Moving Can Be Murder (8 page)

“Are you sure about this?” asked Jim,
holding the listing agreement and good old Charlie Brown in a death
grip. “I’m not forcing you to move. I know how much you love this
house.”

“I’m sure I want to start having new
adventures with you as soon as possible,” I said, neatly
sidestepping his question. “It’ll be fun to fill in the details as
we go along. Now, sign.” I held out a pen. “I already did.”

After a romantic dinner and a delightful
interlude in our Jacuzzi – I don’t have to tell you everything! --
I called Nancy to tell her it was official. We were listing the
house for sale.

And that’s when our troubles really
started.

Chapter 9

The first time a man got into trouble,

he put the blame on a woman.

“I thought you loved our house,” I said to
Nancy. “All you’re doing now is finding things to criticize about
it.”

“You’ve got to stop thinking about this as
your house, Carol,” said my crackerjack real estate agent and
former best friend. “I was afraid you’d be like this. That’s why I
was hesitant to take this listing. You’ve got to let go and let me
do my job. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is selling your
house.”

It was a few days after Valentine’s Day.
Nancy and Marcia Fischer, the “staging expert” from Superior
Interiors (“Your Home, Only Better”), a local upscale furniture and
design studio, were going through my house from top to bottom,
scrutinizing every room, opening every closet door, and taking
copious notes. Marcia was also photographing each room with her
digital camera.

I felt like I had been invaded.

Lucy and Ethel followed us from room to
room, probably checking to be sure Marcia – whom I disliked on
sight for no reason other than the fact that she rolled her eyes at
Nancy every time we went into another room – wasn’t swiping
anything.

“You need to remove all these personal
photographs,” said Marcia, surveying my beautiful living room and
its built-in bookcases with obvious disdain. “Buyers have to be
able to imagine themselves in a house. No one wants to look at
pictures of someone else’s family.” She looked at Nancy, who nodded
in agreement.

“The dogs will definitely have to leave when
we have the open house on St. Patrick’s Day,” Marcia continued. “As
a matter of fact, they should be out of the house for at least a
week before the open house to get rid of that awful doggy odor.”
She wrinkled up her nose in distaste. “No agent’s going to show a
house to a potential buyer with this stench.”

Stench! What? No way. I was a meticulous
housekeeper. Now I was really angry.

Before I hauled off and slugged her, Nancy
intervened. “Marcia’s right, I’m afraid. You’re just so used to
living with dogs that you don’t notice it. But believe me, a
potential buyer will.

“It never bothered me, though,” she added,
trying to soothe me. “You know how much I love the girls.” To prove
it, Nancy reached down and gave each of them a scratch on their
silky heads.

I was momentarily pacified. I guess I knew
in my heart that Marcia and Nancy were right. But I also knew I
couldn’t stand hearing my beautiful house criticized so
ruthlessly.

“Nancy, you’re my best friend. I trust you
to do your job,” I said, trying to convince myself that I really
meant what I was saying. I didn’t say a word about Marcia, though.
I’m not a complete hypocrite.

“The dogs and I are going to get out of your
way. You figure out what needs to be done, make your list, and Jim
and I’ll do what you say.”

I held up my right hand and said, “Girl
Scout’s honor.” I hope she didn’t notice that my left hand was
behind my back. Those fingers were crossed.

“You want to price the house much too low,”
My Beloved sputtered at Nancy the next evening. The three of us
were seated around our kitchen table, where we’d all sat together
hundreds of times before. This time, though, we weren’t friends
getting together for a friendly cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
We were there to hammer out the final details of the house listing.
This was a business meeting, and Jim meant business.

He leaned forward in his chair, breathing
hard, like he usually does when money is involved. “There is no way
I’m letting this property be listed for such a low price.”

Keep your mouth shut, I told myself. Let the
two of them hammer it out.

Unless they came to blows, of course. Then
I’d have to break it up.

I had a momentary, cheery thought. Maybe if
Jim couldn’t agree with Nancy about a listing price, he wouldn’t
want to sell the house.

Yeah, and then he’d keel over from a heart
attack when he was shoveling the sidewalk or mowing the lawn.

So much for that fantasy. No way that was
going to happen, if I could prevent it.

