Melody turned the key in the ignition, cutting the exhaust but leaving it in the position where the radio would still play. When she got too cold, she told herself, she’d go inside and show Jen the photos of all the furniture in her house, the many pieces she’d spent years hunting down at flea markets and estate sales, her favorite finds, the valuable items acquired for a song from sellers who didn’t know any better: a neglected Stickley table that someone had criminally sponge painted, now stripped and restored; a black leather Barcelona chair pocked with cigarette burns and other unsavory stains she’d reupholstered in a bright turquoise tweed; and her favorite, a beautiful oak drafting table that tilted. Nora and Louisa had used it for years to draw or do homework or just sit, side by side, reading a book. She would sell all of it to appease Walt and slow him down. She would sell anything. Almost.
MELODY KNEW NORA AND LOUISA called her the General behind her back, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care because she also knew what it was like to grow up in a state of anarchy, in a house with parents so hands-off they were nearly invisible. Melody knew what it was like to have teachers ask, hesitant and concerned, if her parents were going to come to a parent-teacher conference. She knew what it was like to search in vain for their faces in the school auditorium during a play or a concert. She’d vowed to be an entirely different type of mother, and having twins never set her off course. Some days she drove herself crazy, running from one daughter’s after-school activity to the other’s. She charted the time spent with each child, making sure to even it out as far as was humanly possible. She never missed a single concert, play, soccer game, track meet, Brownie meeting, choral performance. She packed a healthy lunch every day, including one indulgent sweet on Fridays. She wrote them encouraging notes and arrived fifteen minutes early for pickup, so they would never stand in a parking lot alone, wondering if anyone was going to show up to bring them home, wondering if anyone even realized they were gone.
She remembered their first exploratory trips upstate as if they’d happened yesterday. Driving north, watching the scraggly city trees gradually replaced with the stately elms and elderly pines of the Taconic. Nora and Louisa asleep in their respective car seats in the back, both sucking away on identical pacifiers. Melody had instantly loved their small village with its quaint dress shops and bakeries, all the women pushing strollers while wearing jogging suits the color of sorbet. It was nothing like the grime and cacophony of their street that was technically in Spanish Harlem.
They rented a condo on the less desirable side of town. For two straight years Melody would put the twins in a stroller and walk the streets on the other side of the tracks, literally. The commuter train divided the town into its desirable (nearer the water) and less desirable (nearer the mall) side. She didn’t know what she was looking for until the day she saw it. A small house that had managed to survive the kind of gut renovation and expansion happening on most of the surrounding streets. It was an Arts and Crafts bungalow that had clearly fallen into disrepair. The morning she passed by, a man about her age was loading a car with boxes.
“Moving out?” Melody said, trying to sound friendly but not overly curious.
“Moving my mom out,” the guy said; he was staring at the girls as people tended to do. “Twins?”
“Yes,” Melody said. “They’re almost three.”
“I have twins, too.” He leaned down in front of the stroller and played with the girls for a minute, pretending to snatch a nose and then hand it back, one of their favorite games.
“So what’s going to happen to the house?” Melody asked.
The man stood and sighed. He squinted at the house. “I don’t know, man,” he said, sounding beaten. “There’s so much to do to get it in good shape to sell. The Realtor says it’s not even worth the work, someone will probably tear it down and rebuild into something like that.” He pointed disgustedly to the house next door, a renovation Melody had watched—and secretly admired—over the past months.
“Yeah, that place is pretty awful,” she said. And then without thinking: “My husband and I have been looking for a house, but everything is so much bigger than we need—and can afford. I’d love to find something to fix up, not to change but to restore.” Once the words were out of her mouth, she knew they were true.
Walt had been against the house. He thought it was overpriced for what it was and feared a real-estate downturn. The seller liked Melody, but even with all the work the house needed—and it needed everything—he held firm on the price, which was more than they should borrow given that she didn’t work. (Her working had never been worth the price of child care and now who would hire her?) Walt’s salary as a computer technician in Pearl River was okay but not great.