Chapter Four
THE FIRST couple of weeks of their plan went pretty much exactly as Joe expected.
Austin sold the dining room furniture for an insane three grand and showed Joe an image of the money transfer. Then he sent Joe half and asked what item on their to-do list he wanted to check off first.
Of course, they couldn’t tackle much of the actual renovation side yet, what with the house still being full of stuff.
So their first task was to continue decluttering. Thank God for his children, who continued to be nosy and helpful evenings and weekends.
The second order of business was to figure out what exactly needed doing, what could be done, and who was going to do it, and for how much.
So Joe called Starling.
“José! To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“How do you feel about coming round to my recently acquired run-down house and telling me how much I’m going to weep over the bill for rewiring the whole thing?”
“I’m sorry, what? You’re not keeping it.”
“Not forever. Just long enough to fix it up. Austin made some good points—”
“I’m on my way,” Starling said and hung up.
With a shake of his head and a small amount of dread, Joe turned his podcast back on and kept sorting.
He was alone at the house that day, as it was the middle of a weekday and no one else’s day job was so weather dependent.
Another rainy day in November meant another day not landscaping.
He was just tying up another full garbage bag when Starling’s voice came booming through the house from the front door.
“José Vasquez Joseph Romano!”
“Still no Joseph in my name,” Joe said, as he always did. And he hadn’t been a Vasquez since his parents divorced and his mother reclaimed her maiden name. Not that he thought Starling would stop the joke now, almost twenty years after it started.
“Tell me you did not agree to keep owning a house with a man that your children call ‘snatched’!”
“Well, you know that it’s a terrible time of year to sell,” Joe started.
Starling crossed her arms.
“And if we can make it livable, then it’ll actually be worth more than just the land. Honestly, making it not an instant teardown will double its value.”
“Joe,” Starling said, her voice soft and full of concern. “They said you were vibing with this guy. Just tell me you’re not—”
Joe sighed. “Look, do I want to take him to bed and mess him up until he can no longer say anything but my name? Sure. He’s hot. Like, smoking. The kids weren’t lying. But I’m not making an unwise decision just for the sake of a pretty face.”
Starling stared him down.
“Sure, maybe the pretty face helped to talk me into it, but it really does make sense to fix up the house and sell in the spring, so long as we take the DIY approach.”
Starling snorted. “Not with the electricity, you’re not.”
“Nope,” Joe happily agreed. “Which needs a total overhaul, probably, since the inspector found knob-and-tube and there’s no reason to think any of it got updated.”
“Hence the aforementioned bill weeping, I guess.”
“Hence the weeping,” Joe agreed cheerfully.
Starling pulled out a stylus and her phone—a large tablet-like thing—and tapped at the screen. “Okay, let’s get started. Walk me through the house and let’s start talking about the needs.”
As they went room by room, Starling added up the existing number of outlets and lights, and together they made guesstimates for additional ones.
If they were going to have to pay Starling to rewire the whole goddamned house, Joe was not going to live without overhead lighting.
He was tired of sorting through things in the dark.
“So, here’s the thing. It’s not the cost of the materials.
I mean sure, you need several hundred feet of wiring and a whole new panel.
But the real issue is the time, because rewiring the existing setup is enough of a bitch.
But if you’re willing to embrace a piecemeal work schedule and pay for materials up front, then I’ll do it for cost and the promise of future earnings when you sell. ”
Joe hugged her.
“Also,” she said, holding him tightly, “I’ll be doing a vibe check on your house husband.”
Joe never should’ve mentioned Austin called him that.
Scratch that, Joe should’ve called another electrician.
Now Starling was going to meet Austin, and they were either going to get along like two wet cats in a bag or bond instantly and start plotting how to divest Joe of his last remaining shred of sanity.
“On second thought,” he said and tried to pull away.
“Nuh-uh.” Starling squeezed one more time and then let him go. “Sorry. We hugged on it. It’s a hug deal. Can’t break those.”
Joe wouldn’t anyway—couldn’t afford to—but he could see how the next few weeks were going to play out. Rather like the past two weeks, but with one more person and an exponentially higher number of third-degree burns about his love life.
At least now he could see the floor in most of the rooms on the ground level. Not all of the floor of course, but still. Floor. Progress.
“Fine,” he acquiesced.
“Great. Now we can celebrate our business relationship with pizza.”
Joe figured buying her dinner was the least he could do.
But there was nowhere to sit to eat now that the dining table had been liquidated into…
well, probably part of a septic repair, and anyway, nobody delivered out here.
They went into Essex and hit up Woodcraft for dinner, but Joe didn’t want to linger.
He’d made good progress today, and if he could stick it out for another hour and a half, he could finish sorting the office and bedroom.
Then he could amalgamate all the accumulated “What are we doing with this, anyway?” piles in one and pull up the kitchen subfloor to see how bad the joists had rotted.
“Just as an FYI,” Starling said when they were pulling back into the driveway, their leftovers stashed safely in Joe’s cooler because he was still too chickenshit to open the fridge, “you are going to need, like, so much drywall compound. Can you even use drywall compound on plaster?”
