Chapter Two
Two
Treasure houses, it turned out, were houses no one wanted.
Filled to the brim with the detritus of messy lives, they were junk heaps.
But you could see that once they’d been loved—you could tell by the remnants of patterned wallpaper that someone had obviously chosen with care; the old, rusted swing sets in overgrown gardens; dusty photos in tarnished frames.
I felt an immediate affinity with the treasure houses on TikTok.
The first reel I watched was of a teensy little house in Traverse City, Michigan.
It was the size of a small mobile home and was surrounded by junk.
There were old sinks, rusted-out wheelbarrows, ten-gallon drums tipped on their sides, and a general scattering of discarded objects.
The couple who’d bought the house were a smiling, peppy pair in work boots, wielding hammers.
The reels showed them clearing out their little house at double speed, their smiles never faltering.
As I watched, the neglected house emerged from its gloom, turning into a cheerful buttercup-yellow cottage with sunny white interiors and views out of the front windows to freshly mulched garden beds.
And the kicker?
They paid $37,000 for the junk-filled place. And sold the buttercup-yellow dream for more than $200,000.
I mean, seriously…
$37,000 for a house.
The treasure houses were in far-flung parts of the country, in places that didn’t specialize in McMansions and yacht moorings: Fort Flagg, Alabama; Quilty, Georgia; Nailsworth, Ohio.
There were treasure houses in Minnesota, South Dakota, Indiana, and New Mexico, all in towns I’d never even heard of.
The treasure house hashtag led me to people who were wrestling with mold, mildew, opossums and raccoons, salt damp, poison ivy and poison oak, asbestos and emotional overwhelm.
But… every last one of them had a house.
A home. On the kind of budget that seemed preposterous.
My kind of budget.
If those houses had been in more desirable places, they’d be sold for serious money, even as wrecks.
But they were in nooks of the country where few wanted to live, and even fewer were prepared to take on the labor of clearing them out.
I followed one woman who went by the tag HandyMom24—she was a single mother with three kids who had bought a treasure house in Washington state for $62,000.
It was a farmhouse out of a picture book, only threadbare, with split window frames, a sagging chimney, and paint so faded and flaked it was hard to tell what color it had once been.
The yard was a wasteland, with an ancient hemlock rising behind the house.
My heart pinched at the sight of that farmhouse, crouching sadly under the hemlock like a homeless old dog.
But as the reels cycled, I saw HandyMom24 and her three kids unload dark new earth from a truck to cover the dusty yard.
They splashed fresh whitewash on the house’s exterior, turned the front door cherry red.
While the house slowly transformed, a jack-o’-lantern appeared on the crooked top step in fall, Christmas lights twinkled in the hemlock in winter, and by summer little bursts of flowers had sprung up at its feet.
The farmhouse was still old, but it was loved. Lived in.
I’m not ashamed to say that I watched those reels at least a dozen times after work and another dozen times later in bed, my headphones on so the sound of HandyMom24’s narration wouldn’t wake Flo.
Our apartment was so small that you could hear everything the other person did from wherever you were in the apartment; from the kitchenette I could hear Flo’s toothbrush, from the bedroom I could hear the hum of the refrigerator, from the shower I could hear the bedsprings as Flo sat down to put on her shoes in the morning.
And our twin beds practically touched. That had done wonders for my love life, as you can imagine.
I often felt trapped, especially at night, trying not to wake my kid as I crept around the apartment, and the feeling only got worse as she grew.
Her twelfth birthday was approaching. Twelve years of this life, creeping around.
It had flown by, but also dragged. Twelve was the age I’d been when I’d gone to foster with Mr. and Mrs. Bracknell.
They were deacons in some church or other and their house was very clean.
The thought of Flo being packed up and taken to live with strangers filled me with a big, hot, hurting feeling.
As I watched the reels of treasure houses into the night, I reached out and put a hand on her as she slept.
I’d die before I let anyone take her away from me, the way I’d been taken away from Tina as a young child.
Flo snored softly, small puppy noises. She’d kicked off her covers, because it was a hot June and we didn’t have air-conditioning.
I heard drunken undergrads coming back from the bars, loudly shushing each other and giggling in the hall.
I felt a million years old as I listened to them.
Had I ever been that free? And would I still be living in this apartment when Flo was their age?
