Three Story House: A Novel (39 page)

To her surprise, food sounded good to Isobel, too. “I’m starving,” she said, recognizing the feeling she normally killed with a cup of coffee or a stick of gum, “and I’m not going to stop eating until my pants are too tight to sit comfortably.”

The week after Thanksgiving passed in a blur. It surprised Isobel that instead of dwelling on Craig and the potential for disaster, her thoughts most often turned to Tom. She couldn’t figure out where they stood. She introduced him to her father the few times they went to his store to get supplies, but they hadn’t been alone since their disastrous pretend date. Isobel and her father worked their way through the list of repairs that T. J. said needed to be done for them to get their final occupancy certificate for the house. Lizzie refused to talk about her father. She’d drawn a red circle around December 21 on the kitchen calendar, which everyone assumed was the day her family was coming home from Russia, but no one dared ask her about it.

“We’re in the eye of the storm,” Elyse had said when Isobel tried to talk to her about Lizzie’s non-reaction to the news she’d waited her whole life to hear.

“But is it normal?” Isobel had asked.

“There’s no normal,” Elyse said. “The thing you want is healthy.”

“Fine, then is it healthy?”

“Hell no. But what’s she going to do? Write a letter? Have it out with them on e-mail or on the phone? She’s doing the only thing she can do.”

“Wait?” Isobel said.

“Wait,” Elyse said.

These conversations and others emotionally paralyzed Isobel so that instead of dealing with the problem of Tom, or Craig, or Lizzie, she turned to her longest-standing impasse—her father. While under the house sistering the joints that Benny had weakened, she asked about all the stuff she hadn’t had the courage to before. Seeing Lizzie act as if she were the living dead scared Isobel into getting over her own fear with her father. She remembered part of a poem one of her stylists had taped to the mirror. It was one of those addresses to young people. At the time she hadn’t thought much of it, except for one line that sometimes appeared in her mind as if someone had whispered it into her ear.
“What you fear will not go away: it will take you into/ yourself and bless you and keep you.”

“What happened?” she asked her father—or rather his feet as that was all she could see of him in the crawl space.

“With your mother?”

She liked that he knew what she was asking about. It made her feel like she had someone on her side, like her cousins. Their shorthand way of speaking with one another gave her a feeling of protection.

“If you ever get serious about anyone, it would be good to remember that it is impossible to live separately and try to stay married.” He shimmied forward on his stomach and then rolled onto his back. “Pass me the level.”

She rolled onto her side to reach the pile of tools they’d dragged into the small space and sifted through it until she found what he needed. “Seems obvious. But why did you? I was making enough money that we all could have lived together, especially when the boys were out of the house.”

“It wasn’t about the money.” He marked the beams with a pencil and then passed the level back to her. “I kept thinking you’d give it up. That your mother would see the foolishness of it all and come back home. Instead, that world and, honey, forgive me for saying this because I know it is important to you, but that world isn’t real. Your mom forgot that.”

As they busied themselves with the work of attaching the new support beam, their conversation dwindled to requests and directions. Isobel’s mother had remained in Hollywood. The first relationship hadn’t lasted and neither had the ones after that. She took up Pilates and looked younger than she ever had when Isobel had still considered her to be a mother. She dated a rich man long enough to convince him to invest in a Pilates studio located between a casting agency and a Starbucks. It did well. The first year Nora’s Pilates was open, the “N” fell off the sign. Her mother never replaced it. Sometimes in a casting call Isobel would find herself in a conversation with another twenty-something actress who extolled the virtues of Ora and her method for removing stubborn fat deposits and it wouldn’t be until after the conversation was over that Isobel would realize that they’d been talking about her mother.

Her father interrupted her thoughts. “Have you seen this?”

She crawled around the tool pile so she could look over his shoulder. On the old beam, someone had carved a lotus blossom and underneath it were the initials R + M. She ran her fingers over the scarred wood. “Must be Lizzie’s grandparents. Melanie and Roger.”

“I thought he built the house before he met her,” Isobel’s father said. “There’s another one on this beam—you have to look in the same spot, by the joist.”

