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It would be a real hardship, let me tell you.
But I would do it for my woman.
EPILOGUE
Fenway – 2 weeks
“In what way is this the ‘most reasonable’ of all the houses your real estate agent sent you?” Wasp asked, holding up a binder with a picture of the estate on the front.
“Possibly because one of the first ones she showed me cost eighteen million.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“There is a lot of money in this town,” I told her, shrugging. “Rock stars live along the Navesink River.”
“I’d like to go on the record and say that it is absurd for them to have eighteen-million-dollar homes as well.”
“This one isn’t eighteen-million, darling,” I reminded her, always getting a kick out of how shocked and outraged she was over the cost of some things I had long since stopped noticing.
“Oh, right. Only eight million. Only,” she scoffed. “It has eight bedrooms. Even if you slept in a different one every night of the week, you’d still have one to spare.”
“We,” I corrected.
“What?”
“If we slept in a different room every night of the week, we would still have one to spare,” I told her, watching the way her smile went almost shy.
Yes, shy.
And, yes, Wasp.
They were two words that shouldn’t have gone together, but any time I mentioned a future that involved the two of us in it, she got that same smile. Sometimes, her cheeks even went the smallest bit pink.
“Besides,” I went on. “We will need guest rooms.”
“Not if we are going to be in Navesink Bank. All our friends have homes here already.”
“Alvy would like their own room.”
“Okay. That is one extra bedroom. So three would be the bare minimum. Master, Alvy, and guest. Plenty of space. Oh, my God. Is this a spa? A spa? In a private home?” she asked, flipping through the laminated pages.
“You like a good soaking tub.”
“There is a massage table. And a water feature. And a meditation room.”
“If it makes you feel better, we can use the spare bedrooms as space for foreign exchange students or something like that.”
“Oh, please. Like I would ever expose a poor, innocent child to your debauchery,” she teased, smiling.
“What about kids?” I asked, worrying it was too soon to ask, but also seemingly unable to stop the question while we were sort-of on the topic.
“What about them?”
“Do you want any?” I asked. “You seem fond of all your nieces and nephew.”
“Well, a large part of my enjoyment of them is teaching them dirty innuendos and buying them obnoxious toys. You know, the things that I would hate if I had to deal with said child on a daily basis. Honestly, I haven’t really given it any thought. It was never part of my and Raven’s plan to grow into stylish old spinsters in New York City and have boy toy boyfriends half our age catering to our every need. But I guess, if the impossible happened and I got pregnant, I would, I don’t know, see it as a different kind of adventure. Can you imagine how badass a kid I would raise?” she asked.
I could imagine. Which was why I was asking. Like her, I had never really given it thought either. I guess, in an abstract way, I saw myself in a family way some day. A steadier lifestyle, a constant woman, a kid to be happy to see me when I came home. It was a nice idea. But it had always been a far-off thing.
Now, though, it didn’t seem quite so off in the distance.
“Okay. This binder needs to go back to the agent,” Wasp decided, closing it with a snap. “There was a gift wrapping room.”
“We would need somewhere to wrap the gifts.”
“On the dining room table or the living room floor like normal people.”
“What about this one?” I asked, grabbing the next binder.
See, Wasp wasn’t the only one capable of running a little con. I had showed her two obnoxiously ostentatious homes first. Then I saved the one I really wanted for third when her expectations had been shifted. It was an old marketing trick. You offer someone something at a high value price point and when they refused, you offered them something at a lesser price point. The trick was, you never intended to sell the first thing, and people really hated saying no to people. So when you offered them the thing you really wanted to sell them and they had already needed to be the ‘bad guy’ by saying no, you increased your chances of them biting by ten-fold.
This was our future house in my hands.
I knew it because I knew her.
She didn’t object to oversize houses. She just wanted them to be somewhat practical. She was attracted to beauty, but not necessarily something showy.
This was the house.
It was a Second Empire house built in eighteen-eighty. Two and a half floors with a Mansard roof—hipped with two pitches, dormers, black shingles, deep-set eaves and decorative brackets. The siding was cream. There was an abundance of windows in a two-over-two, one-over-two style, in both rectangles and rounded topped, all of them framed with black shutters. There was a wrap-around porch on two sides, original hardwood flooring throughout all the levels, and even stained glass in the master bathroom.