As I lay there in the darkness, I felt something break loose inside me.
Hell, I was only thirty-two; I wasn’t that much older than the undergrads in the hall.
I should be ordering a cocktail in a sleek little bar, trying to catch a flirty bartender’s eye, giggling with friends.
I should be searching for the shimmers of possibility in every dawning day. I should be… doing anything but this.
As I lay watching people clear junk out of dilapidated houses, a wild idea took hold.
I could do that.
I could get out of this place. I could buy a house. Start over.
I could make the life I wanted, instead of living the one I’d inherited.
Depending on the state of the place, and the town it was in, the prices of these treasure houses ranged from $30,000 to $100,000.
For a whole house. A crappy one-bedroom apartment in my building had recently sold for $160,000 and it was only six hundred square feet.
The treasure houses had multiple bedrooms, gardens, and sometimes even views of mountains, or rivers, or, magically, the ocean.
Sure, they were wrecks, but I was young and strong.
If other people could restore them, why couldn’t I?
“What’s that?” Florence asked the next morning at breakfast, pushing my phone down so she could see the screen.
“It’s a treasure house.”
“A what house?” She perked up, and I could tell she was thinking of pirates. I’d shown her The Goonies on our last movie night.
“Not that kind of treasure,” I told her, heading off any talk of gold doubloons. “These are just houses full of junk that people are selling.”
“They’re selling the houses or the junk?” She bent over my phone, the tail of her braid curling on the kitchen bench. She swiped to the next reel.
“Both. You buy the house, but it comes with all the junk.”
“Oh. Cool.” She looked up at me, grinning.
Flo had big, hooded eyes and round cheeks and a tendency to chew the ends of her braids until they were like wet paintbrushes.
She had inherited her father’s thin, mobile mouth and his easy sportiness, but she’d got my darker hair and coloring, and my penchant for books.
We were both on the tall side, with chins that were a little too wide, and since we both hated haircuts, we tended to have long, wild hair with too many split ends.
“Look, this one has a swimming pool.” She pointed at the screen with her spoon.
“I don’t think that’s a pool. I think it’s a pit.”
“Why would someone have a pit in their yard?”
I’d listened to enough true crime podcasts to not want to know the answer to that question. I swiped on to the next video.
“How come you’ve replaced Harry Styles reels with junk houses?” Flo upended the cereal box and shook it until a mountain of Cheerios piled up in her bowl.
“Bite your tongue. Harry’s irreplaceable.” I took the box away from her.
“Vanda’s mother lets her have Apple Jacks during summer vacation.”
“Well, good for her.”
“And Pop-Tarts.”
“Pop-Tarts are dessert, not breakfast.” I passed her the milk.
“They’re sold in the breakfast aisle.”
I ignored that.
“Don’t you think it’s depressing that I have to eat Cheerios instead of Apple Jacks while my mom phubs me?”
Sometimes it was like living with a junior prosecutor. “I’m not phubbing you, I’m house hunting.” Flo had introduced me to the term “phubbing” with relish, as she liked to tell me off for snubbing her in favor of my phone.
Flo jerked and milk splashed all over the counter. “You’re what now?”
“Oh my God, mop it up,” I begged, scrambling for the dish cloth. “Don’t just let it drip everywhere.”
“Are you telling me we’re getting a house with a pool?” Her eyes widened.
“No.” I gently nudged her out of the way and swiped at the milk before it cascaded over the edge of the counter. “Look at all the milk you’ve wasted. And it wasn’t a pool, it was a pit.”
“A proto-pool!”
A proto-pool. Who even was this kid? “Where did you learn the word proto?”
She shrugged. “From a book?” She pulled the stool back up to the now-damp counter. “Tell me about this house. It better be close by because I’m not changing schools.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. My late-night dreams started to crack in the light of day.
I had worked to keep Flo’s life steady and predictable.
It hadn’t been easy staying in the same school district as rents went up.
We’d moved twice already in Flo’s short life, both times downgrading to be able to stay in Squirrel Hill South.
I knew I couldn’t keep it up. The new rent increase meant our next downsize would have to be to a studio.
That was a soul-crushing thought. Flo would be a teen soon and no teen wanted to still be sharing a room with their mom.
No mom wanted to share a room with a teen either…