Three Story House: A Novel (30 page)

One of Isobel’s worst flaws was her impatience. Taping the show earlier that year had seemed to her like an omen—an indication that the next part of her life was about to start. Despite having aired weeks ago, she had no clear sense of what would come of it. The thought that nothing would happen, that she’d go back to clutching at any role to make sure people didn’t forget her, terrified her. What calmed that fear was being recognized. As cheap and shallow as that was, it remained true.

She posed for one last picture, listening to the noise around her. The purposeful hum of activity had been replaced by a buzz as shoppers stopped other people to ask who that woman was, or a few people called their parents or their sisters to tell the story of who they’d seen while they were shopping for a new light fixture. Satisfied, Isobel put her glasses back on and prepared to leave the store. It wouldn’t look right to actually do her shopping after being recognized.

“Don’t you need something?” the tattooed man from behind the paint counter asked. He’d come out from his work station and stood closer to her than any of the autograph seekers had. “You’ve chased off all my customers and now there’s no line for you to cut.”

“I wasn’t cutting,” she said. “I didn’t see the line.”

“You seem to be the sort of person who never sees the line.”

Despite the tattoos and the blue apron, he was an attractive man. She guessed they were about the same age although he’d seen much more sun than she had, so his skin had a weathered quality. That, along with his height and calloused hands, gave him the appearance of a man who’d be good in a crisis. He wore several rings, but not a wedding band.

“I never seem like the sort of person I am,” Isobel said, pushing her sunglasses off her face and onto the top of her head.

“Who are you?” the man asked. His nametag said Tom H.

She thought about her father. What would he say to such a person? She’d have to ask for something more than help finding the perfect butter yellow. Her mind clicked through the possible projects she needed to finish at Spite House. She’d had Benny start on the kitchen, even though she wasn’t quite finished with the second floor. There was so much to be done—at this point mostly cosmetic, but that’s what she’d helped her father with. Buried deep inside her brain were the words she needed to surprise Tom H.

“What do you have that will remove mastic without damaging a mosaic made up of glass, porcelain, marble, and slate tiles? I already tried heat, so don’t suggest that. I also need some replacement tiles because some fool took out part of the border when they put a new door on the back porch, but I doubt you carry what we need. It has a strange color palette. We should talk about the grout too.”

Tom stepped back. “I thought you were after paint.”

“Mostly I was cutting in line, as you said, to try to find out whether you can match the color of the grout I’m trying to replace.” She smiled as she dug around in her purse for the bit of grout Benny had given her after he scraped it from the tiles and put it into a Tupperware bowl. She hadn’t thought she’d need it today, but it was pleasant to surprise people once in a while.

“We could do that,” he said, reaching for the plastic bowl. “I’m sorry. Did you say your name?”

She looked at him, wondering if he really didn’t know who she was—
Wait for It
had been ubiquitous for nearly a decade, and rare was the individual who’d never heard of her or who didn’t recognize her once she’d been identified by fans. He met her gaze with his dark brown eyes. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he peeled the lid from the container.

“I’m Isobel. I used to be on television,” she said.

“It’s nice to meet you, Isobel-who-used-to-be-on-television,” he said. “Now, how much square footage are you trying to cover with this grout? What else do you need? It seems like quite the project you’ve undertaken.”

They spent the rest of the morning working out a plan to update the kitchen at Spite House. Without thinking about Lizzie and the way her eyes pinched when Isobel spent money, she filled her basket. Mostly she talked with Tom about Spite House, which he was vaguely familiar with and then at some point, when they’d gathered what she needed, they moved past discussing the renovation and onto their own lives. When Tom wasn’t mixing paint or cutting wood for do-it-yourselfers, he played in a band, which at once thrilled and worried Isobel. She wanted someone who was happy with his life and not looking for something more. In the past, if she heard the word “aspiring” attached to a man’s career, she moved in the other direction. Aspiring had become synonymous with wanting to use Isobel as a stepping stone.

“I’ll help you load all this stuff,” Tom said as they neared the checkout lane. “I don’t know if you’ll need help unloading it.”

