Chapter 12

On Thursday, the squad celebrated Annie’s return to cheerleading. She had the go-ahead to participate without restrictions. Annie had a lot of friends who loved her and it was very cool to see their enthusiasm. With Annie back in their line-up, cheerleader practice went long. I turned down a ride from Bobby and walked home.

I got there just in time to see a pickup pull out of the driveway as Mom and Franklin watched. They escorted me back to the guestroom that was going to be my office. There was a large drafting table, two stools, a very bright floor lamp that you could direct, and a bunch of drafting tools. He’d also brought a bunch of plot diagrams and transparencies in a large portfolio case. He explained the tools, told me I couldn’t mess it up and to have fun.

“What’s the little yellow wheel with a handle?” I asked. There was a twelve-inch wheel in the corner.

“Ah. That might be the most important tool here. It’s a measuring wheel. Set this to zero,” he said, demonstrating. “Carry it to where you want to start and roll. It measures the distance. It will be helpful but not entirely accurate because the ground is lumpy. Little ups and downs are going to throw it off. We know where the property markers are. My advice is to measure in from the street and use Kim’s flags to mark one, two, and three hundred feet in. Make a visible grid. It will be a lot easier to plot trees and anything else if you don’t have to measure all the time.”

“Sweet. I totally get all that. This is very cool, Franklin. Very cool.”

“Glad you think so. Surveyors use different, far more accurate, tools but this will get you started. You could probably figure out how to use a theodolite but it’s not like we have extras lying around. The wheel is pretty cheap.”

“Man. I was just going to ask if you had a spare theodolite I could borrow.”

“Uh-huh. Do you even know what that is, Buddy?” Mom asked.

“Sure. It’s a surveyor’s doomaflatchie.”

“Exactly,” Franklin said. He knew I had no idea what a theodolite was and it seemed like I wasn’t going to find out that afternoon.

I looked at Mom and she read my mind. “Nope. Dinner is in thirty minutes. You can measure stuff on the weekend. And don’t you think Kim will want to be involved in that?”

That was true. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Burn off some of that energy by skimming the pool. It’s been windy all day,” she said.

I thanked Franklin and went out back to clean the pool. It was spotless. I checked the balance and added a bit of chlorine. I was ready to go in and realized I hadn’t checked the generator since last year and it was hurricane season. I put just enough gas in to let it run for a few minutes and cranked it up. I didn’t remember it being that loud. I stood there, running ideas though my head until it ran out of gas, sputtered and died. Good enough.

After dinner, I went to my new office and piddled around. I explored the drafting tools, adjusted the light, and doodled on graph paper. I tried to convince myself that doodling was being productive since I was getting to know the tools of the trade. I wasn’t convinced. I took a couple of spins on my stool, wondering what I could do that would be productive. On my fourth or fifth revolution, and just before I got dizzy, I spotted our home design magazines.

A thought started to work its way to the front of my brain. I opened one of the magazines to a dog-eared page. Kim and I had both liked the floor plan but we didn’t like that the laundry room was so far away from the master bedroom. I realized I could lay a transparency down over it and trace the plan onto it. I made good use of my ruler, since I can’t draw a straight line. Once I had the outline down, I started experimenting by erasing walls, and drawing new ones. Then I realized I could leave the outline alone and place another transparency over the top and draw on that. I just needed tape to hold them in place.

I raced into the kitchen and poked around in the junk drawer. I found some Scotch tape and some masking tape, and started back.

“What got into you?” Mom asked.

“Busy,” I said and dashed back. ‘That was rude,’ I thought but I was too busy to go back. This was easy.

When Mom showed up to find out what I was doing, I had six layers of transparencies. “Okay, Buddy, what’s got you so fired up?”

“Look,” I said as she stood looking over my shoulder. “I can trace parts of any of these diagrams and move them around. I’ve been doing it wrong. I started with an outline but that’s stupid. Here’s our master bathroom,” I said, wiggling that transparency. “That size won’t change much and instead of drawing it over and over, I just keep it on a separate page. I’ve got a page for the rooms I know and can move them around all I want without having to draw them again and again.”

