Recipe for Disaster (28 page)

W
e finish up on Monday, and after I wash the grime from my hands and arms, Liam hands me a beer.

“That bathroom is fucking gorgeous,” he says, taking a swig out of his own bottle. “I love the contrast between the dark shower and the light floor.”

“Thank you. And thank you for working your magic with the stone guy; it looks a million times better with the real deal than it would have with the regular tiles.”

He winks. “Stone girl.”

I laugh. “Should have known. Well, keep working that pretty-boy magic, if it gets us discounts like that.”

He flutters his eyelashes and places a hand delicately on his chest, as if a blushing girl. “Do you think I’m pretty? Really?”

I swat at him, my hand connecting with the insane solidity of his shoulder. “Whatever. I’m just glad for you to use whatever you have at your disposal for the benefit of the house.”

He makes a mock-horrified face. “You would have me basely prostitute myself for the sake of your little project!”

I can’t help but giggle. The hard work of the whole weekend, the awkwardness of yesterday, it all goes away in the glow of a job finished, and done well. “Yep. You are officially my bitch, and I intend to turn you out.” I snap in the air.

His jaw snaps shut. “Did you just seriously call me a bitch and threaten to ‘turn me out’ with a snap, lass? Seriously? How much HBO late-night pseudo-documentaries are you watching, Pimpzilla?”

His calling me Pimpzilla makes me literally snort beer out my nose.

“Well, now that is classy.” He hands me a handkerchief. A real one. Linen. From his back pocket. I stare at it, beer, and likely snot, dripping from my nose. “It’s clean, you suspicious girl. Wipe your nose.”

I clean myself up and go to give him back the handkerchief. He raises one eyebrow, looking at the small piece of damp cloth warily. “No, keep it. Really. I insist.”

“I don’t have Ebola, you ass.”

“And how would I know that for sure? You could be handing me the plague right there. Or rickets or something.” Which cracks us both up all over again.

When we stop laughing, there is something of a sheepish silence. I think we both realized all at once that for the first time since we’ve met, we’ve just behaved something like friends.

“Well, I should go. Your beloved will be home any moment, and I’m sure you’ll want to clean yourself up and greet him properly.” He looks me up and down. “You know, reignite your love after your weekend apart.” Oh, he is maddening.

“Don’t really need to,” I quip, calmly as I can. “He likes me dirty.”

“Can’t argue with him there,” Liam says without the slightest hint of irony or mocking, and this makes me blush despite myself. “Enjoy your homecoming. I can’t come tomorrow night, but I’ll be here Wednesday.”

“Hot date?” I ask, intending to be casual and flip, but it comes out weirdly snippy.

“Don’t I always?” He smirks. And then he walks around the kitchen island and kisses my temple. “Good night, little Annamuk.”

And then he is gone.

Schatzi looks at me with her head tilted to the left.

“I have no idea, dog. Don’t even ask.” And I pick up the phone to order a huge pizza to sate what appears to be a new hunger.

I
t was great, but everyone missed you,” Jag says, reaching for a slice of pizza the size of Montana. Dante’s is one of the only delivery places in Chicago that cuts pie slices instead of the traditional squares. Since their pizzas are literally twenty inches across, each piece is about as big as your head. I’m a one-handed fold girl, but Jag likes to use the two-handed flat method.

I pick a large piece of meatball off my slice, and relish the spiciness. “I’ll come next time for sure.”

“How was Liam?”

“Fine. We got a lot done. When we’re done eating I’ll show you the progress.”

“You’re okay with him being here?”

I think about this. “Not really. I hate that we had to accept his money, his time. But he’s very skilled, and he is right that his being here and partnering with us will get the job done faster and better, and get us a bigger sale. So it’s annoying, but I know it’s worth it in the long run.”

“Like marrying me.”

I look at him, seeing something a little sad in his eyes. “You are worth it in the long and short and every possible run, and never ever annoying.”

He smiles. “Thank you for that.”