Nancy reached into her designer briefcase,
pulled out a sheaf of papers, and slapped them on the table in
front of Jim. I had the sneaky feeling she wanted to slap him with
the papers, and was working hard to restrain herself. Maybe listing
the house with a close friend hadn’t been such a good idea after
all. Too late now. And I knew she would’ve killed me if Jim and I
had listed the house with any other real estate agent.

“These are comps from houses that have sold
in this neighborhood in the past two years,” Nancy said to Jim. “I
want you to study them carefully, and see if you notice a
trend.”

My Beloved pushed his glasses on top of his
head and squinted to read the information. “You see,” he said after
just a few seconds, “these comps prove my point. Most of these
houses sold for over a million dollars.”

“Look again, Jim,” said Nancy. “You’re
missing the point. All the ones that sold for over a million
dollars were newer homes.” She pointed out three houses she had
highlighted in yellow. “The antiques all sold for considerably
less. The highest one, four months ago, sold for eight hundred
twenty-five thousand dollars. It was on the market for over a year,
and the sellers had to come way down on their asking price to
finally get it sold. Buyers today want open floor plans and
skylights, not cozy rooms with low ceilings and uneven floors. This
isn’t going to be an easy sell. You’ve got to price a house right
in this competitive market. This property should be listed in the
sevens.”

I could see the calculator in Jim’s brain
figure out the bottom line. He looked at me for guidance, but no
way was I going to get in the middle of this one. He’d always been
the financial genius in the family.

I raised my eyebrows, then sent him a look
which said, “Whatever you do is fine with me.”

My Beloved sighed in defeat. “Seven hundred
seventy-five thousand dollars,” he said. “And not a penny
less.”

“Exactly the figure I was thinking of,” said
Nancy. She winked at me, and handed him a pen “You’ll see that I’m
right, Jim. Leave everything to me.”

For the next few weeks, Jim and I worked
like, forgive the expression, dogs. We rented a storage unit in
town, and I was assigned the job of packing away all our personal
items. Since we’d been in the house over thirty years, we were
drowning in stuff, much of it saved for reasons that neither of us
could remember. I wanted to throw a lot away, and Jim wanted to
save all the things that I didn’t. Funny that women are accused of
being packrats, and it’s the men who can’t part with that tattered
college sweatshirt or magazines that are years out of date.

I finally convinced My Beloved to hire a
dumpster. I was well on my way to filling it, too – and having
myself a great time with my purging – until I accidentally threw
out Jim’s favorite L.L. Bean jacket, which he had carelessly left
on the garage floor. After that debacle, I reined myself in.
Reluctantly.

We hadn’t made any decision on where we were
moving to, but since Nancy expected the sale of our house to take a
while, neither of us was concerned.

“Wherever we go, I promise that we’ll take
both dogs with us,” Jim said. What a softie. I knew he loved the
girls as much as I did, especially now that he was retired and able
to spend more “quality” time with them.

Jenny was a big help in the purging and
packing. Probably because she had moved out of the house and was
starting her own adventure with Mark. I was dying of curiosity
about the progress of that relationship, but I restrained myself
from cross-examining her. Like asking whether there were any
wedding plans.

Our dear son, however, was not taking our
move out of the family homestead as well. In fact, if e-mails could
ignite a computer, his constant flood of them would have burned our
house down. They basically all had the same tone, but varied in
intensity as we got closer to the open house. Such as:

The Big Move

Mom, don’t touch my stuff! I’ll come home
and go through it all myself. Just give me a little time to get
things wrapped up in Florida. Do not – I repeat, DO NOT! – under
any circumstances, go into my closet and start to pack things up.
Especially my comic book collection.

Your anxious son.

His comic book collection? Since when was
that so precious? I remembered that Mike had been into comics when
he was in junior high. He even had a box or two stored away, but
nothing that could possibly stir up this kind of long-distance
panic.

I decided Mike must have years’ worth of
Playboy magazines stashed under his comics and he didn’t want me to
know that. That made much more sense.

I had an easy solution. I would delegate
packing up Mike’s room to My Beloved. It would give him a nice
break from re-grouting the master bathroom tile, touching up the
baseboard paint and trim in the kitchen, and helping me wash the
windows until they sparkled. Etc. etc.

It sure looked easier to prep a house for
sale on Home and Garden Television. Where was the Designed-To-Sell
team when we needed them?