The Good House: A Novel (8 page)

“Okay, Cassie, look. We’ve got to do some work on your house by the weekend.”

“I know. Patch and I’ll clean—”

“No, I mean real work. I’ve been thinking about this. I think we should hire one of Frank Getchell’s crews to come in here, starting tomorrow, and do some real work. Did Patch ever find out what’s under that living room carpet?”

“Yes, it’s nice hardwood, he was right. But we can pull the carpet up ourselves.”

“It’s really a big job, Cassie. There’s the carpet, the padding beneath, the tacking strips. Frankie could have three guys do it in a couple hours. It would take you and Patch days … and what would you do with Jake while you were doing this? He could step on the tacks.”

“We can’t afford to pay Frankie Getchell’s overpriced crew,” snapped Cassie. “Do you know how much Jake’s different therapies cost? And our insurance doesn’t pay the half of it. Both our parents are retired. We can’t ask them for any more money.”

“I know. Here’s what I think we should do. I’ll pay Frankie myself. Then, once the house sells, you can pay me back. I don’t think it’ll be much. They’ll come in, rip out the carpet, patch up some of the walls. And they’ll need to paint—I think … everything. Frankie will get three or four guys in here and they’ll do in a few days what would take you and Patch weeks. The extra money you’ll make on the sale will more than pay for Frank’s guys.”

Cassie looked down at her hands, which were resting on the grimy table. “Really, Hildy? You could do that?”

“Of course,” I said. “I want to sell this house as much as you do. You have no idea how slow business is now. You’re giving me something to do,” I said. “A project.”

I hadn’t admitted to anyone else that particular truth—that my business was slow. Most people thought I was still the top-selling agency in the area, but since the corporate real-estate firms, like Sotheby’s and Coldwell Banker, had moved into the area, it had become difficult for me to compete. I still managed to get some of the best listings, because I’d known the owners in this area all my life, but when buyers came to town from New York or Boston, they usually went to Sotheby’s, because they imagined a certain prestige, I suppose. When these new out-of-town owners decided to resell, which they often did within a few short years, having not fully explored the reality of our quiet community, our short summers and long winters, the sometimes prolonged commute and unreliable train service to Boston, they usually listed with the broker who had sold them the place. In recent years, this broker had often been Wendy Heatherton, who’d gotten her start in real estate working for me.

Wendy had just moved here from New Jersey when her husband divorced her. I hired her, first as a receptionist, then later, after she was licensed, as an associate broker. I taught her everything I knew about the business. She paid me back by stealing my best listings and taking them with her to Sotheby’s while I was at Hazelden. She’d had a banner year, while I’d had one of my slowest since I opened my own company.

*   *   *

I tried calling Frank Getchell when I returned to my office, but he wasn’t there. He has no answering machine. He just figures if you need him that badly, you’ll go out and find him. Which I did, quite by happenstance, that afternoon, when I was filling up my car at the Mobil station just outside the Crossing. Frankie pulled up to the diesel tank behind me with his bright orange pickup, and when he got out and saw me, he shouted, “Hildy. How ah ya?”

Frankie is one of the last descendants of the oldest family in Wendover. It’s said that Wendover’s first resident was Amos Getchell, who had some kind of falling-out with the settlement down in Salem and had paddled or sailed up here and lived for several years among the local Anawam Indians. He spent his first winter living in a massive English ale barrel down in what is now known as Getchell’s Cove. He hooked up with an Anawam girl, and now all the Getchells have some Native American blood in them, because it was several generations before the family finally started integrating with the colonists who had begun settling along the waterways that led inland from the coast.

I’ve known Frankie Getchell all my life. He’s three years older than I am. He still lives in the house he grew up in—the dark old saltbox up on the rise. It’s an eyesore and many have complained about the condition in which he keeps his place. There have even been zoning meetings devoted entirely to Frankie, much to his pleasure.

