Chapter One

"I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change!"

For weeks, we’d told the real estate agent that we were just bat-shit crazy about contemporary homes. Hubby and I drooled over the cheap, sleek Scandinavian crap in the Ikea catalogue. I imagined wearing all-black or all-white outfits and hosting pristine dinner parties where everyone had a white plate with a single perfect olive on it and nothing else. Our guests would laugh in a throaty, cultured, contemporary way as they pondered the origin of this perfect olive.

Modern! Get it, Ms. Real Estate Agent with the Lexus SUV? No Colonials, no Tudors, not so much as a ’50s ranch house for us. We wanted the kind of cool-cat, minimalist style you don’t see much in small Southern towns unless it belongs to the snooty art professor at the local college and his life partner. We weren’t a gay couple, obviously, but we sure were house-shopping like one.

So my forty-something agent slipped on her Ferragamos, fussed with her helmet hair in the mirror, tugged on her imitation St. John knit suit and set her mind to finding us, the Southern freaks, the modern house of our dreams.

She did a tremendous job, except for the time she apparently drank too much Robitussin and drove us to a split-level Brady Bunch house that made us gag and whine.

"This ain’t contemporary at all," I chided her.

Hiccup.

One day, deep into the fourth month of house hunting, she drove us to a new development of contemporary homes and we oohed and aahed over the white walls and steely solemnity. The living room in the model home was straight off the cover of the Crate & Barrel catalogue. You know the one: white couch, black fuzzy pillows, and that single, perfect hot-pink zinnia providing the only color in the room. It’s so tasteful it makes you want to throw up.

"Well?" real estate lady said, sweeping her arms grandly. "What do you think? Is this the one? It is, isn’t it? I just know it. It’s the one."

"Well, sorta," hubby said.

"Not so much," I said.

Real estate lady tried mightily not to show the disappointment she was feeling. She’d given us her best shot for four months and it wasn’t good enough.

The next week, hubby and I got lost on a one-way street in an old section of town. And there, on this street that no one knew about, was the perfect house with a sign in the yard.

We called real estate lady and asked her to find out all she could about it.

She was so excited that she drove over immediately to the perfect house. But when she pulled up, her face was ashen.

"You OK?" I asked.

"But (sob) this (sob) isn’t even close to (sob) contemporary!"

"Oh, yeah, about that...," I said.

We stood on the sidewalk in front of the perfect house and realized that it was nothing like we had described. Instead, it was a two-story Federal-style house that was ninety years old and needed a ton of work.

"Isn’t it beautiful?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," real estate lady managed. "But it’s old, really old, and it looks as if it might need, uh, some work."

"Don’t worry!" hubby crowed. "I can do a lot of the work myself." Well, not really. Hubby isn’t what you’d call handy. The one time I asked him to hang a picture in our apartment, it took twelve hours and a six-pack and even then that picture was crookedy ’til the day we moved out.

But we had House Fever and all that we could think about was moving in. There would be an offer, a counteroffer, and tons of inspections.

Looking back on it, I’m fairly certain the inspector was on crack when he proclaimed our house had "good bones." Perhaps he simply meant that he’d run into some while underneath the house, perhaps the brittle, calcified remnants of whatever handyman had been sucked into the murk for whatever repair long before we were born.

With the purchase of this old house, gone was the notion of the olive dinner party. This was more redneck Riviera, a home for oyster roasts and third cousins passing out and sleeping in the yard. It was purely, deeply Southern and we loved it. You could practically hear Olympia Dukakis imploring Sally Field to smack Shirley McLain across the face in the big backyard. It was Steel Magnolias and Ya-Yas rolled into one and, looking at the two enormous pecan trees in the yard, I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought we could go modern.

Nope, this was our house and we would love it and care for it and raise our baby in it and not even care when the basement filled with six feet of water during hurricanes. Which it did.

Friends who visited our new old house always said the same thing: "Did you ever see that movie? Gosh, what was it called? Had Shelley Long in it, maybe Michael Keaton? Or was it Tom Hanks?"

"Are you talking about The Money Pit?" we’d ask.

And, of course, they were.

"That’s the one! This house reminds me of that house in the movie. Hahahaha!"

Yes, hahahahahahaha, indeed.

We moved in and began the long process of renovation, at one point deciding that it would be a whole lot easier to just check into the hospital and have repeated elective surgeries until it was safe to come home again.

First up, the kitchen.

When you set out to gut a ninety-year-old kitchen, you have to be prepared for the occasional unforeseen challenge, or, as we like to call it, "rot."

"See," the contractor guy explained, as though talking to two small, dimwitted children, "water is the enemy of wood."

I was afraid he was going to say, "Now say it after me" just like my eighth-grade science teacher did.

Water, it turns out, hates wood like Trump hates Rosie. The two spend entire de cades fighting inside your walls, until one day a big, noisy tool exposes them just like a deputy holding a flashlight and shining it into the backseat when you’re parked at the junior high ball field. Oh, sorry. Where was I?

We had a crackerjack team working on our old house. There was Darrell and Damon and Donnie Ray and Dion, the head guy.

It’s a "D" thing; try to understand.

Each morning, the boys would roll up in assorted trucks, fumble for a cigarette or ten and walk up and down looking at the rear of the house.

They’d always shake their heads, calling to mind the country expression I grew up with that applied to times when Aunt Elna Jay or whomever had "the cancer."

In the rural South, "the cancer" surgery is always followed by a report from some kin proclaiming that "They opened Elna Jay up but when they took a look at her insides, well, they just sewed her right back up." It’s dramatic, always accompanied by a stitching-in-the-air motion and it never fails to elicit a chorus of "I swanee"s or even a hushed "Sweet Jesus" or two.

This is how the D team looked at the kitchen addition and renovation. Even the prospect of a complete demo of the ninety-year-old kitchen wasn’t enough to cheer them up. It was a gargantuan task ahead of them, not made any easier by the first day’s revelation that a very large dead rat would have to be dealt with when they pried up some boards.

Darrell promptly threw up his barbecue sandwich and Sun Drop and I realized that...