“I suppose I could always use an extra pair of hands.” She looked at her overflowing cart and thought about how neither Lizzie nor her family were in a position to pay for an extensive update to the kitchen. What Lizzie had money for was to repaint the walls and clean up the tile underneath the linoleum. People thought Isobel had more money than she did—everyone underestimated the cost of living in L.A. and not working. And living there for more than a decade had made a serious dent in her savings. Still, she could swing the stuff in the basket without too much trouble. There was a sharp beep each time the clerk ran an item across the scanner. She needed this in her life. Having a real project, one where she could tear the place up and start over, kept her from thinking about what she wasn’t doing with her career. What she’d done in the upstairs portion of the house had been cosmetic, but the kitchen held true opportunity for change.

Tom had continued talking as she deliberated, excited about the possibility of seeing Spite House. “Memphis is full of these sorts of gems,” he said. “I should take you to Graceland Too.”

“Too?” Isobel asked as she handed her card to the cashier.

Tom flashed his employee card and the cashier rang in a discount on the items. “The guy who owns it, Paul, painted it blue, and it makes you think of the songs and the movies.” He continued talking and then broke out singing a few lines of “Blue Suede Shoes.”

The warmth in his voice struck Isobel as an invitation. They walked through the automatic doors and into the parking lot. “That song’ll be stuck in my head all day now,” Isobel said, as they puzzled a way to fit all that she’d purchased into Grandma Mellie’s Datsun.

“I guess you didn’t plan on buying all these supplies,” Tom said.

“I rarely plan on anything.” She pushed at the passenger seat to try to get it to lie flat.

“Why don’t we put this stuff in my truck and I’ll follow you over there.”

“It really isn’t any trouble?” she asked. A breeze lifted her skirt and she became aware of the fact that what was happening between them was more than good customer service.

“It’s my day off and I’m wide open. I was handling the paint counter for my buddy, Will. His dogs set off his burglar alarm again, and his neighbors get pissy about the sound if it goes on too long.”

“And I’m guessing he came back around the same time you started helping me.”

Tom smiled and closed her trunk. “Come on, I’m parked around the corner.”

As Isobel was waiting at the stoplight to cross Main Street, a monarch butterfly landed on her windshield. She looked at it and then adjusted her rearview mirror to make sure Tom’s truck had remained behind her. He appeared to be singing along to whatever music played in his car. She glanced back, surprised to find the butterfly in place. It stayed with her, flattening its wings against the glass, until she pulled up in front of Spite House. Before she could step out of the car, Tom had jumped from his truck and opened the driver’s side door for her. Out of habit she moved to put on her sunglasses, but then stopped. She wanted Tom to know when she was looking at him.

Benny stepped out of the house and walked down the stairs to meet them. Gauging by the speed with which he appeared, he’d been watching for her. “I didn’t know you’d be gone so long,” he said. His eyes looked runny and yellow at the edges.

“My fault,” Tom said, extending his hand. “You must be Benny. Isobel told me about all the work you’ve put into this place. This house is extraordinary. I mean I’ve seen it from the riverside before—you know, all that glass, but I never realized the front was so skinny or the plot so small.”

“That’s Tom,” Isobel said, confident that she didn’t need more of an explanation. He patted her shoulder as if he agreed.

“Give me a tour?” Tom asked Benny. They grabbed as much as they could carry and walked up the stairs, into the house, and down the narrow hallway, setting the supplies on the kitchen floor.

“I’ll make tea,” Isobel said, sending Tom and Benny off on their walk through the house. She put the kettle on and set out the mugs and then examined the kitchen, trying to see if the changes she wanted could be made.

They hadn’t planned on pulling up the linoleum, but last week, Benny had used the kitchen floor as a work surface while soldering. The result had been a dozen dime-shaped holes burned into the laminate. He and his crew had pulled the linoleum up, intent on replacing it, but when Isobel saw the original flooring, she’d insisted they try to restore it instead. Bits of felt lining and mastic marred the overall beauty of the floor, but it still wowed Isobel, even though she’d been looking at it for a solid week.

