The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
In memory of my father
GROUND FAULT
JOHN LIKES to arrive first. He enjoys standing quietly with a house before his clients arrive, and today, although he feels pinned beneath an invisible weight, he resolves to savor this solitary moment. It’s one of those overhauled ranches so common to Old Cranbury these days, swollen and dressed to resemble a colonial. White, of course, with ornamental shutters and latches pretending to hold them open. A close echo of its renovated sisters on Whistle Hill Road, garnished with hostas and glitzed with azaleas. He has seen too many of these to count, but today he feels newly affronted.
He begins with the property. The front grade of this particular address slopes gently away from the structure, ideal from a topographical standpoint. There are no real trees to speak of, only snug rows of adolescent pines at either side of the property, screening the house from its neighbors in the most neighborly possible way.
He strides slowly up the front path in his work boots, noting the fine condition of the brick pavers, flush to the ground with just the slightest efflorescence. On the porch, he squats to finger a pile of fine orange frass. Carpenter ants—nothing unusual this time of year. He goes around the side of the property, surveys the TruWood siding, the tidy soffits and fascias. A quick survey of the back lawn gives the septic risers away: two low welts in the soil. The grass itself is the jolly green attainable only through obsessive fertilization and well-paid maintenance.
Foraging for the well head, John pauses for a moment and listens to the ambient sounds of yard work and birdcalls. From time to time he might experience a mystical flash on a job, a brief collapse of boundaries between himself and the house he is about to examine. He might divine a premonitory sketch of a structure, what its trouble spots might be—foundation, floor, or roof—like those men attuned to the silent thoughts of animals. John closes his eyes, stands upon the pampered grass, and waits. The sun touches the roots of his waning hairline and presses against his eyelids until he sees the red throb of his own blood vessels. No presentiment comes to him. Instead, he finds himself replaying last night, starting with the phone call from Diana. When he opens his eyes again, they catch sight of a neighbor watching from the far side of the privacy pines. The man is buffing a vintage MG and pauses to give a soldier’s salute.
Of course, John Duffy’s work is not remotely psychic. His skills have been carefully honed over two decades in the field, and he takes pride in their hard-won mastery. As a young man, he itched to be outdoors, driving a vehicle, autonomous. In a moment of bold lucidity, he’d quit his deadening job at a mortgage bank and enrolled in a home inspectors’ certification course. After passing the exam, he apprenticed himself to a crabby old man for five years, paid his dues. Knowing that his employer would never retire, John did what every warm-blooded American has at one time or another dreamed of doing: he plucked the dangling fruit of self-employment, turned fantasy into fact. After that, no one could put John Duffy down or undermine him, no one could second-guess the calls he made on site visits or apologize to his clients for an alleged mistake in a report. He has no one to answer to but himself, his clients, and the all-inspecting eye of God.
As he turns back toward this particular front porch on Whistle Hill, a silver Audi pulls into the driveway, and a woman emerges from the passenger door. John sees a short triangular dress and uninterrupted legs, and even from this distance his blood responds. The woman glides up the path beside a man whose pale skin and squinted eyes suggest a good deal of time spent indoors. Her dress vibrates with a kind of 1960s optical illusion pattern, white with orange circles embedded within one another. His eyes are drawn into these mini-vortexes, and only after an overlong stare does he recognize that she is pregnant. The woman smiles.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she says.
“No, you’re right on time.” The husband’s hand, when John shakes it, feels like chilled meat. Hers is narrow, paper-dry, the bones discernible beneath skin.
“First-time buyers?” John asks.
“Yes,” answers the husband.
“We have a lot to learn about houses,” the wife says. “I’ve been looking forward to this.” Her voice hits John’s ear like a tuning fork, a silver bell.
“Well, I hope to help educate you,” says John.