Isobel found eight carvings—all similar but with slight variations caused by the wood or the knife used. “Maybe he did it afterward, when he worked on the house.”

“That’s what was missing between your mom and me,” her father said, running his fingers across the carving on his beam. Isobel had moved toward the front of the house and she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. She held her breath waiting for him to elaborate.

“You want a relationship to last? That person has to be in your thoughts even when they’re not around. All that business about absence making the heart grow fonder. It’s a good test. If you don’t miss a person when they’re gone, don’t marry them.”

“It’s not that simple,” Isobel said, thinking of her own relationships.

“Sure it is,” her father said. “You know I told your brothers this before—explained to them that what they were looking for in a partner was exactly that. Sure you want to be compatible and sure you want to want the same things, but honestly, it’s a good test. It should be the only test. Think of Roger down here working on the house and his wife above him, making dinner or cleaning. He missed her so much and she was right upstairs. That’s what you want: someone who’ll carve your initials into floor joists.”

“And you never felt that for mom?” Isobel asked.

“She never felt that for me. And the hard part is I always knew it. I just didn’t think she’d leave me.”

“It’s getting cold,” Isobel said. She pulled a tarp over the tool pile and army-crawled to the exit. Her father followed. Although she hadn’t spoken it, what she’d wanted to tell her father was that her mother had left all of them. It wasn’t just him she didn’t love enough.

“What are your plans?” her father asked, dusting off his jeans.

“Plans?” Isobel couldn’t figure out what part of her life he was talking about.

“I mean for when Lizzie’s parents come home in a few weeks.” He brought his arm around her.

“I thought I’d do Christmas with the brothers and then head back to Los Angeles. The house will be mine again in January once the renter moves out.”

“It’ll be nice to have you closer.” Her father looked as if he might say more, but instead he tousled her hair and they let themselves into the kitchen and warmed up with coffee even though it was late afternoon. Elyse joined them and then, after the sun had nearly dropped into the horizon, Lizzie appeared, covered in grass and mud from her soccer practice.

“We should go out,” Elyse said. “Why waste a good caffeine buzz?”

“Too much trouble,” Lizzie said. “I’d have to shower.”

“Doesn’t Tom have a show tonight?” Elyse asked.

Isobel nodded and cut her eyes at her father. She’d planned to take him and show off her boyfriend, but their conversation underneath the house had exhausted her. It had her second-guessing everything with Tom. Did she miss him when he was gone? Did he miss her? Were relationships even possible? “He’s at Minglewood.”

Her father brightened at the mention of Tom. “I’d like that. I still feel cheated that I didn’t get to have fake Thanksgiving with him.”

Isobel wasn’t sure she wanted them to get to know each other—the act implied more intimacy than she felt with Tom. “I didn’t think you’d want to go,” she said. “It’ll be young people. I mean kids, really still in college.”

Somehow it was decided that everyone would go. T. J. arrived and they all squeezed into his Suburban, arriving at Minglewood early enough that Isobel and her father had time to chat with Tom before a crowd formed. Her father asked him about his guitar, and the two spoke as if they’d always known each other. Watching them, Isobel felt her heart expand in her chest—there was something in the way Tom looked at her father that conveyed respect and interest. Although Isobel didn’t like to admit it, she’d been thrown by what Tom had said about being a dad. She didn’t care that he was recovering. You couldn’t shoulder a purse in Hollywood without bumping into someone who was in a twelve-step program.

“Do you like him?” her father asked.

The room had filled and had that overheated atmosphere that happened when crowds gathered in the winter. When he was performing, Tom looked taller and wider. He filled the vast expanse of the stage in a way that he didn’t in everyday life. His voice wasn’t perfect—or rather it didn’t have that too-perfect trained quality that too many alt indie singers had. His voice reminded her mostly of Memphis, which is to say it had grit to it and the sort of quality that came with knowing people didn’t like you but that was okay. Isobel had yet to meet a Memphian who didn’t tell her what was wrong with their city, but they said it the way her grandmother used to tell people to stay out of the kitchen if they couldn’t stand the heat.

