Even Tom didn’t know the extent of this. How deeply rooted my desire to live in Starling Falls had become. But he knew I’d suggested it in the first place. He knew I’d pushed for it. He knew I was the one to blame, and he had no qualms in blaming me.
Our house really was a thing of beauty, though. I could still see its potential, even if we didn’t have the money or talent to uncover it. And at least it was nothing like that cramped, dark, dreary shack I’d grown up in. If anything, it was morphing into the co-op I’d lived in during college.
The first floor had filled with a mishmash of strangers’ junk, while the second floor and attic were nearly empty. It seemed everyone in town had old furniture they wanted to get rid of. This was how we met most of our neighbors. They’d approach us at some shop in town, looking like they felt sorry for us, and say, “So, you’re the kids who bought the old Strassmore place.” A day or two later they’d pull up in front of the house in a pickup truck, ready to unload some out-of-style home goods.
By the end of September, we’d inherited a piano, a clawfoot tub (its resting place the sun
room which I’d dreamed would be my reading room), two broken bookshelves, three styles of sofas, several dressers, and an inappropriate-for-our-environment Danish modern dining room table. As it would turn out, we never spoke to most of the previous owners of these castaways again.
We were still sleeping in the downstairs bedroom, and, aside from Tom using the front corner bedroom upstairs as his writing studio, we were living entirely on the first floor. The only room on the first floor that wasn’t filled with mismatched clutter was the music room. We’d put the piano in there, and hung up some new curtains, and I’d started refinishing the woodwork. I was taking it one room at a time, the theory being that once I completed a room, its beauty would be the motivation to keep me moving on to the rest of the house.
Besides writing, Tom’s project was supposed to be turning one of the servants’ rooms into a laundry room. So far he’d gotten as far as measuring the room, reading part of a book about plumbing, and leaving the book, tape measure, and an empty bag of Doritos on the closet floor of that room.
At this time, the mansion next to us and the one directly across from us were still vacant. Many of the other mansions in town were being used as bed and breakfasts, or a funeral parlor, or had been split up into several apartments. But, aside from the McGhees’ restored home, the houses on our street were practically the same as when they’d been built, with original kitchens, plumbing, wallpaper, and wiring. Only young, enthusiastic, romantic people were dumb enough to want them.
Our house and several nearby had been in holding patterns, unoccupied, as some distant family members had paid the taxes and occasionally stopped in to trim the hedges and do unavoidable repairs. It was as if all the old Starling Falls aristocracy knew enough to get away, yet couldn’t quite bear to cut their ties with the town.
In early September a For Sale sign went up in the yard across the street from ours. This home was mustard yellow with tall, square towers on either side of it and a wide, wrapping porch. It had double front doors and a carriage house in the back. Tom looked a little depressed as soon as the sign went up.
“I would have preferred to buy that house,” he said, even though he’d never set foot inside it.
Things got worse when he raided the flier box and discovered they were asking $30,000 less than what we’d paid for our house.
The bubbling irritability that had taken hold of him ever since we’d moved to Starling Falls metastasized then and there in a sputtery eruption, right in the front yard of 312 Hawthorne Avenue. “Nine bedrooms?” he read off the flier. “Fuck no. No way.”
“Shhhhh! Tom, let’s not talk about this right here, please,” I said, taking his arm and pulling him away from the flier box, back toward our own house.
I’d been battling my own demons since we’d moved to Starling Falls. Having strange fits of anger and sadness that felt powerful enough to level me. Usually, it was this new miserable, cruel version of Tom that triggered them, but other times they came out of nowhere. From the start, unless I was alone and could cry and scream into my pillow, I snuffed them down, down, down, until they finally died like a fire smothered by a wool blanket. It was just stress, I knew. And I knew enough to control them, and, most importantly, to hide them from the rest of the world.
“Nine? Nine? Why would someone even need nine bedrooms?”
“Sweetie, please,” I whispered, hoping he’d follow suit. “We have a lot of bedrooms. Seven, right?”
“This place has nine.”
“Seven and nine are both a lot. You’re taking the whole ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ thing a little too far. Don’t trip on that flattened squirrel,” I said, pulling him back across the street, helping him dodge the animal carcass in the road, and getting him up our porch steps and in our front door where we would both be safely out of view of the ever-present watchful eyes of Priscilla and Barnaby McGhee.
“Our place isn’t even close to this big,” he said, glaring at the statistics sheet before him. “Twelve fireplaces? Are you fucking kidding me? We only have five.” Maybe it was something in the water, but Starling Falls had turned my husband into quite the swearer.
“We have eight bedrooms if you count that room off the kitchen. The little room where the cook probably slept,” I reminded him.
“I guess,” he said.
“And if you count the nursery, we have nine bedrooms. And that little attic off the second floor? That could be a bedroom. I mean, back in the day when people didn’t care much about things like insulation, it probably was one. So, we have ten. See? We’re better than that house.”
“Or,” he said, “we have just five bedrooms if you don’t count servants’ rooms and attics as bedrooms.”
“Why wouldn’t we at least count the servants’ bedrooms as bedrooms? Let’s not be snobs about it.”
“I wonder if they’re counting servants’ rooms as bedrooms,” he said, waving the sheet in my face.
“We could sell our house and buy that one,” I suggested.
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“So now you want to sell our house?” he asked me, comically appalled that I’d even suggest such a thing. “Aren’t you attached to this place? It’s our first home.”