Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (26 page)

I say Matt Batt.

He pauses, making sure I am not fooling with him, perhaps affording me the space to explain that no, my parents weren’t trying to set me up for a life of despair, it was just that my mom’s second husband adopted me and so on and so forth. He thinks better of it, and we proceed.

He is a short man in his late forties or early fifties. He wears a lilac polo shirt, pressed khaki pants, and shoes with tassels. I don’t need to see his credentials.

He holds out his hand. “Bob Plumb,” he says. “And yeah, I’ve heard ’em all so give it a shot if you need to, but the bar has recently been set at ‘Plumb Bob Scary Pants.’ You either get it or you don’t—I see you don’t—anyway. Call me Bob.”

I don’t really need another Bob in my life, but what choice do I have? I shake his hand.

“I know, right,” he says, “I get it. Slow down, Bob, right? It’s okay, man. Matt, you said? Okay. Slowing down.” It is like watching a hummingbird on amphetamines.

We go inside and Jenae gives Bob the tour as I trail behind. Since our last realtor experience, I didn’t plan on trusting anybody farther than I could throw him, but I have to admit that Bob is kind of a little guy, and I might in fact be able to toss him farther than I expected.

“Hey, holy cow,” he says, turning around to keep me in the fold, “you guys did this work? You’re kidding, right? You must have had a lot of help, right? Holy cow, the colors! And good gravy, this hardwood floor, I mean, I know it’s old and beat up, but they’re paying fifty grand up in Park City for people to make new floors look like this one.”

I notice, much to my chagrin, that the collar of his shirt is up. It could have been an accident—the wind, say—but still.

We sit down at the dining room table and talk about our plans and the market and what we are hoping to get out of the house. Bob laughs and rambles with Jenae as though they’re old sorority sisters, but he keeps trying to draw me into the conversation too, not by being smarmy but by addressing as directly as he can my transparent mistrust of realtors.

“It’s okay, Matt,” he says, “I get it. You’re nervous. You should be. Maybe not nervous—how about cautious?—because I know better than anybody lots of realtors are schnooks and shysters. But give me a chance, okay? Don’t be a hater.”

Jenae and I look at each other.

“My boy, the Lizard King—that’s his skater name, not mine, but I kinda like it, nice throwback to the day, you know, the Doors?—anyway, my kid, LK, he came up with that one last night at the Spaghetti Factory—I take the whole family out, dad, granddad, all the kids—even the Lizard King’s new girlfriend who was clearly a little freaked out by all us Plumb people and LK told her, ‘Hey, baby, stop hatin’ on us. Don’t be a hater. Be a lover,’ and so come on you two—I can see plain as the shine on my shoes you’re lovers. Why you gotta be hatin’ on Bob?”

He stops for just long enough to raise his eyebrows.

“Seriously,” he says, “this is a great market and a great house and you guys are going to kill it. What do you guys want to get out of it?”

Jenae and I haven’t really decided. I know she was hoping, in her heart of hearts, to get a quarter of a million dollars from some nut job who loves everything about the house and is willing to pay nearly double its market value. I am hoping to make a significant return on our investment and am willing to wait to hear what that is. But a couple houses in the neighborhood have recently sold in only a couple of days, like Stacey’s, and they went for more than my imagination could grasp.

“What do you think about two-ten?” Bob asks. He clearly is starting low, but not too low to know his figure hasn’t rounded the next big hump in the sixth-digit place. “Good return on your investment, sort of right in the middle of the comparables I looked up. Nice tag for a two-bedroom tract house, don’t you think?”

Jenae is crushed.

“I think that’s a good bit lower than we were thinking,” I say.

“I want a quarter of a million dollars,” Jenae says.

She isn’t joking.

“All right,” Bob says, “all right. I ain’t hatin’. You tell me.” He reminds us that we can put whatever price tag we want on it. We just have to remember that a house priced too high can sour fast, no matter how nice. “There’s a house over on Thirteenth South,” he says, “by that fancy Liberty Heights grocer there—Liberty Heist, am I right?—and that Japanese restaurant? The guy did a bunch of junky work on it himself and he’s asking for about fifty grand too much. People won’t even touch it. I show folks the place and they like ask for those paper surgeon’s booties to wear ’cause they don’t want the bad mojo on their soles, get it? All right. So. What do you think?”

