Three Story House: A Novel (31 page)

Isobel winced at the nickname, which over the years had been made ugly by the snark of tabloid headlines—especially during that time when she’d been dating Hollywood men. “You’re late,” she said.

“Come on now. You can’t hold that against us,” he said crossing the narrow sidewalk with short choppy steps. His heavily muscled body worked against him—the inner thighs of his suit pants were worn shiny from rubbing against each other.

She stepped down toward him, fighting the urge to be bitchy because they were late and he’d insulted her. “I won’t.” She forced the smile back onto her face.

“I’ll hold you against me then,” Craig said, enveloping her in a hug that she hadn’t been prepared for. It took her breath away.

“You look different,” Isobel said when he let her go. Then quickly, so he wouldn’t be insulted, she added, “Have you lost weight? Or maybe it has to do with confidence? You seem like a man grown into himself.”

He kept his arm around her. She felt the metallic coolness of his wedding ring tap against her arm. “I am thinner.”

The other people he’d brought hovered behind him. She wondered what had happened in the intervening months to change Craig so markedly. It didn’t take much—often finding a bit of power or having an affair brought out a new cockiness in people.

“I’m Isobel,” she said, extending her hand to the small, thin woman who cowered behind Craig. To the older bearded man next to her, she said, “Jake, it’s good to see you again. I thought the camera work on the special was exquisitely done.” The woman introduced herself as Kitty and indicated that she’d be handling the sound, lighting, and such until the full crew arrived, and then she’d be field producing. Wanting to alter the tone of the conversation, Isobel took a deep breath. “I was worried about you guys.”

“Bags took forever coming off the fucking puddle jumper we had to take from Atlanta,” Craig said, taking a pack of gum from his front shirt pocket and slapping it against his palm as if it held cigarettes. “Flew right over Memphis and then had to get on another plane to fly back.”

She took the stick of gum he offered. “Makes you wish they’d given you a parachute.”

“Or a private jet.” He turned toward Jake and shooed him toward the vehicle where they’d left the equipment on the sidewalk.

“Maybe if I can make you some money, that’ll change,” Isobel said, looking over the producer’s head to see what equipment they’d brought with them. Three wasn’t a large crew.

Craig continued to talk while the woman hovered somewhere in between Jake and Craig. “The numbers were good. Real good and if this goes the way I think”—he rubbed his hands together—“it might just be private next time. Think of it. The two of us in one of those executive Cessnas.”

“I don’t know if I’ll go back to Cali,” she said.

“Right, then. We’ll get all of that figured out,” he said, walking around the porch and inspecting the exterior of the entryway. He cracked his knuckles repeatedly and then took out a small notebook and, with a pencil no longer than his pinky, he started making notes.

Jake closed up the SUV and waved Kitty over to help him with the equipment. She was a petite woman who had the androgynous frame of a teenager waiting on puberty. Jake had the look of a man who’d been filming other people’s lives too long. He wore belted jean shorts and sported a beard that whorled and matted like steel wool. Isobel figured he’d shave it before too long. Even in September, Memphis was unbearably hot. It wasn’t the heat but the stickiness that made facial hair impractical. As if reading her thoughts, he scratched at his beard and sighed.

“You aren’t filming today, are you?” she asked, slipping past Craig, who’d become fascinated by the windows on the front porch. Over the years, she’d learned it was better to have the cameraman like you than not.

Jake grunted, but before he could speak, Kitty, who’d loaded herself up with equipment that weighed more than she did, popped up. “Oh, my gosh. I’ve wanted to meet you forever. We’re not filming
you
today. Just the house, and Jake wants to make sure he has enough lights or rather the right type of lights. The grip is coming later, but still that’s my job today to take light readings. Of course, we’ll have to come back and do them all throughout the day.”

She continued talking even as she moved toward Isobel, arms extended in a gesture of embrace despite the equipment on her shoulders. Isobel bent down and hugged the woman, offering appropriate responses to her running commentary. “Hmmm . . . I see . . . Of course.”

“She’s a talker,” Jake said.

Kitty appeared not to hear him. She talked on, adding details about the last show she’d worked on and how she’d never been on location, as she trailed Isobel back up to the house and set some of the equipment on the porch.

