“Well?” Keanna says when I climb into the driver seat.
“It’s perfect,” I say.
Her brows lift.
“It’s a fixer-upper for sure. But it’s so beautiful inside. It’s empty in there, so the place has to be for sale. There’s wooden floors and an awesome huge staircase. Like twice the width of normal stairs. It’s gorgeous.”
“Prom stairs,” Keanna says.
“Huh?”
“You know, like when the girl does her grand entrance down the stairs for prom and her date is waiting there for her. They could be Harper’s prom stairs.”
“Ew!” Harper squeals from the backseat. She does the same thing when she sees us kiss.
“You’ll feel differently one day,” Keanna tells her.
In the evening, my parents offer to take Harper and Brooke to the movies to give us a night off. They say it’s to give us a night off, but I think they secretly love doing grandparent stuff even though they’re very young grandparents. Plus we could use the night off. Sharing a room with our kid has meant we don’t get nearly as much alone time as we’d like.
We take full advantage of that alone time. We plan to go to a late dinner after, but now that I’m snuggling with my wife in bed, I don’t want to get up and go anywhere.
“I can’t stop thinking about that house,” Keanna says. Her hand traces circles on my chest. “Is that crazy?”
“I can’t stop thinking about it, either.”
“But it’s not a rental.”
“And it needs a ton of work.”
“Say we did try to buy it…” She lifts up on her elbow, which puts her breasts on display and makes it impossible to focus. Whatever she says next, I don’t hear.
I pull the blanket up to her shoulder. “Baby you gotta cover up if you expect me to pay attention.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Can’t help that my wife is hot as hell.”
“Let’s get dressed and go to dinner because I want to discuss this situation for real.”
So that’s what we do. We lay out our thoughts about this random empty house that needs a lot of work, while eating at a back corner booth at the Main Street Diner.
“You said the floors looked good?”
“Yeah, it was all hardwood flooring. Seems like it had been maintained well or refurbished recently or something. They were nice. And the trim around the floor was that thick wood slab, not the crappy little molding in our house. Well…our burned down house.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “It’s like a Craftsman house.” She pulls up photos on her phone to show me and I nod.
“Exactly like that.” I point to one of the pictures in her Google image search. “And it looked like the living room had built in shelves like this, too.”
“Oh my gosh… built in bookshelves?” She puts a hand to her chest. “It’s totally a Craftsman house! Those houses are gorgeous inside. A lot of TV shows have houses like that. I’ve always loved that style.”
“But it’s not a rental,” I say, stealing one of her cheese fries. “If we bought it, he’d own it…and the other house that’s getting rebuilt. We don’t need two houses. What if we sold the other house?”
She nods. “Can we do that?”
“I don’t see why not. We’ll probably have to wait until it’s fully rebuilt, then we get rid of it.”
“Can we afford two mortgages?”
