Marie Ferrarella - Finding Home

“I love this house, Brad. This is my house. Our house. This is where all my memories are.” As Stacey spoke, emotions swept through her, intensifying every word she said. “This is where we started out together. Where Julie and Jim became tiny people instead of just babies. I love this house,” she told him again with feeling.

Stacey searched his face to see if she’d gotten through. But there was no indication that she had.

He shook his head. “Then why change it?”

It wasn’t changing, it was improving, but she had a feeling that comparison would be lost on him, too. “Because like everything else, the house needs a face-lift.”

He glared at her. “You sure that a quarter of a million will cover everything you want done?”

Stacey had no idea what possessed her to glibly answer, “If not, it’ll be a start.” But it felt good to say it.

Marie Ferrarella wrote her very first story at age eleven on an old manual Remington typewriter her mother bought for her for seventeen dollars at a pawn shop. The keys stuck and she had to pound on them in order to produce anything. The instruments of production have changed, but she’s been pounding on keys ever since. To date, she’s written over 150 novels and there appears to be no end in sight. As long as there are keyboards and readers, she intends to go on writing until the day she meets the Big Editor in the Sky.

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Dear Reader,

Welcome to my life.

All right, Finding Home is a slightly fictionalized version seeing as how I didn’t marry a doctor and my daughter isn’t in medical school and my son isn’t a musician. But I did live through the horror of having several rooms remodeled and I did have a husband who handed me lists every morning to review with a not-so-happy construction person.

Anyone who’s ever had remodeling done and remained married after the contractor and crew have left knows what sort of a triumphant feeling that is. Remodeling is definitely in the same realm as trial by fire. It tests the limits of your patience and your love. When it’s all over, you come out the other end stronger, more confident, with a reorganized sense of priorities. Either that, or in a straitjacket.

So, consider carefully before you make that first call to the local contractor. Can your marriage take it? If you’re afraid to find out, just move. In the long run, it might be safer. But definitely not more interesting.

Affectionately,

Marie Ferrarella

To Katherine Orr, with many thanks.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

She couldn’t get the song out of her head.

It haunted her, popping up in the middle of a thought or an activity. Like now, just as she was putting a platter of sugar-dusted French toast in front of her husband.

Stacey Sommers first heard the song, which staunchly refused to untangle itself from her brain cells, years ago. At the time, the lyrics had struck her as unbelievably sad. It was playing on the radio while she was driving home from the supermarket.

The incomparable songstress, Peggy Lee, was asking anyone who would listen, “Is That All There Is?” and Stacey had laughed in response. Back then she was busy up to her eyeballs, juggling the care and feeding of two small kids and a husband who was in his last year of residency at a local hospital, all this while working in order to help pay for said husband’s staggering medical school bills, not to mention put food on the table.

At the time, she’d felt like a hamster with her foot caught in the wheel and was far too exhausted to wonder if life had anything else to offer. Moments together with Brad were just that, moments. Stolen ones. And all the more delicious and precious for their scarcity.

Now, twenty years later, the pace had slowed considerably, although time was still a scarce commodity. Her kids no longer needed her for every single little thing. Half the time, she felt shut out of their lives. And Brad? Brad was an established, well-respected neurosurgeon whose opinion was sought after.

But the moments they had together were even less now than they had been before.

Is that all there is?

At this point in Brad’s career and their lives, she would have thought they could finally have those idyllic vacations she used to dream about in order to sustain herself while going ninety miles an hour through her overwhelming life. But somehow, Brad was busier these days than he had been back when he was in medical school and even during those awful intern days.

Worse than that, he seemed so much more remote now than he had been back then. As if medicine had taken him away from her.

Slipping into the chair opposite his, her life-sustaining cup of coffee in her hand, Stacey looked across the breakfast table at her husband of twenty-five years, the only man she had ever loved, or wanted. He had the Monday Health section of the L.A. Times on one side of his plate of French toast, the latest copy of the Journal of the American Medical Association opened to an article he found engrossing on the other. His attention was unequally divided between the two periodicals. Whatever was left over, and there seemed only to be little more than a scrap, he devoted to his breakfast.

Stacey suppressed a sigh. She didn’t seem to fit into his life anymore. Had she ever? Had she ever been more than a means to an end for him, taking care of his kids, his bills, his eternally wrinkled shirts?

Stacey took a long sip of her black coffee, swallowing and feeling the tarlike liquid ooze through her veins like semifrozen molasses over a stack of pancakes.

Damn it, where was all this self-pity coming from? she upbraided herself in disgust. She knew Brad loved her. In his own conservative, quiet fashion. Moreover, she knew with a bone-jarring certainty that her husband had never once been unfaithful to her, even though he’d been presented with more than one opportunity to stray.

Thank God she didn’t have to grapple with feelings of betrayal the way Jeannie Roberts did. The woman had been completely devastated, not to mention humiliated, when she’d discovered that her neurologist husband, Ed, had been seeing the daughter of a former patient on the side for more than a year.