In the face of such relentless enthusiasm, Isobel’s energy escaped her. She hadn’t slept well in weeks. At night instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, she counted possible outcomes of this production, of Tom, of Lizzie, of Elyse. Her brain hadn’t worked so hard since learning how to solve for X when she studied algebra.

Craig had let himself inside Spite House, leaving the door ajar. “What a house,” Kitty said, craning her neck to peer at the small balconies that extended from each of the floors. “Is that a room? On top of the house?”

“Cupola. It’s an Italian feature, dates back a couple hundred years,” Jake said, setting the rest of the equipment on the porch. “I worked on a few projects with Vila. Got to know my way around architecture. It was in the middle of being repaired when we were here last time.”

“You should see the kitchen,” she said, opening the door for them. “I mean the whole house is under construction, but the kitchen is my mess.”

Craig appeared on the stairs, his girth making the rise seem even more precarious. Isobel nodded before continuing to explain the layout of the house to Kitty.

“What did we film when we were here last?” Craig asked, leaning against the banister in a way that made it groan out a complaint.

“I’m not sure that’s secure,” she said, gesturing for the producer to move back. The special had been filmed in the spring, and all of the women had been shot on the porch or in the backyard with the Mississippi River behind them. “They did lots with the house—really played it up.”

“I’m picturing a floor plan in the opening of your reality show. This place is impossible. It’s like something out of a set designer’s nightmare. Who built it?”

“Lizzie’s grandfather.”

“Lizzie? I thought it was your grandfather.”

“We’re step-cousins, although close as any family. She doesn’t even know who her father is.”

Craig narrowed his eyes. “She’s the soccer star, right?”

Isobel felt as if she’d stumbled. It’d been too long since she’d been around cunning people. Memphis was a town without guile, but sharks like Craig, assholes from Los Angeles, were dangerous. Here he was pretending not to know what he ought to. She realized that she’d given him too much information and tried to move past it. “We’ve got blueprints of the house if that would help with the graphics.”

He made more notes in his book. “Nah. I’ve got it.” He told Jake and Kitty what he needed and instructed Isobel to relax until they’d been through the house.

“Have at it,” she said. “There’s nobody here but me.”

Kitty turned and pressed her cheek to Isobel’s as if bidding her farewell. “I love this place,” she said in a fierce whisper before disappearing up the stairs with such gracefulness that none of the treads groaned out their usual squeaks. Isobel could see why the girl had become a sound technician.

In the kitchen, Isobel took the jug of sun tea that Elyse had set in the window that morning and poured it over ice. Her cousin appeared to be recovering from the wedding situation, as she and Lizzie had taken to calling what had happened in Boston. In the last two weeks, she’d started cooking classes, which meant that they hardly saw her. When Isobel had her heart broken the first time, her mother had told her the only way to mend it was to get on with life. Waiting around only made grief insufferable.

Isobel’s heart had been broken so many times she needed only a day or so to get over rejection. Before meeting Tom, there had been no one serious. Nine months of stand-him-till-you’re-bored-with-him, as Isobel liked to think of her one-plus-night stands. The stuff with Tom was Lizzie’s fault. She and T. J. were the type of couple who made you want to get into a relationship—like watching a triathlon made you think you could do one. Lizzie and T. J. were fit and purposeful. Isobel had sworn off relationships after the dating horror show that had been her late teens and early twenties when people had still expected great things from her. She dated older men, established in their careers. More often than not their agents or handlers arranged it. She’d fallen hard for two or three of them, and then there were those awful months when she’d been spectacularly dumped by a man whom most of America was in love with.

And that had been the beginning of the end of everything in Isobel’s life. His verdict that she wasn’t good enough seemed to pervade casting directors’ assessments of her acting and her potential to move from the small screen to the big screen. She stopped getting calls, stopped being asked to read scripts. All of it, in a matter of months, dried up. There had been precious little in the five years since that ended. Her last movie—a bit part in an indie she’d done in an attempt at being a grown-up—had been panned and then hadn’t even been released in the theaters. One of those straight-to-DVD flicks. Not to mention that she’d stupidly agreed to a frontal nudity scene, which people used stills from for pornography sites. Her agent didn’t speak to her for more than a year after that. He’d told her not to do it, warned her about the consequences. The first she’d heard from him since the indie flop had been when he’d called about the
Where Are They Now?
show.

