Page 75 of This Is How It Started
“Good point. What’s your ETA?” I don’t want to go in the house without backup.
“I’m about five minutes out. See you there.”
My mother’s townhouse is nothing like the Queen Anne on Vallejo. When she was forced to start over, she didn’t want anything to be the same. Now it’s clean, simple lines and large open spaces without the warrens of nooks and crannies. Everything smells like fresh paint and newness. Perhaps a metaphor for her life.
Hannah is sitting at my mother’s large kitchen island, eating pistachios. She must’ve been at it for a while because there’s a large mound of empty shells in front of her. Adam is already here and hasn’t wasted any time scrounging through my mother’s refrigerator. He is so far submerged inside her Sub-Zero that all I see is his ass and a pair of denim-clad legs. Shana is stirring a pot of chicken noodle soup (Progresso, not her own), which I see for the cliché that it is.
No one is talking, which is an anomaly for the Golds.
I go straight to my sister and give her a hug. She sits there stiffly but doesn’t back away. I know she’s humoring me. But maybe, just maybe, she needs a hug from her baby sister.
“What happened?” I ask, breaking the weird silence.
She gives a half-hearted shrug. But if you know Hannah the way I do, you can see that below the surface she’s losing it.
“I don’t love him anymore. Maybe I never did,” she announces. Her blue eyes meet mine, and there’s a hidden warning there. Okay, not so hidden. She knows about Stephen. She knows I know about Stephen. She maybe even knows Adam knows about Stephen. But she doesn’t want my mother to know.
I never gave much thought to whether Stephen was Hannah’s One, like Dad was Mom’s or Mom was Dad’s, or Josh was mine. Perhaps because deep down inside I knew Stephen wasn’t. On paper they look good together—two attractive upwardly mobile lawyers—but there was never that “I can see his heart in her eyes.” Or vice versa. Not like I saw it with my parents. Or with me. I stand certain that Stephen is not Hannah’s plus-one in the afterlife. Her story isn’t finished yet. There’s more to come.
“What happens now?” I ask.
“She thinks long and hard about what she’s about to lose,” my mother says. “Do you think it’s been easy for me to give up the lifestyle I once had with your father?”
Hannah, Adam and I look at each other, then gaze around Shana’s three-thousand-square-foot townhouse with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and laugh. The three of us, laughing until we can’t breathe.
* * * *
On my way home, I swing by Campbell’s new Craftsman and find him in the backyard, building a piece of furniture. A chair maybe, though at this point in the process it’s hard to tell. The wood is white oak, and judging by the straight horizontal spindles he’s cut, he’s going for a Mission style that would complement the house.
“Hey,” he says but doesn’t look up from what he’s doing.
“I came by to see your progress.”
“Take a look.” He nudges his head at the back door, which has been cleared of weeds and appears usable now.
I wait for him, and when I realize he’s not going to follow, I let myself in. I wander through the laundry room to the kitchen. Nothing much has changed here other than there’s now a stack of boxes against one wall and a cheap plastic bistro table with a single lawn chair taking up a corner on the opposite side of the room.
It appears Campbell has begun scraping the cottage cheese (not asbestos, thank God) from the dining room ceiling. There are drop cloths on the floor and an assortment of buckets and ladders.
More boxes are in the living room, which hasn’t been touched. Though the floor appears leveler, which might be a trick of the eye.
I take the back hallway to the bedrooms. I can’t see the floor in the second bedroom. It’s filled to the brim with clothes and moving boxes. The main bedroom has a box spring and mattress on the floor and little else.
Except for a new shower liner in the bathroom, it’s still the worst room in the house. It seems crazy that Campbell is outside making furniture when the inside needs so much work. But I suppose there’s a method to his madness.
A door creaks, and suddenly Campbell is standing behind me. The faint smell of sawdust, salt and sweat fill the air.
“Is it my imagination, or did you level the floor?”
“Not your imagination. It was a few days’ worth of going under the house, jacking it up with a level and sistering the old joists with a bunch of two-by-twelves.”
“It looks good.” I move back into the living room and inspect the floor closer. No more sinkhole. “How’s the cottage cheese going?”
Campbell follows me into the dining room. “It’s going. I’m about half done.”
It’s a start,I think. “What are you making?” I glance outside at his makeshift workstation.
“A chair.”