Frankie’s house is falling apart, paint is peeling from the decaying clapboards, and the roof sags. Strewn about his lawn are old pieces of plumbing (including about half a dozen toilets), railroad ties, pieces of architecture—lintels, fireplace mantels, stone slabs, wooden beams, balusters—and even a few monstrous oil tanks that he’s salvaged over the years. Apart from his salvage/construction business, Frankie is also the chief of our town’s volunteer fire crew, and he rescues some old fixtures if a house burns and nobody wants them. If you ask him, as I have on occasion, why he has a charred wooden beam lying, still smoldering, on his front lawn, he’s genuinely perplexed.

“It’s perfectly good” is his reply. “Why would you wanna throw away a perfectly good thing like that?”

It’s all “perfectly good,” and it’s all for sale, all except for the house and property. His weedy front lawn hosts this perennial yard sale, while off to the side, he keeps his fleet of five of the oldest, ricketiest pickup trucks you’ll find within a hundred-mile radius. We have no municipal garbage service here in Wendover, so you can either haul your own garbage to the dump or hire Frankie Getchell to come get it. I’d say 80 percent of Wendover’s 2,800 residents have contracted with Frankie to have his crew haul their garbage for fifty dollars a month, which adds up quite nicely—you do the math. In the winter, during snowstorms, his guys stay up all night drinking and plowing out Frankie’s customers—again, most of the people in Wendover. Frank also offers property management and caretaking, as he had done for the Leightons’ pony farm, as well as landscaping and carpentry services. Everyone in Wendover refers to him as the “fix-it man.” You can call on him and his crew to do just about anything that needs to be done in and around a house. His business thrives, but he appears to put not a penny of his earnings back into his own home or vehicles. His trucks regularly break down on the side of the road.

When I drive clients by Frankie’s property, some ask about the “character” who lives in “that place.” I’m sure they imagine some poor, old, uneducated hermit. No, Frankie Getchell is whip-smart and easily one of the richest men in Wendover, or he was, until the wonderful McAllisters moved to town.

Frankie’s property extends far behind his house; actually, it goes all the way down the rise to the estuary. He has 120 prime acres there, plus another twelve priceless acres that border my property along the river. The property has always belonged to his family. On the far side of his riverfront property are about fifty acres of wetland that can never be developed and that have been deeded over to the Wendover Land Trust. Sharon Rice and the Land Trust officials have been trying for years to get him to at least deed them the rights to his higher (thus buildable) riverfront land after his death.

“That way, nobody will ever develop it,” Sharon has said, pleading with him. “It’ll be protected in perpetuity, just as it is today.”

“Now, why would I care what people decide to do with that land after I’m dead?” he always shoots back.

Frankie pays very little tax on the property because he has most of it registered as farmland. The acreage behind his house has been a Christmas tree farm for as long as I can remember. Plus, apparently he has some kind of tax protection due to his Native American ancestry. But it was mostly the clutter on his lawn that caused some of his neighbors to bring a complaint about him before the zoning board a few years ago. Wendover Rise is residentially zoned.

Frank Getchell clearly operates a business—in the summer months, a very ugly, noisy, and smelly business. Often the crews finish garbage collection too late to go to the dump, so sometimes they leave the stinking garbage in the trucks for entire weekends. In the winter, there are actual traffic jams up there during the weeks before Christmas, because Frankie’s farm is a “cut your own tree” place, and people come from far and wide to traipse through the snow and choose a tree and cut it down themselves.

Some neighbors wanted him to “cease and desist.”

It’s funny in a town like this, the way some newcomers want to believe they’re tight with the locals—the real townies. Alan Harrison, a big-time Boston litigation lawyer who has a weekend place up here, is one of those, and he offered his services pro bono to Frankie, believing, as many do, that Frankie just barely manages to scrape by. And most of the town showed up at the zoning meeting to offer their support to good old Frankie Getchell, poor old persecuted Frank. They didn’t really need to. Frankie was within his rights. He was grandfathered in, having run his business long before the zoning laws were written up.

Normally, I would have just waved back to Frankie but this time I needed to talk with him about Cassie’s place, so after I finished pumping my gas, I walked over to where he was leaning against his rusty old truck. The old Ford was idling and music was blaring from his radio. Frankie grinned at me as I approached. I didn’t care for the way he continued grinning at me as he filled his tank. We have a complicated little history, Frankie and me, a history that he finds amusing and I find, in parts, humiliating, which amuses him even more.

“Kinks, Hil,” he said.