We push around some figures and begin to sweat, sitting at our dining room table with Bob. We know he is right—we have seen perfectly good houses in our neighborhood rot on the market for months. They would cycle through different, increasingly pathetic versions of their signs and agents until they ground down toward entropic death and simply put up a For Sale by Owner sign in the window—grim as a toe tag—like our own house when we bought it. But we don’t have a year or two to sell it, as Stanley did. We need to get out in a couple of months and maybe turn a profit so we can make a down payment on a house in Texas.

“Come on, guys,” Bob says. “It’s important, but it’s not the secret code to the reactor.”

We look at each other and name a figure, splitting the difference between Jenae’s goal and Bob’s initial proposal.

“Little high,” Bob says, scratching his neck. He chips away at the price until it feels both reasonably lofty and modest, we imagine, to people who have dramatically better jobs than ours.

We agree.

“Sweet,” Bob says. He claps and rubs his hands together like a genie. “Here we go.”

We have about three weeks to get things together before the sign goes in the yard. We are shooting for the weekend after Easter, right at the beginning of the season—three years almost to the day after Gram died. There is tons to do to get the house ready, but we have a timeline. I am in charge of finishing up work on the baseboards in the living and dining rooms, and Jenae is going to take care of the yard and the flower beds. She has already done a heroic job of planting the bulbs in the fall, while I was mired in job-search junk. She has planted more than a hundred tulips, dahlias, poppies, and irises, all according to a thoroughly planned flower map that she drew up. Some of the daffodils and tulips have already started to come up, but so have a lot of weeds. Bob has told us not to worry about the yard, though; he’s going to send somebody over to clean the windows and take care of our lawn.

So while Jenae is at work, I get set to finish the baseboards. It isn’t the kind of carpentry I know anything about—not that I know anything about any real carpentry—but this sort of work is what people actually see, and so, to a big extent, it matters.

It’s a pretty tricky enterprise, I learn, to make a floor and a wall meet. Take the molding and baseboards. They exist to extend the foot of the wall cosmetically over the edge of the floor, like the hem of your pants. I suppose baseboards do other things—they look nice and give you an extra surface to paint and keep clean—but for the most part they’re just window dressing, or in this case, floor dressing.

I am ashamed to admit that I so dreaded doing this last, relatively small task that we have lived in the house for almost three years without them. The varying width of the gaps was daunting but, as it turns out, easy to ignore. Until now.

The only solution is either to use crown molding on the floor—which would be, to say the least, unconventional—or to try some combination of baseboards and molding to layer the transition from the walls. This is all very pleasant to talk about, but when you’re actually setting about making this manifest in the world, it becomes a little tricky. My job is essentially to build a picture frame for the floor, the problem being that neither room is square, and on top of that, I am going to have to build one frame and then another frame for that frame, including: two rooms with five doorways, a closet, three heat registers, four electrical outlets, a forty-five-degree slanted corner, a gently arched outer wall, and a floor that was laid at two different levels. I am not looking forward to this.

One afternoon, as I take measurement upon measurement, I stop for a break and notice, much to my surprise, men in our backyard. After a second of shock I realize it must be the crew that Bob was sending over, and suddenly I feel like quite the pimp. I not only have people working for me, I have somebody working for me who has other people working for me. Best yet, no cash comes out of my pocket. The house, our glorious house, is going to pay for them. I walk to the front and find that they have already been there.

The yard looks great, except for one thing: they have whacked down the flower beds along with the weeds.

I know I am going to have to tell Jenae before she sees it herself. “Hey, baby,” I say, cuddling the phone by proxy. “You busy?”

“What’s wrong?” she says. It is her mama bear voice. “Is Maggie all right?”