“Anytime.” The doorbell rings just as I’ve taken a huge bite of pizza. Jag looks at me and I shrug. He motions for me to stay and eat and heads down to see who is at the door, Schatzi close at his heels. In a few seconds I hear happy dog barking and a high-pitched barrage of indecipherable chatter, with heavy footsteps clomping up the stairs, which can only mean one thing.

“ANNEKE!” Emily grabs me around the shoulders from behind, effectively Heimliching me and sending my large bite of pizza shooting straight out the front of my face, and into the sink.

“Oops,” she says, covering her mouth as she smiles.

“Three points,” Jag says, laughing.

“Hi, Emily. How was Maine?”

“It was really good, the weather was perfect, and the blackflies weren’t too bad and I totally ate like my WEIGHT in lobster every day, and we sea kayaked and did some antiquing, and I brought presents!” This all comes out in one breath, and makes me laugh.

She reaches down and unzips her duffel bag, rummaging around. She pulls out a beautiful old hammer, the handle clearly hand-carved and worn smooth with years of use, the iron head still bearing the marks of the blacksmith. It is one of the loveliest things anyone has ever given me, and the pizza sticks in my throat and tears prickle my eyes. I shake it off, and look up at her.

“Thank you, Emily, it’s just the perfect thing, and very sweet of you.”

“You’re welcome! I just saw it and thought of you and the guy said it was like from the late seventeen hundreds or something, and anyway, I just figured you’d kill me if I brought you lobster soap or something.”

“You didn’t have to bring me anything, but this is really special and I will treasure it.”

Clearly very pleased with herself, she smiles so wide I think her head is going to snap in half. She leans down and rummages some more and comes back up with a stuffed lobster chew toy that she tosses to Schatzi, and a small package for Jag.

“You shouldn’t have, Emily,” he says, unwrapping a small flat leather box that opens to reveal antique drafting tools. “How wonderful. Thank you so much.” He leans over and kisses her cheek, and she blushes fetchingly.

“I’m glad you guys like them.” She wriggles out of her jean jacket, which she tosses over the back of a chair, and reaches over and snags a slice of pizza. “And I’m glad that I got them so I can use them to butter you up.”

Uh-oh. “Butter us up for what, pray tell.”

She looks down at her hands. “Um, I was wondering if maybe I could stay here for a little while.”

Crap. “What happened to your sorority sister?”

“When I went there tonight she seemed surprised to see me, I guess she thought I wasn’t really coming back, and she said that she’s just loved having me, but it is making things complicated with her boyfriend, who was, um, there when I got back, if you know what I mean, so I just came here and thought maybe you’d let me crash here to give her some space for a bit.”

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six . . .

“Of course, Emily, you’re most welcome,” Jag says, looking at me over her head with his eyes wide open, encouraging me to do the right thing.

Sigh. “Yes. No problem. I’ve got a blow-up mattress upstairs . . .”

“You guys are the best! Seriously, love you. Really appreciate it. Why don’t I just use the pullout couch in the den?”

And with that one sentence, Jag and I suddenly realize what we’ve agreed to, and our jaws drop open in unison.

I
t’s probably only for a couple of nights,” Jag says in the dark from his side of the bed. We’re both lying as far to opposite sides of my queen-sized mattress as possible. Jag in full pajamas, and me in leggings and a T-shirt. We both have our own blanket and sheets, and I’ve wrapped myself up in mine like a burrito.

“Well, that will be restful.”

He snickers. “We can just think of it as good research for the green card interviews.”

“Oh, yeah, terrific. I can tell them what tune you fart in your sleep.”

“And I can tell them how loud you snore.”

This makes me giggle. “Seriously, what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to be grown-ups. We’re going to share this bed and get some sleep.”

“Right. Grown-ups. Good night, Jag.”

Ppppprrrrrruuuutttttt.

“SERIOUSLY!”

He laughs. “Excuse me, wife.”

“HOLY CRAP. What the hell did you EAT this weekend?”

“Lots of dal.”

