“Oh, good . . .” The wife trails off, her eyes turning toward the house next door. The neighbor is still there with his MG, wielding a shammy cloth.
John suspects these two young people to be the type who will hire landscapers to trim their bushes. They will hire handymen to clean their gutters, plumbers to tighten their pipes. He is well aware that he is among the few in this town who prefer to do things himself; who would rather drown than pay a professional; who insulates his own attic, extends his own drain pipes, replaces his own cracked shingles. Most others treat home ownership as an entitlement, trusting that their house will provide shelter from the elements without strenuous effort on their part. Few seem to respect the marvel of engineering and ingenuity that a house represents.
Only once has John overestimated his abilities. Without the help of an electrician, he’d attempted to replace several two-pronged outlets with three-pronged grounded outlets and had been flattened by a forceful shock. As he lay prone on the dining room floor, Diana had shrieked that he was foolish and egotistical, that he would never admit there were things he was not qualified to do.
Lori opens the lockbox. Inside, the house is bright and cold as an art museum. John does not usually notice a home’s decor any more than a woman’s nail polish, but today his senses are uncomfortably heightened, and as the party steps through the living room, he is sharply aware of its spare furnishings. There is a low-slung orange sofa fronted by a coffee table, a glossy black oval at knee-banging height. What person enjoys sitting on such a sofa? Where does a man put down a drink? The wife who lives here, he is sure, would scowl at a glass placed upon the table. She would be a woman who slides a coaster beneath her husband’s tumbler and moves it away from the table’s edge, as if he were a child. The kind of woman who picks lint from his shirt without asking, who brushes crumbs from his chin in public.
John’s own home boasts original geometric linoleum from 1941, and its bathrooms are lined with veteran baby-blue tile. The furniture, however, is only eighteen years old, chosen by himself and his wife during a giddy shopping spree the day after closing. He remembers that day as one of the most joyful of their marriage. He and Diana had been buoyed by the same warm wave of exhilaration, tasted the same salt of home ownership. They’d spun through the furniture showroom, laying claim to a sectional sofa, a king-sized sleigh bed, a dining set for eight. Styles have changed since then, of course, but Diana has nimbly updated the existing pieces. The sectional has been disguised with slipcovers over the years, each retiring to the linen closet after its tour of duty. The huge oak bookshelf—forever displaying John’s building code manuals and Diana’s archive of House Beautiful—has been renewed with countless coats of color. The marriage may have slipped into obsolescence, but the house has always remained painstakingly fresh. For eighteen years John has been comfortable within its confines, surveying the world from its windows, watching the daffodils bloom in spring, rose of Sharon in summer, sunflowers in fall. At no juncture has he felt the desire to trade it for any of these nouveau colonials. He loves and respects the house and the ghosts it contains, of his own life and of those who came before. The previous owners had remained there well into their eighties, and John wholly expects to do the same, with or without Diana. He intends to keep the bones of the house strong and its organs clean for decades to come, even as the skeletons of newer houses rise and fall around it.
Most inspectors make a beeline for the basement mechanicals, then vet the rest of a structure. John knows that he is a bit of a renegade in that he prefers to reverse the order. In his opinion, kicking off with heavy-duty items like the service panel and furnace is a sure way to unsettle a buyer, and once the questions start coming, it can take hours to get to the first floor. He prefers to start with attics, sparse and innocuous, and work his way down so that, by the time they reach the water heater, his customers are limp and glazed over.
So he leads Lori and her buyers to the attic first. Inhaling deeply, he ventures out along the narrow beams. The wood beneath his feet feels solid and sure, and he marks this on his clipboard. He follows the beams as far as he can in each direction, feeling the slabs of the sloped ceiling with his hand. Dry and clean. The insulation is new, mirror-tight. He stands for another moment, listening. There have been times when he’s detected the scratching of hidden animals in attics, even in daylight, so brash and accustomed to privacy they are. He holds still for a long quiet moment, breathing the fishy smell of fiberglass, before turning and stepping back.
“How does it look?” the wife asks.