Recipe for Disaster (36 page)

“Yeah, I never really thought of that.”

“I’m sorry that bringing him on is creating an issue.”

Jag smiles at me with a tilt of the head. “I’ve got a green card, a job, and a very good friend. And thank god, a girlfriend who totally gets it. Besides, with my parents coming in just three months, I should probably focus on being here and working more nights anyway.”

“I think for starters we should have a regular date night. Maybe Saturdays, when Emily is out anyway? That way when Liam is here all day we can casually mention that we are getting ready to go out together, or I can be prepping for a romantic dinner, put on a good show.”

Jag’s face falls for the briefest second, and then he nods. “You’re right, that is a wonderful idea.”

“Will Nageena be horribly disappointed?”

“She gets it. She’ll be fine.”

“Maybe this week you could start to teach me some of your family dishes; we can practice for Thanksgiving.”

“Good idea. Maybe sweet potato masala curry? You mentioned that you hate the cloying candied sweet potato dishes; that would be a good substitution.”

“Perfect! Would it go with roast pork? I’ve got a simple recipe I want to try.”

“Absolutely.”

I hold up my bottle of beer, and he clinks it with his. “It’s a date, husband.”

“I look forward to it, wife.”

“Now dig in, and I’ll see if I can get the brat out of the shower before the salmon is cold.”

Y
ou met Jacob Lewiston?” Caroline says reverentially.

“Yeah, he lives up the block, we were walking our dogs.”

“Is he still with Jameson?”

I look at Jacob’s card. Lewiston Realty. “Looks like he opened his own shop.”

“Good for him. Is he still deadly gorgeous?” Caroline whispers in a way that makes me think Carl isn’t far away.

“He certainly makes an impact,” I say, thinking of the cheekbones, his blinding smile, the sheer elegant length of him.

“Goodness, he was in my five forever,” Caroline says, sighing.

This makes me laugh. The very idea of Caroline having a “five” list is like Martha Stewart admitting to sexting on Andy Cohen’s show. It isn’t that I don’t believe it, I just find it incongruous.

“He seems nice. I think he just wants to be the one that gets this listing when we’re ready.”

“You can certainly feel comfortable doing that; he’s very good. I wonder if he’s still dating that anchor from WGN?”

“Oh no, should I warn Carl?”

“No, I actually thought he might be a good fix-up for Hedy.”

“But he seems like such a nice guy, would we really want to foist Hedy on him?”

“He’d be great for her. But regardless, befriend him for sure, he’s a very good broker. And if you get a whiff of singledom, don’t be shy about mentioning our girl; something tells me they might spark. Speaking of handsome boys, how goes everything over there?”

Liam completely won over the girls at Del Frisco’s, even flipped the script on Hedy, who was still harboring a hair-related grudge, and now they can’t stop teasing me about “being the meat in the handsome-boy sandwich.” I always remind them that anything that involves two men would give me PTSD flashbacks. “Good. Tedious but good. On budget, which is a miracle. Almost on schedule, which is an even bigger miracle.” I get a small knot in my stomach thinking about Grant and the huge clock that keeps ticking in my head.

“That’s good. The impending storm of parents not freaking you out too much?”

“I’m trying not to think of it too much. Jag is worried, of course; breaking the news to them about school and his new career path makes him very nervous. And I really want to make a good impression on them. I want them to think that it wasn’t a terrible mistake to marry me.”

“They couldn’t possibly think that. What about your mom?”

“She emailed that she and Alan look forward to meeting my husband, and that they would be delighted to join us for Thanksgiving.”

“Did you tell Jag yet?”

“I’m working on it.”

I can almost hear her swallow down the advice she is dying to give me, and the way she forces herself to change the subject.

“Did she send anything like Jag’s parents did?”

“Hah! I haven’t had a birthday acknowledged since I was fifteen. She certainly wasn’t going to send a wedding gift.”

“Since you brought it up . . .”

“No.”

“Anneke.”

“N.O. No. I will allow a girls’ night dinner. You can cook, if you want, I never say no to that. But I do not want some big thing.”

“Anneke, it’s thirty-five.”

“I know you won’t let me ignore it completely, but let’s please not make it a big hairy deal, okay?” My impending birthday is just a reminder that nothing is what I thought it would be. My thirty-fifth was supposed to be a big party at Grant’s new place. It was supposed to be an awesome prequel to the wedding festivities, and happily ever after, and a big bright future. I don’t want to celebrate where I am right now, or the uncertainty of what comes next.

“Okay. I hear you. But can we at least do plus-ones? Carl and John and Jag and someone for Hedy? Maybe even Jacob? Emily and anyone she would want to bring? Don’t you want to celebrate with your husband? Maybe even include some of his friends?”

I think about this, and realize that it would look very weird to not celebrate my birthday with Jag, and that if we do it right, it might allow us to put a good face on things. “Okay. Plus-ones, and Jag’s gang. Essentially the wedding all over again.”

“Good. Leave everything to me.”

“Fine. And Caroline? You will make the chocolate cake with the vanilla icing, won’t you?”

“Of course, sweet girl. With plenty of rainbow sprinkles.”