For one, she’d never seen its like. They’d uncovered dozens of wonderful floors in all the houses she’d done with her father—and there had been close to fifty, counting those before she started acting and those renovated during the years he spent with her in Southern California—but none of them were like this one. The original flooring resembled a mosaic—shards of a dozen different types of broken tiles scattered in what appeared to be a random pattern. Except that the more Isobel stared at it, the less random it appeared.

Getting down on her knees, she ran her fingers over the tiles clustered near the center of the floor, scraping away at some of the mastic with her fingernail. The colors of the tile faded in intensity as they radiated out from the center of the room. Putting her face to the floor, she squinted and looked across the floor. The tile appeared almost to have an ombré effect. She couldn’t discern the pattern of the center design. The remnants of the linoleum obscured it, and the image was also too large to view up close.

The teakettle whistled. She looked up to find Benny and Tom watching her as she crawled around. Standing next to Tom, Benny looked wan. The blotchy redness that normally covered his cheeks had disappeared and instead of making him look sober, it made him look ill. Her overriding impression of Benny over the last few months had been of a man who looked like he belonged in Spite House, but now he had the look of a valet handed the keys to a car he wasn’t sure how to drive.

Tom clapped Benny on the shoulder, and he turned even paler. “This is some fucking house.”

Isobel nodded, realizing only as Tom spoke how much she’d come to love Spite House. Her phone rang, and as the men poured themselves tea and continued to talk about what had been done on the house and what could be done, she pulled her phone from her purse and glanced at its face. It was her agent, who she hadn’t heard from since the day after the
Where Are They Now?
episode aired. Her thumb hovered over the accept button. Wanting something too much could be dangerous.

“You okay?” Benny asked.

Isobel declined the call and then looked up at him and Tom. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

It had taken the better part of a week, but with a bit of elbow grease and the solvent Tom had suggested, Isobel had restored the original kitchen floor to near-pristine condition. The grout needed to be redone and she hadn’t yet found replacements for the few missing tiles around the edges of the room where entryways had been altered over the years. But even in its unfinished state, the floor was magnificent, especially in midmorning. She ran her socked feet over the tiles and glanced back at her computer. The pattern she’d been trying to figure out had turned out to be a lotus. It was Lizzie who’d first seen it. She pointed at the similarity in the flower shape on the beaded curtain to the one in the tiles. The floor lotus, after it had been cleaned, was a brilliant yellow color. The tiles radiating out from it gradually lightened to an almost clear milky glass.

Isobel looked at her watch and closed her computer. The production crew was nearly two hours overdue. Isobel’s natural impatience often meant she came off as brusque. She knew this, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from being upset. Part of her lamented the lost time. There was so much left to do in the kitchen and with two hours, she could have been removing the metal cabinetry, which was the next item on her list. Instead, she’d been listlessly searching the Internet for tiles similar to those around the edges of the room. Taking up her sketch pad, she once again drew possible configurations for the kitchen. The western wall of windows limited her options, as did the slanted walls. When she’d first arrived, Lizzie had described the house as being shaped like a thermometer, but that wasn’t quite right. The sketch on her paper looked more like a child’s plastic sand shovel—long skinny handle with a trapezoid at the end. She heard the echo of a car door slam.

Finally. Isobel stood and forced herself to unclench her fists. Walking down the long hallway, she worked to compose herself, to put an authentic smile on her face—or at least what these Hollywood folks would take as genuine. She stepped out onto the front porch and raised her hand in a greeting to the three people clustered around the rented SUV. The producer, Craig, had never been someone she’d liked, but because Hollywood worked the way it did, he’d never suspected how forced her apparent liking for him was. It made her uncomfortable to have him back in the house, especially after he’d misconstrued so much of what she’d shared with him about her cousins for the
Where Are They Now?
show.

He looked up at the porch and waved to her, his booming voice echoing across the vast space between the curb and the front of the house. “There she is. Isobel Wallace. America’s Tweenheart.”