The Development (9 page)

If Doc Sam Bailey were this story's teller, he'd probably end it right here with a bit of toga-party Latin:
Consummatum est; requiescat in pacem
—something in that vein. But he's not.

The overhead garage light timed out.

I
N LARGE
gated communities like our Heron Bay Estates development, obsolescence sets in early. The developers knew their business: a great flat stretch of former pine woods and agribusiness feed-corn fields along the handsome Matahannock River, ten minutes from the attractive little colonial-era town of Stratford and two hours from Baltimore/Washington in one direction, Wilmington/Philadelphia in another, and Atlantic beach resorts in a third, converted in the go-go American 1980s into appealingly laid-out subdevelopments of condos, villas, coach homes, and detached-house neighborhoods, the whole well landscaped and amenitied. The first such large-scale project on the Eastern Shore end of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Bridge, it proved so successful that twenty years later it was not only all but "built out" (except for a still controversial proposal for midrise condominiums in what was supposed to remain wood-and-wet-land preserve), but in it's "older" subcommunities, like Spartina Pointe, already showing it's age. In Stratford's historic district, an "old house" may date from the early eighteenth century; in Heron Bay Estates it dates from Ronald Reagan's second presidential term. More and more, as the American wealthy have grown ever wealthier and the original builder-owners of upscale Spartina Pointe (mostly retirees from one of those above-mentioned cities, for many of whom Heron Bay Estates was a weekend-and-summer retreat, a second or even third residence) aged and died or shifted to some assisted-living facility, the new owners of their twenty-year-old "colonial" mini-mansions commence their tenure with radical renovation: new kitchen and baths, a swimming pool and larger patio/deck area, faux-cobblestone driveway and complete relandscaping—all subject, of course, to approval by the HBE Design Review Board.

Which august three-member body, a branch of our Heron Bay Estates Community Association, had reluctantly approved, back in the 1980s, the original design for 211 Spartina Court, a rambling brick-and-clapboard rancher on a prime two-acre lot at the very point of Spartina Point(e), with narrow but navigable Spartina Creek on three sides. It was a two-to-one decision: None of the three board members was happy to let a ranch house, however roomy, set the architectural tone for what was intended as HBE's highest-end neighborhood; two- and three-story plantation-style manses were what they had in mind. But while one of the board folk was steadfastly opposed, another judged it more important to get a first house built (it's owners were prepared to begin construction immediately upon their plan's approval) in order to help sell the remaining lots and encourage the building of residences more appropriate to the developer's intentions. The third member was sympathetic to both opinions; she ultimately voted approval on the grounds that preliminary designs for two neighboring houses were exactly what was wanted for Spartina Pointe—neo-Georgian manors of whitewashed brick, with two-story front columns and the rest—and together should adequately establish the neighborhood's style. The ranch house was allowed, minus the rustic split-rail fence intended to mark the lot's perimeter, and with the provision that a few Leyland cypresses be planted instead, to partially screen the residence from street-side view.

The strategy succeeded. Within a few years the several "drives" and "courts" of Spartina Pointe were lined with more or less imposing, more or less Georgian-style homes: no Cape Cods, Dutch colonials, or half-timbered Tudors (all popular styles in easier-going Rockfish Reach), certainly nothing contemporary, and no more ranchers. The out-of-synch design of 211 Spartina Court raised a few eyebrows, but the house's owners, Ed and Myra Gunston, were hospitable, community-spirited ex-Philadelphians whom none could dislike: organizers of neighborhood parties and progressive dinners, spirited fund-raisers for the Avon County United Way and other worthy causes. A sad day for Spartina Pointe when Myra was crippled by a stroke; another, some months later, when a For Sale sign appeared in front of those Leyland cypresses.

All the above established, we may begin this teardown story, which is not about the good-neighbor Gunstons, and for which the next chapter in the history of their Spartina Point(e) house, heavily foreshadowed by the tale's title, is merely the occasion. We shift now across Heron Bay Estates to 414 Doubler Drive, in Blue Crab Bight, the second-floor coach home of early-fortyish Joseph and Judith Barnes—first explaining to non-tidewater types that "doubler" is the local watermen's term for the mating stage of
Callinectes sapidus,
the Chesapeake Bay blue crab. The male of that species mounts and clasps fast the female who he senses is about to molt, so that when eventually she sheds her carapace and becomes for some hours a helpless "softcrab," he can both shield her from predators and have his way with her himself, to the end of continuing the species: a two-for-one catch for lucky crabbers, and an apt street name for a community of over-and-under duplexes, whose owners (and some of the rest of us) do not tire of explaining to out-of-staters.