“That’s a problem for future Joe and—”
The truck, and his train of thought, screeched to a halt simultaneously.
Starling said, “Dude, is someone squatting in your driveway?”
Joe blinked at the geriatric trailer parked between the two garages.
A cheerful yellow light gleamed inside it, or maybe it wasn’t yellow but was just picking up on the general yellow vibe of the whole patchwork metal Frankenstein thing.
The trailer might have been cream once. It was tiny—so small it might’ve fit in the one-car garage if the garage weren’t full of three lawn mowers, two rain barrels, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, and fifteen bags of fertilizer.
There were a pair of boots next to the stairs, which seemed stupid because it was fucking November; who wanted to put on freezing-cold boots?
A moment later the whole scene got even more surreal when a little whitish-yellow shape darted through his headlights, skittered under the trailer, and then disappeared around the side of the pole barn.
Starling said, “Did you get a dog?”
“Is that what that was?” Joe parked the truck. “Can you just—I’m going to go find out what’s going on.”
Starling’s delighted laugh chased him out of the cab. “Wait for me.”
The door slammed behind him as he strode up to the trailer and raised his hand. Rap-rap-rap. “Austin! Are you—”
The door opened. Sure enough, Austin stood on the other side of it, hair pulled back under a bandana, beat-up jeans hanging off his hips, yogurt cup in one hand, spoon dangling from his lips.
He reached up his free hand to take it out.
“Hey, be gentle on this old lady, Joe. Think it’s in worse shape than the house.
” Those coal-dark eyes flicked from Joe to Starling.
“Oh. Didn’t know you had company tonight. ”
Joe could practically feel Starling’s unfettered delight behind him as Austin waved the spoon. This was absolutely not a two-wet-cats-in-a-bag scenario. Fuck. “That’s Starling. She’s my friend. Also an electrician. And also not the point—did you bring a dog here?”
Austin’s brow furrowed. “Why would I bring a dog here?” He gestured to encompass the property. “Like, the house is barely safe enough for your four pseudo-adult children. I’m not gonna put a dog in it.”
“I saw a dog,” Joe said. He sounded insane. He felt insane. Also, the dog was not the point either. “What’s with the trailer?”
“Oh, this?” Austin patted the doorframe. It rattled. “Got tired of losing so much time driving home at night. By the time I get back to Windsor, I’ve got a second wind, you know? Then I sleep like shit. Or else I don’t get a second wind and I’m in danger of driving into a ditch. Not great.”
“We have a house,” Joe pointed out.
“Yeah, and I had this thing rotting in the parking lot. Besides, every mattress in that place has mouse droppings on it.”
Well, when he put it like that—“Fair point. But, like, an air mattress would’ve been less work.”
“An air mattress doesn’t have a fridge attached.”
Why did Joe feel like he was getting shade for forbidding anyone to open the Schrodinger’s nightmare that was DeeDee’s refrigerator? “Whatever,” he said. “Anyway, I guess there’s a stray, so just… watch out it doesn’t run off with your boots or whatever.”
Austin transferred the yogurt cup to the spoon hand and held the other one up, palm facing outward. “I will protect the boots.” Then he paused. “Did you ask Linda about the dog?”
Joe blinked again. “Linda?”
“Yeah.” Austin gestured toward their only neighbor, a stone’s throw down the road. The light on the back porch illuminated the wide stretch of recently mown lawn between the two houses. “Linda. She mentioned the septic problem to me? I guess she and DeeDee had a standing dinner date on Wednesdays.”
DeeDee had had a more active social life in the past twelve months than Joe had, and she’d been dead for four of them. That was depressing.
“Right. Linda,” Joe said. He wondered if she and Austin were going to continue the Wednesday dinner date.
“I’ll call her.” Austin stepped back into the trailer. When he returned to the door with his phone, he arrived without a yogurt and wearing a hoodie.
Joe and Starling shamelessly eavesdropped as Austin asked Linda if she had a dog.
“Uh, I don’t know.” Austin pulled the phone away from his mouth. “What did it look like?”
“A yellow-cream blur. We saw it sprinting away,” Joe explained.
Austin relayed the information, then went pale and yelped, “What?!”
Joe and Starling leaned in. “What is it?” Joe asked, worried.
Their eyes met. “She said it might have been a coyote. A coyote?” He put the phone back to his mouth. “Linda, I don’t do coyotes. I’m a city boy.”
Joe and Starling looked at each other and held back their laughter.
“I don’t think it was the right size,” Starling said placatingly.
“Or the right color,” Joe put in. As much fun as it was to watch Austin freak out, he didn’t want the poor guy to have a meltdown.
Austin gave them a grateful look. “Okay, so probably not a coyote.” He waited while Linda spoke once more, then hung up.
Apparently Linda didn’t know the dog, but she told them to bring it to her if they did find it. “Turns out she’s a vet.”
Austin stepped into his boots and shut the door of the trailer behind him. “Any thoughts as to the best way to find a stray dog?”