The worst time I had to make a call like this, we were living in our second-floor apartment in Columbus, using the fire escape as the main entrance. Maggie and I had just come back from our morning walk and were at the top of the rusty metal stairs when she spotted a squirrel on the first-floor roof. Maggie took off and jumped on it. The squirrel was long gone by the time Maggie hit the slate shingles and started to slide, slowly but inevitably, toward the edge. I practically jumped down the entire fire escape, but I wasn’t able to beat her to the ground. She landed on all fours, wobbled for a second, and crumpled to her belly.

I picked her up as gently as I could and laid her across the back seat of my Jeep. When I started the engine, however, she sprang up in panic and struggled to get onto my lap. There is nothing, bar none, that Maggie hates more than the car.

After the vet gave her a miraculously clean bill of health, I called Jenae. (At that time, nobody except drug dealers and Don Johnson had cell phones, so I hadn’t had a chance to call earlier.)

This is how I sound now, when I call to tell her about her flowers.

“No, baby,” I say, “we’re all safe and sound, and I think that’s the important thing to remember here.”

“What is it, then?” she says.

“The good news is the grass looks great.”

When she gets home, she goes from sorrowful weeping to Old Testament keening. You would think that our own firstborn has been torn from her arms and smote with paving stones.

“Why don’t you let me call Bob Plumb,” I say. “I’m sure we can work something out. It was just a misunderstanding.”

“No,” she says. “No. I am going to call Bob Plumb.”

I have to step outside.

Less than half an hour later, Bob pulls up in his white Acura to survey the damage. He is a pro.

“What a shame,” he says. “All those flowers. All that
work.
” Then he smiles his big Plumb smile. “How do we make this right?” he says. “I know there’s no getting back your flowers or the work wasted, but how can we get close?”

Jenae looks as though she has just been asked to put a price on an orphanage fire.

“Do you want me to have my guys come back with a few flats of petunias or something? They can knock it out in a couple of minutes and you’ll have a yard full of blooms before dark.”

“No,” Jenae says. “I want to do it. It’s still my yard and I didn’t spend hundreds of hours for a bunch of stupid petunias.”

Bob looks at me generously. He is not judging me. He is not judging Jenae. This guy sells houses that are worth ten times what ours is. He knows this shit is stressful.

“How about this,” Bob says. He reaches for his money clip and starts counting out twenties. “I know it’s only getting close, right—I’m not paying you off—but would a hundred bucks help? Or a hundred fifty? Or no, I only got twenties. One-forty? Would that get you closer to where you want the yard to be?”

What could we say? He tucks the bills into Jenae’s palm and pats her hand.

“I gotta go, kids,” he says, maintaining eye contact but sidling back around to his car. “We’ll be rolling soon and this will all be behind us. Don’t sweat it.”

Dragging myself around the house in a handyman’s stations of the cross, I work toward the end of our seemingly perpetual list of projects. I lay the baseboards in the dining room with Liquid Nails à la Stanley, tack them in place with some tenpenny brads, and move on to the next room by lunchtime. The living room with its split-level floor is a lot more challenging, but I realize that because the difference in height is only a quarter of an inch, I can lay the baseboard on shims where there is a height difference, so it will be the same height all the way around. Then, when I go back to attach the quarter-round molding (basically a long wooden dowel about the size of a broomstick which has been sawed the long way into four equal pieces—take one of those and you’ve got a quarter of a round stick), it will cover the shims and the gap with only one Z-shaped joint, and nobody’ll be the wiser. It is an obvious solution any tradesman would have known to do before he scratched his ass, but to me it was more complicated than French literary theories based on rhizomes.

That’s not true. It is less complicated than rhizome theory, but it wouldn’t have been an easy fix for anybody. This is a good fix not just anybody could have come up with. It’s about damned time I stop apologizing for being decent at one or two things. I am going to get my PhD in a couple of weeks, and figuring out how to use a stick to cover a crack feels like the greater achievement.

The guys across the street moved into their place about the time we did ours, and as it turns out, they put their house on the market just a month before us. The house is no bigger than the cabin of a small crab boat, and the two men who live there, a husky, ruddy gay couple, could pass as fraternity brothers or missionaries.

One day while Jenae and I are replanting some decorative grasses in the parking strip, I talk with Marcus, the slightly bigger guy with the slightly darker goatee.