“What?”

“On the radio.” He nodded at the cab of his truck. “The Kinks. Ya ever listen to this station, Hildy? They play all the oldies. All the good ones.”

“Not really. Hey, I called you this morning, Frank.”

“Yeah? What’s up?”

“I’m trying to sell Patch and Cassie Dwight’s house—Ralph Dwight’s kid, Patch?”

“Yeah, I know Patch.”

“Well, the place needs some work. And they have a boy with … problems … you know.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s retarded. See him all the time down the market with Patch.”

“Yes, little Jake has very serious problems and they need to move to Newton so he can go to a special school. Anyway, I might have a buyer, but they want to see the place this weekend. It’s a wreck. It’s a small house, but it needs some touch-up work on the drywall. The whole interior needs to be painted.…”

“Well, I got all my guys workin’ on a job down Manchester this week, Hil. We’re clearin’ some land for a new house. It’s a big job, got all my guys on it.”

“
All
your guys?”

Frank Getchell’s “crews” are a combination of local barflys, a smattering of undocumented Mexicans, the occasional ex-con, and, each summer, a sizable infantry of high-school and college boys who consider it a manly rite of passage to be on one of Getchell’s crews. They drive, tanned and shirtless, around town in trucks, hauling trailers that rattle with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and other landscaping equipment. Or they stand, again, shirtless, gleaming with sweat, on a ladder, painting the exterior of a house and shouting out whenever a girl they know walks or drives past. At lunchtime, all the beat-up Getchell trucks can be found at the North Beach parking lot, where the guys eat their lunch on the boulders. My daughters and their friends always tried to be in bikinis at noon on North Beach when they weren’t working on weekdays. But now it was fall and these boys had gone back to school.

Frankie shrugged and replaced the gas nozzle. When he looked at the price on the tank, he whistled. “Look at that, Hildy. Almost ninety bucks to fill that sonuvabitch.”

“Hey, that reminds me. Somebody asked me a while back if you’d be interested in selling your riverfront lot. The one next to me. I’ve tried to call you a few times about this over the summer, but … no message machine.”

Frankie squinted up at the sun and then looked at me. “Who wants it? A developer?”

“No. He’s a businessman. From Boston.”

“What does he want it for? Listen, the Who. Now, that’s a wicked good song, Hil.” Frank reached inside and turned up the volume on his radio.

“What do you think he wants it for, Frank?” I shouted over the music. “He wants to put a house on it. That acreage is really valuable. I could come up with a sale price for you that would—”

“Nah. I need it. I like to fish there.” Music was blaring from the cab of his truck and Frankie started crooning along with the tune while screwing his gas cap in place.

“Oh, Frank, I never liked this song, and you’re just making it worse with your awful caterwauling,” I said, covering my ears and wincing. The man had no sense at all. His property was worth several million dollars and he wanted to keep it so he could fish. My commission on a sale like that would sort out my mortgage situation quite nicely.

Frank laughed and bellowed over the noisy radio, “You don’t like my singin’, Hil?”

“You’ve got some rusty-sounding chimes there, Frank; only your friends will tell you the truth. You never could carry a tune, now that I think of it.” This made Frank laugh even more. He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and was gazing off across the road, his shoulders shaking merrily.

“C’mon, Frank, don’t you even want me to ask him how much he’d be willing to pay?”

Frank leaned into his window and lowered the volume of the music, saying, “Well, sure, ask him. I wouldn’t mind knowin’ what he’d be willin’ to pay.”

“Oh, forget it. I’m not gonna waste his time. You’re sure you don’t know anybody who wants to make a few extra bucks this week?”

“How soon do they need it done?”

“I’m planning to show it on Saturday.”

“Did I see you out swimmin’ last night, Hildy?” Frank asked. He glanced at me quickly, then down at the ground, but he had that insipid grin going again.

“What? Swimming last night? No. I mean … I suppose … you might have. Sometimes I go for a little dip. If it’s a nice night. Yes, now that I think of it, I did wander down for a little swim.…”

“Yeah, I thought I saw you. I was out there, too. In my waydahs. Night fishin’. I thought I saw you. Kind of chilly last night for swimmin’.”