Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

“You’ll have to pick it up.”

“And?”

“I’ll have to drive you.”

“That’s a problem?”

“I don’t know my schedule,” Nick says. “Jackson has day care.”

“It’s Friday. We can pick up a rental on Sunday if mine’s not ready.”

“We could do something,” Nick says. “I’m beat, but we’ve got a couple hours.”

The handsome physician appears and walks to a shiny black Lexus. Two empty parking spaces separate him from Nick and Phoebe in their rattling Subaru. He gestures to Phoebe, who raises a hand in recognition. There’s no hiding: She’s riding shotgun.

“Friend of yours?” Nick says.

“Not quite.”

“Nice hair.”

The physician disappears inside his black car with tinted windows, leaves them behind.

“Where to?” Nick asks.

The realization that they could and should want to get Jackson early, go somewhere as a family, hangs over them.

“It’s three thirty.”

“Nap time,” Nick says.

The weekend lies ahead: no day care for Jackson, two days to fill, the heat insane, the pool dirty, and the beach miles and hours in the car, something she tries to avoid on weekends. And Nick will work both nights. He’s always been good about taking Jackson for the first hour or more, letting Phoebe sleep, the only two days she can. He’ll change and feed Jackson, and she’ll hear her son giggling because of Nick, who will keep the TV off and play with him in the living room. They’ll kick his Nerf soccer ball or throw sticky rubber bugs against the high ceiling, watch them dangle, peel off, then plummet to the floor, Jackson laughing, trying to catch them when they fall.

• •

They drove down to Delaware two months after they met. Phoebe’s mother was visiting family there, had come up from Florida.

“Should have seen that FBI agent thing through. Should have followed through on that. Do some good in the world. Teaching. Weren’t you going to teach? What happened to that?” There were deep creases in her mother’s forehead, and she chain-smoked and stared out the living room window, overlooking a well-kept lawn and chain-link fence. The presence of a bird feeder surprised Nick. A squirrel hung from it, upside down, looting.

She cursed the animal and left the room. As she did she delivered one last stab, “Follow through on something, for Christ’s sake.”

She was unapologetic about the past: “You made it this far,” she said to Phoebe. “So obviously, I did something right.”

Phoebe refused to see her mother in Florida, where she lived surrounded by glossy tabloids and unfinished cigarettes. The house in Delaware was Phoebe’s uncle’s place, surrounded by bland white and yellow homes with dirty aluminum siding and cracked, weed-choked driveways. Phoebe’s uncle was doing Thanksgiving. Nick insisted they go because Phoebe’s mother had claimed she had terminal lung cancer and it might be her last Thanksgiving. It was Nick’s first introduction to her family.

“She’s lying. She needs money,” Phoebe said.

“We go.”

Nick bought two nice bottles of wine and a ham and two pumpkin pies.

“They don’t drink wine.”

“We do.” He held the bottles up and smiled.

“You’re pretty great about this,” Phoebe said. “About everything.”

He shrugged. “Family. You know. You do it.”

• •

“It never happened” was what he said to her after the visit went south, predictably, when talk turned to Phoebe’s father and all the ways he failed the family and why Phoebe wasn’t sufficiently bitter. They left before dessert. Nick kind of ushered her out and pulled the door closed and turned onto the parkway that would take them home. He grabbed her thigh and laughed and said, “Buckle up,” and she apologized and he said, “It never happened. And look, goodies.” He placed a paper bag on her lap. In it was the unopened bottle of wine and a pumpkin pie.

• •

Now Nick and Phoebe and their dirty Forester idle in a sunbaked strip mall parking lot, contemplate their options for filling the couple of hours of free time they just found.

“Beach?” Nick says as he turns right into traffic, looking around for signs. “This goes west,” he says.

“I’ll feel guilty,” Phoebe says, “going without him. He loves the beach. I love that he loves the beach.” She trails off, closes her eyes against the late-day glare.

Just over a year ago, when Jackson managed his first faltering steps, it seemed that everyone had a house or was buying one. Deb and Marty, their neighbors from the seventh floor, bought one in Needham. Matthew and Caroline, on the ninth, bought one for themselves, another to restore and sell in Marblehead.

Young married professionals buying and selling houses for six-figure profits. So why not them? Of course them, finally them. For months they’d spent their weeknights staring at these shows, new ones every week, and Nick and Phoebe watched them all : What You Get For the Money, Designed to Sell, What’s My House Worth, Stagers, Flip This House, Flip That House. It never rained on those shows. Nick commented on the production values, which tended to be high. He said he could do it cheaper, make it look just as good, if given the chance.

The animated tally-board at the end of one of their favorites on HGTV flashed money down, money spent, money made, along with the cash-register sound effect that had been echoing for weeks inside Nick’s head.

After the accident, after Jackson’s recovery and Phoebe’s return to work, Nick knew it was time. Together they spent hours cycling through property listings online. They narrowed the scope of their search. They calculated the cost of mortgages, the expense of upgrades. In February, they quickly negotiated an interest-only, zero-down, 125 percent renovation mortgage on the house in Serenos. It was doable because of the twenty-two-thousand-dollar salary increase Nick negotiated with his new job, combined with the eleven thousand that remained in savings and Phoebe’s inheritance from her aunt.

They chose the new construction with room to grow. Granite countertops, double-ascending stairways, and a double garage. More stainless steel. More square footage. More landscaping. And the pool: in-ground free-form hourglass with ice-blue Quartzon rendering, natural stone waterfall with solar heating. The cabana and wet bar. Nick and Phoebe spent as much as they could to drive up the value. Something else Nick insisted on: the rock-climbing wall. It was simple, clean, and something to make their place pop: One interior wall of the double-ascending stairway hid the bonded two-part application of granite-like panels. Phoebe admitted: It was cool. Studded with bright primary-colored modular rocks, it had six unique challenge courses to the top. They decided it would attract a more discerning buyer, would set their property apart from the rest of the houses on Carousel Court. It was virtual home-building, images on their laptop, point, click, purchase. Phoebe sat on the barstool in the kitchen and cycled through images and upgrade options. Nick stood behind her, close, and her optimism made him flush.

“We can do both colors downstairs,” she said. “Banana crème and honeydew.”

“We make it all back and then some,” Nick promised effusively, and Phoebe agreed because the numbers made sense: low-interest loans and rising property values, but also because the scenario he presented was irresistible. They’d flip this house for a huge profit. They would have more income from Nick’s new job, which would afford Phoebe three full months off in a furnished oceanfront rental in Los Angeles. This, the gift from Nick to her for the rough stretch she’d endured, the exhaustion. A summer to herself, walking distance to Hermosa or Manhattan Beach, to breathe new air, to fill mornings and days with Jackson. With more excitement in his voice than seemed rational, Nick drew Phoebe’s attention to a landscaping company’s website, the emerald rolls of TifGreen Certified Bermuda. Her laughter was the reaction Nick wanted. And it was genuine, the last time since Jackson that they were in sync.