Isobel finished her tea and put the glass in the sink. She listened to the strangers moving around in what she’d come to think of as her place. What would they think of this mess of a house? Looking around the kitchen, she tried to see it through their eyes. The floor, which she’d been admiring moments before, looked crafty instead of craftsman. The metal cupboards would be beautiful when they were actually refinished. She’d arranged with an auto detailer to powder coat the metal a beautiful off-white color with flecks of gold in it to draw out the colors of the floor. Right now, though, they were rusty and hung crooked so several didn’t close. Benny’s repairs appeared to have been made out of necessity and as cheaply as possible. There were holes in the plaster from when Elton had rewired. If it weren’t for T. J.’s constantly watching Benny, they’d never have a hope of meeting the code requirements.

Looking again at the cupboards, the need to take action filled her with a restless energy. What could it hurt to begin? She found a drill motor charging in the corner and without thinking through the consequences or even making a plan, she began to unscrew the hinges on the cupboard doors. She started at the top, standing on the counter to reach the cupboards attached to the upper portion of the wall.

The dust on top of them was two inches thick. She supposed no one had been up here in years to see the tops of things. If she stood on her tiptoes, she could peek over the lip of the cupboards, which had been topped with a molding of sorts to make them appear more elegant. A few small boxes nestled behind the decorative frame of the cupboards and were covered with a layer of the greasy dust that coated the top of the molding. A grapevine-patterned border ran along the length of the wall between the ceiling and the cupboards. One of the seams had come unstuck and the corner flared out from the wall. Isobel stretched for it, grasping it between the tips of her fingers and pulling at it. The brittle glue on the back gave way easily. In less time than it had taken her to climb onto the counter, she’d pulled away an entire length of the hideous border.

Laughing, she spun on one foot and nearly lost her balance. From behind her she heard clapping and turned to see both her cousins standing near the back door. They’d just come from the hairdresser, and Elyse sported a pixie cut that emphasized the sweetness of her face. Before she could compliment her, Isobel flailed about and then grabbed hard onto the upper cabinet.

“Careful,” Lizzie said, stepping forward.

She smiled at them, meaning to let them know it would all be fine, but instead, in the half second it took for her to regain her balance, the cabinet tore loose from the plaster wall and crashed down onto the counter. The momentum threw Isobel off balance and she fell from the counter, half landing on Lizzie, who had rushed forward to try to catch her. Elyse screamed and then the sound of shattering glass echoed throughout the kitchen.

“Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” Isobel asked Lizzie.

“I don’t think so,” she said, putting her hands down and struggling to stand up. “My leg.”

Isobel held her breath, not wanting the worst to have happened. Lizzie stood, but carefully and without putting weight on her right leg.

“It’ll be fine,” Elyse said, tugging at the ends of her newly shortened hair. Her voice was low and calm. “Take a step. I’m sure it’s fine. You didn’t land on your knee.”

Lizzie looked at both of them, her eyes wet. She took a step forward and then another. She walked across the room and then did a few jumping jacks. “It’s fine,” she said. “Fine, fine fine.”

Elyse smiled and then looked up at the beaded curtain, which still rustled with movement. “Who are they?” she asked.

Jake stood in the entryway, his camera on his shoulder. Craig stood to his left, giving him hand signals about what to film and where to focus the lens. The girl Kitty had crept around to the glass windows and pulled the shades down. She stood almost behind the refrigerator so she’d be nearly invisible in any wide shots of the kitchen.

“Those are the people we’re going to pretend not to see while they shoot a sizzle reel.”

“Starting now?” Lizzie asked.

“Guess so,” Isobel said, getting to her feet and surveying the damage. The cupboard itself had dented like an auto fender when it hit the ground. She cursed. The cupboards were impossible to replace—the manufacturer, St. Charles Steel, didn’t even exist anymore. She kicked at the now warped metal and looked at the wall where they’d been attached. The plaster behind them had torn away in large chunks, revealing the lathe and through that the clapboard of the house. A dozen jelly jars were broken in bits across the tile floor. Isobel’s sense of accomplishment at having started a project faded. Her face reddened as she surveyed the disaster. “Were these your grandmother’s?”