Mrs. Perfect

“The same,” I say before the bartender can ask me.

As the bartender walks away, Nathan groans and rubs his face. “That was a waste.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” We sit in silence for a while, and it’s a companionable silence.

Our wine arrives. Nathan lifts his glass. “To unforeseen tragedies,” he says in a mocking toast.

I warily clink my glass with his. “So is that what we do? Declare bankruptcy?”

Nathan sighs. “It’d give us time.”

I nod.

“It’d have the least impact on the girls,” he adds emotionlessly.

He’s as dead as I am. “Won’t people know?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known anyone who filed Chapter thirteen, or seven, or eleven.”

Neither have I.

But then, when I was growing up, I never knew anyone who had money. If it hadn’t been for my scholarship to USC, I’d probably still be part of the struggling middle class today.

From dust to dust, I say silently, mockingly, ashes to ashes.

“What’s that?” Nathan asks, and I realize I wasn’t exactly silent.

Self-consciously, I repeat the passage. “It’s from Genesis. The gist is that all our efforts, and all our striving, is in vain. We started as dust.” I shrug. “And we’ll end as dust.”

Nathan cracks a smile. “Aren’t you Debbie Downer?”

I smile back crookedly. “We can’t say it wasn’t fun while it lasted.”

We sit so long, we end up ordering a blackened salmon Caesar salad to share along with another glass of wine. I’m not really hungry, so I let Nathan have the lion’s share. I pick at a warm roll.

“When are you going to take your Porsche to Omaha?” I ask as the waiter clears the salad plate.

Frowning, Nathan slowly turns the wine goblet by the stem. “I’m selling it. I’ve got an ad in the paper and one on Craigslist.”

“Oh, Nathan.”

“I can’t keep the car, Taylor. It’d be a joke. I’m a joke. What kind of man has a Porsche and no job?”

“But you have a job now and you need a car.”

“The company’s supplied me with a car for now, and someday when I buy another car, I’ll buy something more practical.” He takes a breath. “The boat, by the way, is gone. Bellevue Marine and Boat Sales bought it back from me.”

My insides fall. “Did they offer a good price?”

He gives me a look. “I was six months late on my payments. I’m just lucky I got out of it.”

Swallowing hard, I push my wineglass around. “But that still leaves us with a lot of debt.”

“Between your car payments, the equity loan, and the credit card debt, we’re in the hole about two million. And it grows every month we don’t pay it significantly down. Unfortunately, we can’t pay any of it down. All we can do is make minimum payments.”

Two million in the hole. And the debt’s just growing. My insides writhe. “If we sold”—God, this is hard—“the house. Would there be enough equity left after we paid off the second and third loans on the house to get rid of the debt?”

“It’d be close.” He leans back, folds his arms tightly across his chest. “But it’d help. It would at least reduce the debt to something manageable.”

Then that’s all there is to it. I reach across the table, touch Nathan’s elbow. “Let’s sell the house. Let’s just do it.”

His features tighten. “It’s a beautiful house, Taylor.”

“It’s a house.” I can barely get out the words before my throat closes.

“I know how much you love that house.”

“Let’s not talk about it. It’ll just hurt more if we discuss it.” My eyes are burning. I won’t be able to keep it together much longer.

He shakes his head, runs his hand across his face. Tears shine in his eyes. “That’s your house. Your dream house. We built it for you.”

I can’t do this. I can’t. What do they say when a limb has to go? Amputate it fast? “It’s just a house,” I choke. “We’ll have another one someday.”

So, it’s settled. We’re going to sell the house. We drive back home, and I’m keeping it together until we turn down the drive that leads to our house. The tall roof with the dormer windows comes into view and then the glossy white columns on the front porch and the elegant shingled facade. Hot emotion floods me, emotion so strong that I grip the edges of my seat to keep from making a sound.

We have to do this.

We have to.

There’s no other way we can get the monkey off our back.

Nathan parks in the driveway instead of the garage. He leaves the car running and just looks at the house. “We don’t have to do this.”

Yes, we do. He and I both know it. “If we’re going to do it, we have to do it fast. I won’t be able to handle it if this drags on too long.”

He turns off the ignition. “I should call Art, then,” he says, referring to Art Whittelsey, our real estate agent.

Nathan still has Art on his speed dial, even though we haven’t bought a house from him in a long time. But Art handled the four houses we owned previously in this area. Not just a savvy agent, Art has become a friend over the years. He helped us navigate the pricey, and at times ridiculously inflated, real estate market here on the Eastside.

Nathan and I bought our first house together the same year we married. It was a dark, tiny, windowless shoebox of a house in Clyde Hill, one of the coveted affluent Bellevue neighborhoods with proximity to everything—the bridges to Seattle, downtown Bellevue, Kirkland waterfront, and, of course, great schools.

The exterior siding of our new house was painted brown. The exterior window trim was the same brown. Enormous cedar trees circled the house, blocking light as well as any curb appeal, and the backyard was a muddy swamp. I didn’t know then what I know now about houses on hills in rainy cities. Don’t buy a house at the bottom of a hill. Buy on the top. Water drains down.

That first year we were married, I’d come home from work and change into jeans and T-shirts and my work boots and I’d attack the yard. I had a professional tree company take out the massive cedar in the front yard, grinding the stump, and then prune the trees around the perimeter of the house, allowing more light to reach the house.

I dug up some of the huge overgrown rhodies and replaced them, whacked others down to size, and just removed others entirely. I removed wild ferns and hacked at thorny blackberry vines until my arms and wrists were scratched and bleeding.

One Saturday Nathan and I rented a rototiller and churned up the soil. The next day we tilled soil amenders into the freshly churned earth. The next Saturday we rented a roller to flatten the front smooth. The next day we seeded the front. Within three months we

had a beautiful lush lawn that rolled from the front steps of the house and along the curvy walk to the edge of the street. The lawn was green, bright healthy green, and as it filled in I turned to the house and tackled the hideous brown paint job. It was April, and the weather was warming. I picked the sunny weekends and learned to use a paint sprayer. I wasn’t great at spraying, so I learned to cover my splotches with a light, deft touch of a paintbrush.

The house, now a silvery gray, needed a new front door, and I bought one at Home Depot and painted it a gorgeous, glossy black. With a topiary in a pot by the front door and new brass house numbers on the side, it began to look like a real house, a house that was a home.

Every house we lived in, I did virtually the same thing. New garden, new paint, new doors and windows, new crown molding, new baseboards, new carpets, new hardwood floors, new fixtures, new, new, new, and I did most of it myself. I learned to plumb and wire and use a wet saw for tiles and a circular saw for chair rail and crown molding.

I would never have thought I could build anything. I’m not that handy. But desperation, and the desire to make Nathan happy, fueled my determination to learn.

I never told Nathan this, but I couldn’t wait for his parents to visit. They’d see how hard I’d worked, how much I’d done for their son. I hoped they’d realize I wasn’t just a good wife, but the right wife.

His parents, though, never came.

Art gets Nathan’s message and he’s over just before six. “What’s going on?” he greets us, shaking Nathan’s hand before leaning over to kiss my cheek.

Art’s tall, the kind of man who looks like a former jock. He’s all friendly and funny. Maybe that’s why he’s so successful. You like hanging out with him. You end up enjoying buying and selling houses, because along with the house, you get great company.

“We were hoping you’d list the house for us,” Nathan says, not wasting time. He’s still hoping to catch a late flight out.