“Very clever. And you’re using The Giant Book of Home Design for ideas. Very clever.”

“Yeah. Engineers do this all the time I said,” sliding a kitchen into place.

“They do?”

“I have no idea. They should, though, that’s for sure.”

“You should ask Franklin.” I agreed and Mom left me to it. I worked on stitching together the best parts of a couple of different designs. When I had something I was happy with, I used tracing paper to capture all the transparencies on one sheet. It wasn’t the greatest job but I was pretty happy with it. It was also after midnight. I slid my plan into a protector, then into a binder to take with me. I couldn’t wait to show Kim.

I woke up early the next morning, knowing I’d need a few extra minutes to wake up. I went out to the gym and did a few weighted box jumps, then around back to swim a few laps. Passing through the kitchen, Mom offered to make me an omelet when I finished showering and changing.

“Not sure if I’ll have time. I might need to shave.”

“I’ll fix you an omelet.” Huh.

As it turns out, I could go another day without shaving. Mom made a great Western omelet, and Kim didn’t mind switching to The Rolling Stones’s Emotional Rescue for the short ride to school. I wanted to show her what I’d done the night before but we didn’t have time. I had my hands on it in Shakespeare class but Mrs. Middleton was really excited about King Lear. I didn’t have a chance in precalc, either. It would have to wait until lunch.

It was Friday and Kim wanted to sit with the squad but I pulled her over to our private table. I pulled out the transparencies and the book of plans, then showed her my final product. She looked over it, nodding and smiling. Then, she got this questioning look on her face. I waited.

“Where do you put the sheets?” she asked.

“On the bed? Is that a trick question?”

“No. Where is the storage? Where are all the closets? And we need a mudroom.”

“Closets. Crap. It’s okay. I can figure that out. Mudroom?”

“When you come in from outside and you’re a mess and you don’t want to track it all over the house, you need a mudroom. Next to the laundry room. It needs to have a utility sink and a place for your dirty boots and stuff. A mudroom.”

“Ah. It should probably be pretty big, huh?”

“Don’t get bummed about this. I like it. It’s got a lot of features and things I really like. And with those transparencies you can move stuff around pretty easy, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. I was up until after midnight doing this.”

“Shocking. You’re so funny, Jack. When you get going on something, God help whoever gets in the way.”

“You’re never in the way.”

“Uh-huh. Eat your sandwich.” How did I miss that? Nice to have a partner to think of all the stuff you miss.

The game that night was terrible. We lost to a team we should have beat. Our defense was actually pretty good but our offense simply couldn’t get anything going. Jay was hobbling up and down the sidelines on crutches, trying to encourage everyone. I have a hunch he made a pretty big impact.

Alan sat with us for the game. He seemed really down about the whole thing.

“Not scouting for next week?” I asked.

“Nah. Spencer’s done for the year with one bad play. That doesn’t happen in the pool. I think it’s time to forget about football and get back to swimming.”

“You know, I missed baseball season last year because I broke my foot,” I said.

“Playing baseball?” he asked, surprised.

“Nope. At home. We got stuck in the garage when it started pouring rain. I made a dash for the house to get umbrellas and slipped on the walkway.”

“That’s crazy. I think swimming’s safer than football, though.”

“Agreed. I’m just saying, you can get hurt doing just about anything. Kim and I got T-boned once and almost hit another time when we were on vacation in Puerto Rico. But one of the reasons I’m not interested in football is that you can get injured a lot more easily than swimming.”

“I need to quit slacking off at practice and work like I mean it,” Allen said.

“How’s your butterfly? If someone doesn’t improve their fly, I’m going to be stuck swimming fly at every meet. I like it. I just want some flexibility.”

“Ah. It’s all about you,” he said, joking.

“Darn straight. Ryan and Aaron help but they have some work to do. Bobby is obviously our backstroke guy. His free is good but his fly sucks.”

