. It’s a billable hour. Now go home to your wife.”

Chapter Twelve

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON,
just after six, Lacey gave up waiting for Eric. She’d slept downstairs since Sunday, and every evening this week, Eric had gone out with his uncle and the rest of Moranis Miszlak, drinking beer and eating the kind of food she hadn’t seen in weeks. Wings, nachos, chili cheese fries.

She hadn’t been out with friends since spring, when she and Eric started spending their evenings online and weekends in Greeneburg looking for a house. She used to go out with her college friends and a group of young teachers. House and baby had sucked her in, and she hadn’t called her friends, or answered their e-mails, or even checked Facebook. Lacey’s life had kaleidoscoped inward, the same images mirrored and mirrored again. Husband, house, baby. House, baby, husband. Baby, husband, house. Phyllis, her best friend and roommate all through college, must have tried to get in touch with her on Facebook. There must be a thousand messages. The thought exhausted her. She’d get around to it.

She and her friends used to go dancing, ending the night at a dive in Five Points for chili cheese fries at three in the morning. She was that girl, four months ago.

Chili cheese fries. Hunger leaped on her with no warning, filled her like helium, making her head float. She had to sit down for a minute. Low blood pressure, Dr. Vlk said—another good reason for staying off the stairs and not driving, not that she could drive anyway; she and Eric had sold her car when they moved, because they wouldn’t need two cars until after the baby came. Worst decision she’d ever made, letting Eric sell her car. Because it meant this: now, when she would sell her soul for chili cheese fries, the car in the driveway belonged to a vegan.

Restaurants delivered. She could have all the chili cheese fries she wanted. She could even have steak. A deep-fried onion blossom, the whole onion cut open and fanned out and battered and fried, with ranch dressing for dip. She used to share an onion blossom with four friends. Now she was hungry enough to eat one by herself. She got up from the bed and headed for the kitchen to look up restaurants in the Yellow Pages.

The doorbell rang. Lacey closed the phone book and listened. Her skin tightened, and she held the phone book over her belly like a shield—if it was Drew again, mister trouble-at-home—why wouldn’t Ella Dane answer the door? The bell rang a second time.

“It’s your house,” Ella Dane called. “Answer the door. Bibbits, come to Mama.”

Lacey walked toward the front door, Bibbits bouncing around her feet. Whatever Ella Dane had been giving him from the brown glass vial, it seemed to be working; he hadn’t coughed for days. “Why won’t you go to your mama, anyway?” Lacey asked him, and he licked her ankles with his slimy pink tongue, telling her as clearly as a dog could that as long as she kept giving him meat, his mama was on her own. She glanced up the stairs as she passed them, and there was Drew, standing at the top, with one hand on the banister.

When he came with popcorn, he’d asked her if he could come back and she had said
Yes, later.
Now here he was, inside the house. Without warning, she was back in the world of the dream, accepting Drew’s presence, his right to be present, though some far part of her mind wanted to shout
go away, get out.

“Don’t answer that door,” he said, with a childish ferocity that triggered her teacher’s instinct to take him to a quiet place and ask what was wrong. The doorbell rang again. “Don’t talk to her.”

Who? Her thoughts scattered. There was something important, something she had to tell or ask him, but some mute heavy thing sat on her tongue and resisted her. She pushed through it. “Where is your mother?” she said, but that wasn’t what she needed to know. She opened the door and saw CarolAnna Grey and a little girl with a clipboard.

“Hey, Lacey,” CarolAnna said. “It’s nice to see you. This is Madison.” She pushed the child forward. Lacey glanced back up the stairs. Drew was gone.

“You want to buy something for my school?” Madison thrust a dog-eared catalog at Lacey: Academy Notions, a collection of Christmas gift wrap, scented candles, and outrageously expensive chocolate. The PTA at her old school used the same firm. Waxy chocolate, magnolia-scented candles, flimsy gift wrap and plastic Christmas banners: dollar-store goods at boutique prices, and the PTA got 5 percent of the profits.

At least this child would leave, not hang around the house, appearing in nightmares and sliding around corners. “Sure,” Lacey said, taking the catalog. Madison showed no enthusiasm at this possible sale, but CarolAnna took a step forward, holding out a pen. “Do they still have the candied pecans?” Lacey asked.

“I dunno.”

“Madison! Page seven,” CarolAnna hissed.

Madison rolled her eyes. “What she said.”

CarolAnna handed Lacey the pen and the order form, and Lacey said, “My checkbook’s inside. Come in and cool off for a minute.”