“Jesus. Are you trying to kill me? That smells like a dead wombat. In Death Valley. Covered in Camembert.”

“You wanted to know the tune, I thought I’d oblige.” He’s still laughing, and the whole bed is shaking.

“It’s on now, husband, when the pizza kicks in, you are in TROUBLE! I might blow you right out of this bed.”

“Based on what I’ve heard through the wall in the mornings, I don’t doubt it.”

And both of us laugh till we stop, and then, eventually, sleep.

T
oday Jag and Emily are working on refinishing the floors in the living room and dining room on the main level. We were lucky when he sanded them this week to remove the old yellowed finish to discover that they haven’t been redone more than once in the building’s history. You can really only sand down a hardwood floor twice after it’s been installed before you start to see nailheads, and I was really worried that we’d take off the finish and find that we would need to rip up and replace all the flooring. But for once the renovation gods were smiling on us and the horrible finish came up easily, and now that we’ve cleaned them three times with adhesive cloths to make sure there isn’t a speck of sawdust or dirt anywhere, the floors are all prepped for staining. The three of us went round and round on the color; Liam likes a light floor to contrast with the rich deeper chestnut brown of the woodwork, Jag likes a dark floor for its elegance and visual impact. I’m always Goldilocks, wanting it right in the middle, close to the color of the woodwork to create a seamless look, but one tone lighter to ensure that they don’t show every bit of dirt and dust that gets tracked in, the way very light or very dark floors do. The boys deferred to me, as they always do, knowing that while I love and appreciate their input, I do have a bigger vision.

Jag and Emily are working carefully from the back of the first floor toward the front staircase to make sure they don’t stain us all into a corner, and Schatzi is corralled on the second floor in the kitchen to make sure we don’t end up with doggie paw prints in the fresh stain. It’s been four days. As far as we can tell, Emily has no plans to leave. I want to broach it with her, but Jag has convinced me to let it alone. As it turns out, a little gassiness aside, we are actually pretty compatible sleepers. He crashes almost instantaneously, falling deeply asleep on his back like a dead guy, and never moves till morning, like flipping a switch. So the fact that I’m a flippity-flopping side sleeper, who always needs the cool side of the pillow and does what Grant used to call the floppy salmon dance all night long, doesn’t disturb him in the least. So even though it is still a little weird, it isn’t horrible.

I’m up on the third floor in the larger of the two walk-in closets, fully indulging what little girly side I actually have. I finished the smaller closet, the “his” closet across the hall, yesterday. Lots of narrow shelves for sweaters, plenty of deep drawers for jeans and T-shirts, pullout pants racks, built-in organizers for ties and belts and hats. A window seat for putting on socks and shoes, with storage underneath. One wall has sliding paneled doors that reveal a cedar-lined hanging space for suits and sportcoats, and one has floor-to-ceiling generously sized shoe cubbies, large enough for a size 12 EEE width to put his shoes in side by side. I learned from having to totally rip out a wall of shoe cubbies for a previous client that men’s “standard” shoe storage is notoriously undersized, and that guys who like nice shoes like to keep shoe trees in them, so they don’t want to store them on their sides as if nestled in a shoebox. Ever since, I have a custom template that I use to make sure that the boys get shoe storage as thoughtful as the ladies’.

But for all the nice details in a man closet, there is nothing more fun than doing a built-in girl closet, especially one as generous as this. Since this whole level had originally been the family bedrooms, it had three rooms in graduated sizes. We’ve kept the larger front bedroom as the master bedroom. On the original plans it was actually a large bedroom and a small attached sitting area, with a smaller bedroom on the other side, creating a three-room suite. This would have been so that as the couple got older, or if either was ill, one of them could move to the separated bedroom with a shared sitting room between them. When the place was converted to apartments, this whole space was opened up to create a large L-shaped living room. We’ve decided to leave the footprint as is, but turn it back into a bedroom suite, making the original smaller bedroom area into a space for watching TV, and the former sitting room a cozy place to read or sit and chat. The two other bedrooms would have been the children’s rooms, one smaller than the other, and it’s these two we’re converting to the master closets.