Which is good. Because if I have to turn thirty-five at all, there had better be sprinkles.

F
rom Gemma’s Journal:

In the spring, it is time for list making. The housekeeper makes the list of all the spring-cleaning chores needed to get the winter doldrums out of the corners. The houseman explores the house and makes his list of necessary repairs; the landscaper assesses the property to see how everything fared over the long winter, and to plan the small kitchen garden for the backyard. I take stock of the root cellar to see how the stores have been depleted, and give the kitchen a full scrubbing from top to bottom. The under housemaids will help me do a full polish on all of the silver. The houseman will give the wood floors in the kitchen a scraping, and then reseal them with mineral oil and beeswax. The mattresses will all be fluffed and restuffed as necessary, the heavy velvet drapes of winter will be taken down, cleaned, and stored, replaced with the cotton drapes for spring and summer. The rugs will all be taken outside for a good beating, and the winter clothes and shoes cleaned, repaired and packed away in the attic, the spring and summer clothes brought down and aired out. It is a time of enormously hard work, long days. The windows are thrown open to the fresh air, and everything seems bright and possible.

Punch list time. Like Gemma’s annual spring cleaning and refreshing, you get to a point in a job where you move from an endless series of lists to one master list, the punch list. Joe used to go very old school with his, actually using an antique hole punch to check off the items on his lists, and I still have his punch, but I don’t use it. I prefer the satisfaction of the black Sharpie line-through. To ensure that we don’t miss anything, I asked both Liam and Jag to take their own tours of the house to make their lists, so that the three of us can compare notes. Between our sets of eyes, we should be sure we don’t leave anything undone.

Now that the stultifying heat of summer has abated somewhat with the imminence of September, we can do the outdoor work, installing the decking material on the top of the garage roof, along with the privacy fencing. With the new AC up and running smoothly, we can finish the painting in the rooms that haven’t been done yet, without fearing that the humidity in the air will prevent a clean job. Most of the heavy-duty work has been finished, so we can make a schedule to strip and reseal the wood floors on the second and third levels. We’ll save the staircase for last, stripping and then re-staining and sealing only after we know we’re ready to put it on the market.

Over the weekend Liam helped Jag and Emily and me shift all of our stuff down into the basement bedrooms, freeing up the second floor for finishing. I have to say it’s been a total treat to be able to use that bathroom; I’ve become a total bath junkie, taking a nightly soak in the deep tub when Emily takes Schatzi for her evening walk, and Jag showers on the first floor.

As much as the baths are wonderful for my body, they are the time I’m most plagued by my head. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about Grant and his money, and my time is ticking away. I keep going over the finances, and as far as I can tell, if I want to get him his fifty grand without telling anyone, I’m going to have to cash in some of my retirement savings, which also will carry a penalty and additional tax burden at the end of the year. At least Emily will leave next week to go visit her dad before heading to school, so Jag and I won’t have to tiptoe around, and we can get our sleeping arrangements back to normal. I have to grudgingly admit that she’s been a big help, but having her living here these past months has been exhausting. Her boundless energy is fine when we’re working, but the chatter during dinner and her constant need to try to poke at the recesses of my brain, asking a zillion questions about my past, telling me the endless stories she invented about us and the years we supposedly spent together, it’s exhausting. She quizzes me about vacations we never took, memories I don’t have, games we played and parties we had. The whole thing is just weird, it’s not like I’m going to bump into one of her Harvard professors and have to get through an interrogation. But it’s just a few more days, and the free labor has been a godsend, so I suck it up and play along.

Jag and I are very ready to stop sharing a bed, which started off sort of friendly, but now feels strange in light of his relationship. Once Emily is gone, he’ll be able to sleep over at Nageena’s without raising eyebrows. The three of us had a very lovely dinner at her house last week, they are truly adorable together, and I feel shitty for being so petulant with him about the whole thing. Nageena pulled me aside to tell me how much she appreciates what I’ve done, and promised to be as helpful as she can in assisting in maintaining our cover. I promised to not be a jealous wife, and she laughed and hugged me hard, and I felt lighter. Which made my annoyance even worse, because not only does he get to be in love with a wonderful woman, he also gets another confidante and co-conspirator in our charade, and for some reason, it just makes me feel even more alone. I’m not sure why it bothers me, since being alone is the thing I crave more than anything these days. I never really thought about how much time I spent on my own when I was with Grant, but with his long hours, his travel schedule, and my work on the house, I had long, luxurious stretches of time without anyone else around. Now with Jag and Emily living here, and Liam coming in at least two evenings a week, plus all weekend, I feel like I never get any significant time just for me.

Of course, I’m not terribly good company for myself these days, so perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world to have other people keeping me from getting too much in my own head. Which is probably why, with Jag and Nageena having a hooky day at the movies in the far north suburbs where no one will see them, and Emily indulging in a beach day with her friends, and Liam dealing with a Manning issue, I faced a blissful stretch of total me time, and panicked.

The doorbell rings, and I jump up to answer it.