“Hey,” Bobby said, suddenly looking across Allen at me. He’d been sort of listening to the whole thing but not saying anything.

“I hear he’s got a wicked sidestroke,” Allen said.

“You guys are messed up.”

“I get it, Aquaman. I’ll work on my fly. Maybe Bobby can help me with my sidestroke,” he said, joking.

“You know the sidestroke is actually pretty important if you’re a lifeguard,” Bobby said. Allen and I realized Bobby wasn’t interested in giving sidestroke lessons.

We watched our girls get back in the groove with Annie back in action. She acted like nothing had happened and that was good. The game came to an end with a weird score. Twenty to five doesn’t even sound like a football score.

Kim and I caught a ride back with Bobby and Mel. I told Kim I wanted to go to the property the next day and start measuring and marking and she was good with that. We agreed to start early since it was going to be really hot, especially for October.

Saturday morning, Kim and I were on the property by eight. We dropped the tailgate on her truck and used that for our office. I tried the wheel measurement roller, then we compared it with a tape measure for ten feet. We did that a couple of times and I figure out a correction factor. Because of the lumpy ground, the actual distance was about ninety-four percent of what the roller wheel said. Close enough. Kim had a batch of pink flags and we placed those at fifty-yard intervals all the way from the street to the farthest back we thought we would build.

It took two hours but we had a pretty good grid. I took a couple of pictures. I didn’t want to start from scratch if it rained and washed our flags away. Kim was pretty good with tree identification. I tried to put the important ones on our big diagram but it got pretty messy. We decided to just label some key trees and take pictures.

By eleven, we had all we thought we needed. It was early for lunch but we stopped at Burger King and I bought a bunch of Whoppers and fries and we went to Franklin’s house. We stood on the porch eating Franklin’s fries until he answered the door.

“If you’d been faster, you’d have a full order of fries,” I said.

“Sorry,” Kim added, dabbing at her lip. He just smiled and let us in.

“Lunch,” he hollered and Karen joined us in the kitchen, drying her hair.

“I smell greasy food,” she said.

“Don’t tell Doctor Legare.” She smiled at that and we sat down for lunch. “What do we do next?” I asked. I showed him two plans. The first just had the big trees and the creek annotated on it. The other had our scribbles showing where we’d put the house, stable and arena, and pastures.

“I’d do two things before moving forward. First, I’d talk to your neighbors. I know you’ve talked to a couple of them, but I’d talk to the rest, just to make sure they don’t have anything weird in mind.”

“Like what?” Kim asked.

“Lots of possibilities. Your house location is a lot closer to the northern property line than the southern. What if the neighbor to the north is going to put in a gun range. It turns out that it’s county; not city. They could do that. Doesn’t matter. Just talk to them. The next thing I’d do is take a long slow walk around the entire property. You’ve kind of zeroed in on the spot near the big live oaks, but then you moved your spot to the opposite side of the clearing so you could see them in the evening. I get it, and that might be where you end up. Just do a slow walk and be sure. You might even wait three months and do it again when a lot of the leaves have fallen.”

“That makes sense. What looks good in summer might not look so good in winter,” Kim said.

“Exactly. Then, when you’re sure, get a permit for your septic system. You already know you’re going to dig a well and run electricity. You can do that anywhere on the property. You might be able to do the septic system anywhere, too, but you don’t know.”

“And then we’re ready to hire a builder,” I said.

“Then you’re ready to talk to one. Utilities first. They don’t need to be in place but you need to ensure you’ve got all those bases covered. A good builder will help you through it. You have some ideas on a floor plan?”

“Yeah, but I left a few things out,” I said. Franklin waited. “Closets. I didn’t plan for any storage.”

“That’s a big one. Go house shopping. You’ve been looking at books and magazines. Go look at real houses. Jantzen Homes has a couple of models to look at. Go look and take lots of notes.”

“I know where that is. We passed them the other day. Just go? No appointment?”