Some months have passed since the space break above: It is now the late afternoon of a chilly-wet April Friday in an early year of the twenty-first century. Ruddy-plump Judy Barnes has just arrived home from her English-teaching job at Fenton, a small private coed junior-senior high school near Stratford, where she's also an assistant girls' soccer coach. This afternoon's intramural game having been rained out, she's home earlier than usual and is starting dinner for the family: her husband, a portfolio manager in the Stratford office of Lucas & Jones, LLC; their elder daughter, Ashleigh, a Stratford College sophomore who lives in the campus dorms but often comes home on weekends; and Ashleigh's two-years-younger sister, Tiffany, a (tuition-waived) sixth-form student at Fenton, who's helping Mom with dinner prep.

Osso buco, it's going to be. While Judy shakes the veal shanks in a bag of salt-and-peppered flour and Tiffany dices carrots, celery, onions, and garlic cloves for preliminary sautéing, Joe Barnes is closing his office for the weekend with the help of Jeannine Weston, his secretary, and trying in vain to stop imagining that lean, sexy-sharp young woman at least half naked in various positions to receive in sundry of her orifices his already wet-tipped penis.
Quit that already!
he reprimands himself, to no avail.
Bear in mind that not only do you honor your marriage and love your family, you also say amen to the Gospel According to Mark, which stipulates that Thou Shalt Not Hump the Help.
"Mark" being Mark Matthews, his boss and mentor, first in Baltimore and then, since Lucas & Jones opened their Eastern Shore office five years ago, in Stratford. That's when the Barneses bought 414 Doubler Drive: a bit snug for a family of four with two teenagers, but a sound investment, bound to appreciate rapidly in value as the population of Avon and it's neighboring counties steadily grows. The girls had shared a bedroom since their babyhood and enjoyed doing so right through their adolescence; the elderly couple in 412, the coach home's first-floor unit, were both retired and retiring, so quiet that one could almost forget that their place was occupied. In the four years until their recent, reluctant move to Bayview Manor, they never once complained about Ashleigh's and Tiffany's sometimes noisy get-togethers with school friends.

Perhaps Reader is wincing at the heavy New Testament sound of "Mark Matthews Lucas and Jones"? "Thou shalt not wince," Mark himself enjoys commanding new or prospective clients in their first interview. "Why do you think Jim Lucas and Harvey Jones [the firm's cofounders] hired me in the first place, if not to spread the Good Word about asset management?" Which the fellow did in sooth, churning their portfolios to the firm's benefit as well as theirs and coaching his protégé to do likewise. That earlier gospel-tenet of his, however, he formulated after breaking it himself: In his mid-fifties, coincident with the move from Baltimore to Stratford, he ended his twenty-five-year first marriage to wed the striking young woman who'd been his administrative assistant for three years and his mistress for two. "Don't hump the help," he then enjoyed advising their dinner guests, Joe and Judy included, in his new bride's presence. "You should see my alimony bills!" "Plus he had to find himself a new secretary," trim young Mrs. Matthews liked to add, "once his office squeeze became his trophy wife"—and his unofficial deputy account manager, handling routine portfolio transactions from her own office in their Stratford house, "where unfortunately I can't keep an eye on him."

But "
Eew,
Mom!" Tiffany Barnes is exclaiming in the kitchen of 414 Doubler Drive, where she's ladling excess fat off the osso buco broth. "Even without this glop, the stuff's so
greasy!
"

"Delicious, though," her mother insists. "And we only have it a couple times a year."

"We have it
only
a couple times a year," her just-arrived other daughter corrects her. An English major herself, Ashleigh likes to catch her family's slips in grammar and usage, especially her English-teacher mother's. Patient Judy rolls her eyes. "Dad says I should open a cabernet to breathe before dinner," the girl then adds. "He'll be up in a minute. He's doing stuff in the garage."

