Chapter One

“I don’t get it, Mom. If this is our house, why are other people going to live here?” My daughter Melissa, nine years old and already a prosecuting attorney, looked up from the baseboard near the window seat in the living room, which she was painting with a two-inch brush and a gallon can of generic semi-gloss white paint. Never use the expensive stuff when you’re letting a fourth grader help with the painting.

“I’ve explained this to you before, Liss,” I told her without looking down from the wall. I was trying to locate a wooden stud, and the stud finder I was using was being, as is often the case with plaster walls, inconclusive. Using a battery-operated gizmo to find a stud and failing: I tried not to dwell on its metaphorical implications for my love life.

“Other people aren’t coming here to live,” I continued. “They’ll be coming here when they’re on vacation. We’re going to have a guest house, like a hotel. They’ll pay us to stay here near the beach. But we’ve got to fix the place up first.”

“Mr. Barnes says these houses have history in them, and it’s wrong to make them modern.” Mr. Barnes was Melissa’s history teacher, and at the moment, he wasn’t helping.

“Mr. Barnes probably didn’t mean this house. Besides, we’re fixing it up the way it is meant to be. I mean, no one would want to live in the house the way it looks now, right?”

Our hulk of a turn of the last century Victorian house was not, by the standards of anyone whose age was in the double digits, livable. Sure, the house had once been adorable, maybe even grand, but that was a long time ago. Now, the ancient plaster walls downstairs were peeling, and in some places, crumbling. There was a thick coat of white dust pretty much everywhere, and as far as I could tell, the heating system was devoid of, well, heat. The October chill was already starting to feel permanent in my bones.

However, it was clear some work had been done by the previous owner, though by my decorating standards, he or she must have been demented. The living room walls had been painted bright, blood red, and the kitchen cabinets were hideous, and hung so high Shaquille O’Neal would have a hard time reaching the cereal. Luckily, the upstairs walls had been patched and painted, the landscaping in the front of the house was quite lovely (although the vast backyard had been untouched), and the staircases (there were two) going upstairs had been refinished beautifully. It was a work in progress. Slow progress.

“I would live here,” Melissa said, and went back to painting. That settled it, in her view.

“You do live here,” I answered, not noting that there was no furniture, and we were both sleeping on mattresses laid directly onto the floors of our respective so-called bedrooms and living out of suitcases. Why remind her of all the things we’d left in the house in Red Bank after the divorce? Melissa’s father Steven (hereafter known as The Swine) hadn’t wanted the furniture, but he did want half the proceeds when I sold it all to help make the down payment on the house. The Swine.

Besides, now the house was a construction site, and any furniture would be prone to disfigurement or worse while the work went on. As soon as the house was in shape, the new furniture I’d ordered (and in some cases, collected from consignment stores) would be delivered.

I hadn’t put down a drop cloth where Melissa was working, because I was going to paint the rest of the wall after I’d made my repairs, and the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room was among the first things I’d decided to remove when I first saw the house. Giving Melissa woodwork to paint was going to be little help in the long term, but mostly, it was a good way to keep her busy.