“No. There are a couple of differences between looking at new homes and looking at homes built five years ago.”

“What could be different?” I asked.

“I’m so glad you asked,” Karen said. “You go look at a new home, and let’s say it’s listed for fifty thousand. The model you look at will have ten thousand in upgrades they don’t mention. They will probably have a lot of upgrades in the kitchen and bathrooms. And here’s another thing they do that’s just crazy. No doors.”

“What? What do you mean, no doors?” I asked.

“They take all the inside doors off. It makes the house look bigger. And they will have mirrors everywhere. They pick their lightbulbs too. If you look at an older home, then look at a brand-new home, the new one will seem bigger and brighter, even if it’s the same size. They might not even have drapes on the windows”

“But we’re not going to buy one so none of that matters, right?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t. Just be aware,” she said.

“You learn a lot by looking at someone else’s dream home. Just keep asking why? Why did they put this here or that there? New homes are notoriously short on storage space. People underestimate how much they need and closets aren’t glamorous.”

We got a few more tips, cleaned up our mess, and set out to go house shopping. We parked in front of one of two models and talked about it for a few minutes. We decided on an approach we thought would give us the most information and went for the house that looked least busy.

It was a house. Karen had been right about the doors and lights. I checked the drapes but they weren’t the kind that would close. They were just window decorations and none of the bedrooms had real shades or blinds.

‘It’s like a movie set or something,” I said, picking up a cardboard TV with two fingers. Kim picked up a piece of plastic fruit from a bowl and pretended to take a bite.

“There’s a plastic turkey in the refrigerator,” she said, laughing. “Okay. Let’s get serious and figure out what we like and what we don’t like.”

We’d been at it for a few minutes, hollering out likes and dislikes when the saleslady showed up. “How do you like The Marsh Breeze,” she asked.

“The Marsh Breeze?” I asked.

“It’s the name of the floor plan,” she said. “I’m Laura.” She had the most genuine-looking fake smile I’d ever seen. I hated her and she’d only said ten words.

“Where do you put the sheets?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s not a lot of closet space. Where do you put the sheets? You know. The extra towels and such. There’s one tiny closet.”

“I think we should look at the other plan, Jack,” Kim said, and we started for the door.

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for,” Laura said.

“A home,” I said. “We want something that meets our needs. This has some interesting features. I like the arched window over the entryway and the vaulted ceilings.”

“But it lacks features you want,” fake Laura said.

“Exactly.” We went next door and looked. She gave us all kinds of details about the house and the awards they’d received for design. Kim and I liked the kitchen but everything we liked about it was superficial.

Neither one of us said anything as we poked around. Fake Laura was undaunted and kept talking. We ignored her as best as we could. “I’m trying hard not to be rude,” I whispered.

“Me too.” We looked in the master bedroom and, when we had a moment of privacy, Kim said, “We screwed up. We just want to look, right? She wants to sell us a house we know we’re not going to buy. We went to the empty house. We should have gone to the busy house. The busier the better.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Those people left and now, she’s hovering over us. If we had gone where all the people were, she would have picked the more likely customers.”

“Ah. But we’re stuck now. Let’s just tell her.” Kim nodded.

We walked back out to the living room. “Laura, we plan on building. We have land and we plan on building. We’re just here to get ideas. Is that okay?”

She changed, immediately. “Yes. Can I ask you a question?” I nodded. “How old are you two?”

We both laughed. How many times had we answered that question? We told her, Kim showed off her ring and the conversation changed completely. She was more than willing to give us information when she knew there wasn’t a sale on the line and there weren’t other people waiting.

“If you want my thoughts on it, I’ll tell you,” she said and we both agreed, enthusiastically. “Floor plans are changing. They’re a lot more open than they were five years ago. There are fewer and fewer formal living rooms because people just don’t use them. Same with dining rooms. Kitchen nooks are becoming a thing. And here’s another thing, people realize that when you have guests, half of them congregate in and around the kitchen. Kitchens are getting bigger and more open because that’s how people live.”