"Just take a taste of this marrow," Judy invites both girls, indicating a particularly large cross-section of shank bone in the casserole, it's core of brown marrow fully an inch in diameter, "and tell me it's not the most delicious thing you ever ate."

"
Ee-e-ew!
" her daughters chorus in unison. Then Tiffany (who's taking an elective course at Fenton called The Bible As Literature that her secular mother frowns at as a left-handed way of sneaking religion into the curriculum, although she quite respects the colleague who's teaching it) adds, "Think not of the marrow?" Judy chuckles proudly; Ashleigh groans at the pun, musses her sister's hair, and goes to the wine rack to look for cabernet sauvignon, singing a retaliatory pun of her own that she'd seen on a bumper sticker earlier in the week: "
Life is a ca-ber-net, old chum ...
"

Sipping same half an hour later with a store-bought duck pâté in the living room, where a fake log crackles convincingly in the glass-shuttered fireplace, "So guess who just bought that house at the far end of Spartina Court?" Joe Barnes asks his wife. "Mark and Mindy Matthews!"

"
Mindy,
" Ashleigh scorns, not for the first time: "What a lame name!" Though only nineteen, she's allowed these days to take half a glass of wine with her parents at cocktail time and another half at dinner, since they know very well that she drinks with her college friends and believe that she's less likely to binge out like too many of them on beer and hard liquor if, as in most European households, the moderate consumption of wine with dinner is a family custom. Tiffany, having helped with the osso buco, has withdrawn to the sisters' bedroom and her laptop computer until the meal is served.

"That ranch house?" Judy asks. "Why would the Matthewses swap their nice place in Stratford for a run-of-the-mill ranch house?"

Her husband swirls his wine, the better to aerate it. "Because, one, Mark's buying himself a cabin cruiser and wants a waterfront place to go with it. And, two, by the time they move in it'll be no run-of-the-mill ranch house, believe me. Far from it!"

Judy sighs. "Another Heron Bay remodeling job. And we can't even get around to replacing that old Formica in our kitchen! But a renovated rancher's still a rancher."

Uninterested Ashleigh, pencil in hand, is back to her new passion, the sudoku puzzle from that day's
Baltimore Sun.
She has the same shoulder-length straight dark hair and trim tight body that her mother had when Joe and Judy first met as University of Maryland undergraduates two dozen years ago, and that Jeannine Weston (of whose tantalizing figure Joe is disturbingly reminded lately whenever, as now, he remarks this about his eldest daughter) has not yet outgrown. He and Judy both, on the other hand, have put on the pounds—and his hair is thinning toward baldness, and hers showing it's first traces of gray, before they even reach fifty ...

"Never mind remodeling and renovation," he says. "That's not Mark's style." He raises his glass as if in toast: "Heron Bay Estates is about to see it's very first teardown!"

... plus her generous, once so fine, firm breasts are these days anything but, and "love handles" would be the kindest term for those side rolls of his that, like his belly, have begun to lap over his belted trouser top. Men, of course, enjoy the famously unfair advantage that professional success may confer upon their dealings with the opposite sex: Unsaintly Mark, e.g., is hardly the tall/dark/handsome type, but his being double-chinned, pudgy, and doorknob bald didn't stand in the way of his scoring with pert blond Mindy—and what in God's name is Joe Barnes up to, thinking such thoughts at Happy Hour in the bosom of his family?

Thus self-rebuked, he takes it upon himself to clean up the hors d'oeuvres and call Tiffany to set the table while Judy assembles a salad and Ashleigh pops four dinner rolls into the toaster oven. As is their weekend custom when all hands are present, they then clink glasses (three wines, one diet Coke) and say their mock table-grace—"Bless this grub and us that eats it"—before settling into the osso buco.
I love you all, goddamn it!
lump-throated Joe reminds himself.

"So what do the Matthewses intend to put up in place of their teardown?" Judy asks. "One of those big colonial-style jobs, I guess?"

"Oh, no." Her husband grins, shakes his head. "Wait'll you see. You know that fancy new spread on Loblolly Court, over in Rockfish Reach?" Referring to an imposing Mediterranean-style stucco-and-tiled-roof house built recently in that adjacent neighborhood despite the tsk-tsks of numerous homeowners there.