The space I’m working in today is my former bedroom, a generous twelve by twelve feet, and I’ve designed it to work almost like a tiny boutique, so a woman can feel like she’s shopping every time she goes to get dressed. Over the years I’ve done everything from small organization units in condo closets with sliding doors, to one massive one-thousand-square-foot duplex closet for a pampered socialite that included a wall of climate-controlled storage for her substantial fur collection, and no lie, a CIA-level fingerprint lock on the door. The only thing that was ever more fun was doing a panic room for a paranoid woman who had recently lost her husband. She wanted to be sure that if someone broke into her Gold Coast brownstone she could survive in comfort for at least a week. We referred to her as the Preppy Prepper, giving her a large panic room with en suite bathroom, which included a mini kitchen stocked with canned caviar and smoked oysters and splits of vintage champagne, completely upholstered in a huge-scale blowsy floral chintz.

This room is a good size, big enough for me to create an island in the middle that combines very shallow drawers for organizing jewelry and scarves and other accessories toward the top, and open cubbies of varying sizes for handbags around the bottom. The window wall gets a built-in window seat on top of tall cubbies for boots. I found a great shoe system at IKEA that I love to incorporate in closets like this, essentially a slide-out drawer of shoe trees on sticks. You can fit sixteen pairs of even the tallest heels in a space about three feet by a foot and a half. Most built-in closets do these skinny little shelves that take up a huge amount of wall space and don’t store that many shoes. By using these drawers, I can fit four times the number of shoes in the same wall space, and the drawers are flush with the other shelves and drawers in the closet. I do these deep drawers all the way around underneath the hanging and shelving sections, and then one small area of more traditional angled shoe shelving for the footwear that gets the most use or are the special pairs someone would want to show off most. A tall section of shallow shelves designed to hold only one or two folded sweaters per section, all lined in cedar. Four pullout valet bars around the room so a girl can plan a long weekend of outfits, or debate between options for a special night out. All of the clothes live behind glass-front doors that are done with special UV protective glass, the kind of glass they use to frame artwork, so that a girl can see her stuff but it isn’t getting dusty or damaged by light. A built-in wall safe behind a hidden magnetic-catch panel. Since the floor in here was structurally sound but water damaged in a way that wouldn’t work for re-staining, I painted it in large squares, pale dove gray offset with a slightly darker tone, and all of the woodwork was stained to match the original wood of the house. And my favorite part, an oversized chandelier dripping with crystals that we scored from Liam’s Fremont project. It used to be a dining room fixture, and is the kind of over-the-top touch that embraces the joy of the nonpractical side of a closet like this.

While Jag has been working with Emily all week on the floors, keeping her out of my hair for both of our sakes, I’ve been pre-building drawer and shelving units so that the closets come together more like a kitchen, installing section by section, leveling and tweaking fit, attaching one piece to the one next to it, installing filler strips where necessary. When everything is in, I’ll be able to come back and put in the doors. The island, which is essentially like a four-sided piece of furniture, will go in last so that I have plenty of room to work. In the meantime, I’ve got thick paper covering and protecting the floor. The units get screwed into each other and I’ve done a row of cleats around the room, that way if someday someone decides that this room needs to be a bedroom again, the closet system can come out in its sections to be repurposed. We’re using standard closet organization systems in the rest of the house, but it was important that these two closets got the really custom treatment.

“How about I give you a hand in here?” Liam’s voice behind me shocks me right out of my skin, and I give a yelp.

“Jesus, you oaf, you scared the shit out of me.”

He grins sheepishly. “Sorry. I have a strangely light tread for an oaf. My mum always threatened to bell me like a cat.”

“Smart woman.”

“Yes, she was.” There is something in his face that falls a bit, but he recovers quickly. “You’ve been busy up here this week, I see; that looks amazing over there.” He gestures across the hall to the other closet. “Jag and the bairn seem to be all squared away downstairs, so I’ve been banished up here to help you, if you’ll have me.”