“What’s not to like?” she said. Even as she answered her father, she was trying to put Tom to the test he’d told her earlier. She tried to think about a time when he hadn’t been in her life. What it had been like the last few weeks with the distance between them.

“He seems to have all the qualities,” her father said.

“He’s got a kid,” Isobel said.

“That’s tough. You have to see what kind of father he is and then you have to know enough about yourself to know whether you can handle being the other mother.”

“It’s too much to think about,” Isobel said, turning her eyes away from the stage and watching Lizzie and T. J. together. He had his hand in her back pocket. That was a new habit, one that had come out of the news about Lizzie’s father. She looked contented if not happy and after a moment, Lizzie put her head on T. J.’s shoulder.

“I think they’ll make it,” she said.

Her father nodded. “She’ll need him and you guys too.”

There was something wistful about his voice. “You aren’t staying?”

“I don’t think I should,” he said. “You know how sibling relationships are. I’m not sure mine and Jim’s can stand the strain of this. If I were here when she tells them she knows, I’d have to take sides and I don’t want to do that.”

“Have you told him that she knows?”

Her father looked away from her.

“Dad.”

“I had to, honey. He’s my brother, and the only way they’ll solve this is by walking into it with some preparation.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, knowing without having spoken to Lizzie about it that her cousin needed the element of surprise to get the truth out of her parents. “They aren’t going to tell her what really happened.”

“Do you think they even know?” her father asked. “That’s the myth—that adults understand or can explain themselves. We can’t, you know. Nobody can.”

Isobel shook her head. She didn’t want to fight with her father. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Elyse leaning over the bar. In a flash, she considered all that had happened to them this year, and knew what her father said was true. She also knew they were now adults in every sense of the word.

“Wanna dance?” her father asked.

“Nobody dances,” she said.

“No matter.” He took her hand and found enough of a four-four tempo in Tom’s song about a smoky bar to start waltzing. She remembered dancing with him like this as a child at someone’s wedding. It was a surprise talent that her father, who never wore a suit, should be so light on his feet. He’d taught her at a young age that everyone could dance if they had a strong partner to follow. He whirled her around the back of the crowd and people gladly made room for them.

The music changed without Isobel’s realizing it, and in a moment Tom had transformed himself into Elvis and was singing “Until It’s Time For You To Go.” Her father smiled and with just a twitch of his arm telegraphed his intention to spin her out. Isobel relaxed her body and followed her father’s lead. As the song ended with Tom singing about staying, her father dipped her, and the crowd, not sure why the song had changed or who Isobel and her father were, broke into the sort of applause audiences reserve for magicians. Isobel felt as if a trick had been played on her and that because of it, her whole world was about to shift.

C
ontrary to T. J.’s assurances that he’d handpicked a colleague who would pass them, the code inspector looked nitpicky. He fussed with his tie as he walked through the house—clipping and unclipping his tie tack and reaching down to dust off his shoes and his pant legs after walking through each of the rooms. Isobel kept as close to the man’s elbow as he allowed, which gave her the occasional opportunity to read from his clipboard.

“How’s it look?” Elyse mouthed when they entered the kitchen.

Isobel gave her a quick thumbs-up. They’d been through the house from top to bottom and she felt as if they were almost finished. He had the option of checking the crawl space, but it wasn’t mandatory. Isobel guessed that what T. J. had meant when he said this particular man was easy was that he didn’t like to get dirty, which meant he didn’t go above and beyond. Her father’s rule had been to never wear a shirt that wasn’t already stained when he went to a job. This man took the opposite approach. He’d been impressed with their electrical box—by how ordered it had been. Isobel silently thanked Elton for the extra work he’d put in. From the pocket of her voluminous skirt, her phone rang. She glanced at the inspector, who appeared to be looking at the view of the Mississippi. Sliding the phone out, she glanced at it and then without realizing it, she answered it quickly—afraid as she was when fishing that at any moment the fish could jump the line.