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I’m good at putting things away after I use them. After a few awful roommate situations in college and med school and residency, it’s nice never to worry about other people’s messes. And it’s not like I’ve got a line of people queueing up to hang out in my living room. The couch looks cool, all white leather and smart angles. But nobody sinks into smart angles. Maybe I need a squashy armchair.
I stare at the functional but not very comfortable chair by the lamp. Why would I want to replace it with a different chair? So someone would come over and slump onto it?
What a weird thought.
I stare around the room again. Why, all of the sudden, do I find my decorating style offensive? Okay, not offensive. Just . . . lacking.
Lacking what? Oh. Not what. Who. People. Human company.
The place looks like a showroom. Clean and sanitary and lonely.
There’s nohomein my home.
And what am I supposed to do with that thought?
I sit down on the classy couch and call my sister.
“Hi, Gray,” Lana says, a squeal coming through the phone from one of her twins. I hear her shushing someone. “You caught us a bath time. Gigi, stop screaming. Uncle Gray says he loves you.”
“I do. Love her, I mean. Why are you answering the phone when you’re trying to give seventeen toddlers a bath?” I ask.
“There are only two of them, and I haven’t talked to another adult in about a thousand years. You think I’m going to miss this chance? Wyatt, sit down. You’re going to slip. I just keep my earbuds in all the time, hoping someone will take mercy on me and call. So thank you.”
Her rapid-fire sentences somehow make perfect sense to me, and I can see her kneeling on the tile floor getting splashed and catching rubber water toys as they go careening across the bathroom.
“I have a decorating question, but it’s not urgent or anything.”
“That’s good. Urgent decorating questions usually lead to poor purchasing decisions.”
I don’t ask what she’s referring to. After a day of speaking to three-year-olds, she probably just needs to say the words that come to her mind.
“Okay. So you know I love my place. You did such a great job with it.” Lana runs an online interior design company from her home. She likes to tell me I’m her favorite client who is also her brother.
“Thanks. You know I love big-budget projects, so we’re a good team.”
She’s making fun of me, because when we were planning what we’d buy to fill my new apartment, I gave her an estimated budget and she laughed. A lot of laughing. Apparently nobody spends quite that much on furnishing a temporary apartment. She scaled back my dollar amount and created a space that could be in a magazine. I only needed a glass bowl full of limes. Which she bought and placed on my kitchen table for a photo shoot before taking it home and, I imagine, squeezing them into way too many Diet Cokes. It’s a habit I can’t break her of.
“Okay, well, this place I love is starting to feel a tiny bit clinical.”
She barks out a laugh and then says, “Gigi, don’t drink the bathwater.” There’s another squeal and some splashing. Then Lana says, “I knew it. I warned you, didn’t I?”
Of course she did.
“And you were right. So how do I make my apartment feel like someone lives there?”
“Bookshelf. Blanket. Throw pillows.”
I laugh. “It’s like you’ve been waiting for me to ask,” I say.
She makes a humming sound through the phone. “No. I’m just really good at my job. I’ve got a few samples I’ll send you.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I say. “Just send me a picture and I’ll buy it.”
“You can’t feel a picture. Texture is everything. Trust me.”
I do. And she knows it.
“Wyatt, do me a solid and keep some of the water in the tub, will you? I’ll get to the shipping place tomorrow or the next day. You’ll have it by the weekend for sure.”