I almost wish Jag had sent Emily upstairs instead. “Come on in and I’ll show you the plan.”

I’ve got the layout for the closet install taped up to one of the windows; each piece is numbered, so it should go in pretty smoothly. I walk Liam through the plan, and we decide to start with the wall to the south of the window wall, since that wall and the one opposite the windows create an unbroken L, which requires a little trickiness in the corner, where I’ve designed a wedge-shaped unit of open shelving. The other wall is all hanging storage and shoe drawers, and we’ll wait till all of this is in before we link the two with the window seat unit, and then we’ll install the chandelier before we bring in the island.

“It’s like you’re planning an invasion of Kamchatka.” He gestures at my color-coded, numbered, three-dimensional printouts.

“Ha! I loved that game when I was a kid.” Risk was one of Joe’s favorites, and we used to play sometimes after dinner.

“Me too. Shall we begin?”

We grab the first piece and bring it into the room, using shims underneath to get it level, and screwing it into the cleat on the wall. While we’re working, it becomes clear that Liam is in a chatty mood today.

“I have to hand it to you, little Annamuk, this is not what I would have expected.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s so, um, romantic.”

“And you don’t think I’m romantic?”

“I think you’re refreshingly unsentimental. It’s what makes you a great builder.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

He pauses for a moment. “I think that your eye always goes to what will make a home function smoothly, what will make the people who live there comfortable. That is different than the romance aspect. Romantic people get focused on things like brand names and labels that evoke a certain feel for them, or focused on elements that may or may not work well for their space. Old-world crown molding in a modern loft space, commercial kitchen appliances for a family that doesn’t cook, the kinds of touches that actually make a space feel awkward or just off. Your places are always fully kitted out, with amazing attention to detail, and always designed with the actual usage and client in mind.”

“So why is this different?”

“I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing, and still super-functional, but the chandelier? The painted floor? Very girly.”

“And I’m not a girl?”

Liam looks me dead in my eyes. “No, my darling. You are not now and have never been a girl. You are a woman. Every inch.”

His gold-flecked green eyes hold my gaze when he says this, and for the first time since the day I caught Grant soaping up his sous chef, my girl parts remind me that I am indeed a woman. One who cannot remember the last time a man looked at her with anything remotely indicating that he noticed.

“Thank you, I think?”

“It was intended as a compliment.”

“So you think we should change the design in here? Make it less sentimental?” I’m flushed and flustered and very much wanting to get back to work.

“Nah. I like it. It’s like a lovely little surprise. I like that you surprise me now and again.”

I can feel myself blushing deeper. “Glad I can keep you amused.”

“Oh, you do at that, lass, you certainly do.”

No wonder this man gets so many women. Despite the fact that my intense distaste for Liam has recently converted to reluctant tolerance, even occasional appreciation, my biology apparently could give a flying fart about anything other than the span of his shoulders. The stupid accent even works; he says nice things to me, and all of a sudden it’s all damp pants and sweaty palms.

Which is why when we go to grab the next section, it slips right out of my now-slick hands, and when I grab wildly to stop it from careening right into the wall, my wrist torques uncomfortably. “Ow, damn!”

Liam quickly shifts his grip to take the full weight of the piece and sets it down gently.

“Show me,” he says.

“It’s nothing, it’s fine.” But he takes my hand anyway, holding it firmly and moving each finger gently. This does nothing to stop my heart, and parts southerly, from quickening.

“Seems okay. Not sprained?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Good. But what say you let me be the big lunk I am and do the heavy lifting, and you focus on finesse.” He doesn’t say this like it’s a question, and I don’t argue. I move aside and let him lift the piece alone, watching his arm muscles flex underneath his thermal shirt. He brings the piece into the room and we shim it up, clamp it to the piece we already installed. He screws it into the cleat while I predrill holes to attach it to the first piece and then proceed to grab the wrong length screw, watching as the one I pick goes clean through both pieces, leaving a good half inch pointing out the other side, into the shelf space.