“Hello, Anneke, good to see you,” Jacob says when I open the door. We saw each other a couple of times in the park right after we met; he remembered Caroline fondly when I mentioned the connection. So far I haven’t been able to figure out if he is single or not. I hadn’t seen him since; until yesterday, he had been out of town visiting his parents in North Carolina, but thinking about today and the endless time with just me and my worries, I invited him for a tour just so I could fill some time.

“Thanks for coming, Jacob. Hello, Beanie!” The pooch jumps up and down excitedly, and Schatzi comes skittering around the corner joyfully to greet her boyfriend.

Jacob comes in, and tosses a couple of treats to the dogs, who are now romping together happily in the living room.

Jacob makes a low whistling noise. “Wow, Anneke, what a space!”

I grin. “Yeah, it was love at first sight for me.”

“I can see why. How do you want to do this? Top down?”

“I thought so, if you don’t mind, I think it makes the most sense.”

“Lead on, Macduff.”

I’m enormously conscious of the fact that he is face-to-face with my substantial butt as I lead him up the staircase. “We’ll be refinishing the stairs last,” I say over my shoulder.

“Makes sense, keep them pristine.”

We head up to the third floor, where I take him through the special small French doors we’ve installed to the bedroom. The narrow doors close flush into the wide, detailed jamb with magnet closures, so that they become a seamless part of the hallway when opened, but when closed, provide some light and sound protection for the bedroom, so if one partner is an earlier riser than the other, they can have full access to their closet and bathroom without disturbing whoever is still sleeping.

“These are a great detail.”

“Thank you.”

He has a small Moleskine notebook open, and takes some notes as we go, noting the light in the master bedroom, the special details in the walk-in closets, and the stunning bathroom.

“I love that you have a laundry room up here. Makes so much sense.”

“We have two more, actually: one in the basement for big jobs, towels and linens and such, and a small stackable on the second floor in the bathroom closet, but figured that having one up here too was just logical.”

“So smart.”

We head through the matching French doors at the end of the bathroom and into the back bonus room. “We thought a young couple might want the option for an adjacent nursery space, or an older one might like the idea of a caretaker’s bedroom back here. Or it can be a home office.”

Jacob scribbles. “Good thought to give it a three-piece bathroom.”

“There was already a bath back here, so we figured we’d use it to our advantage.”

We head down the back stairs to the kitchen, where Jacob takes a quick inhale of breath. “Anneke, this is just the most spectacular kitchen I think I’ve ever seen.”

“It is the heart of the home.”

“It will sell this house.”

“That’s what I want to hear!”

For the better part of the next hour, Jacob looks at every room, every detail; wherever things are unfinished, I take him through our plans. He’s appreciative of the design and layout, offers a couple of wise suggestions, and seems very certain of his ability to do a quick sale for us.

“I do want you to be realistic. If it were in Lincoln Park or Bucktown, you’d get three times as much as you will here. Other Realtors will use the location and the transitional neighborhood to haggle down a lot on price. So I want to manage your expectations about how things will go. Can I ask, what’s your bottom line?”

I’ve been running the numbers forever. When it is all done, we will be about six hundred grand out of pocket in all. I need to clear at least a hundred thousand just for myself to move and try to start some sort of business. There is the Grant issue, and Liam will get his cut, and Jag doesn’t know it, but I’ve set aside a percentage for him as well. “I really don’t want to take less than 1.2 million.”

“I’m comfortable we can get you that. I’m glad you aren’t expecting two million in this neighborhood, even though the house certainly warrants it! What is most important to you, quick or maximum money?”

I think about that. “Quick, I think. If the first offer we get is 1.2 or more, let’s take it and be done. Rip the Band-Aid off.”

“Good to know. When do you think you’ll be ready to list?”

“Mid-December if all goes well.”

“I will make it my mission to give you a great Chanukah present.”

“Thank you, Jacob.”

We head to the living room, where the dogs are curled up in a tangle, napping. Jacob whistles for Beanie, who leaps up, and they head for the door. We promise to meet them in the park tomorrow, and watch from the porch as they head for home. And for some reason I feel my chest get tight.

“Schatzi, it’s going to be over soon. We’re going to have to let someone else live here.”

Schatzi tilts her head at me.

“I’ll tell you something I never said out loud to anyone else. I always sort of dreamed, deep down, that when it was finished, Grant would just say, ‘Surprise!’ and we’d move in.” Until today I hated to admit even to myself that what I was building here is my absolute dream house, and now that it is almost finished, the idea of having to leave just breaks my heart.

I
wake up to a smell that can only be described as amazing. I get up and put on my robe and slippers, and head up the stairs to the kitchen.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!” Emily grabs me in a hug, bouncing up and down.

“Good morning, my love, happy birthday,” Jag says, coming around from behind the stove in an apron to give me an appropriately deep kiss.

“Happy birthday, Anneke,” Liam says, sitting at the breakfast bar. I’m suddenly awfully aware of the nest that is probably my hair, the fact that the girls are unfettered beneath my pajamas, and I pull my robe tightly around me, hoping it will provide some much-needed support.

“What’s all this, then?”

“We decided if you were going to be working on your birthday, at least you should have a special breakfast,” Jag says. “Eggs, bacon AND sausage, toast, muffins, and something called a hash brown casserole.”