It was after midnight on Friday evening when Dave saw the lights of Shae's Taurus pulling into the driveway. This wasn't unexpected; when she'd called for the boys' bedtime story she explained they'd had to shoot later in the afternoon than planned, but was going to drive right straight through from the minute Avalon had wrapped for the day. Dave saved the open file on the novel -- having an unexpected weekend in Bradford gave him a little more time than he had been anticipating, so he had a chance to work on it -- and headed outside to greet her.

He'd barely made it out the front door when he saw Shae rushing toward him. He spread his arms to greet her, but got an unexpected response. "Out of my way, Dave," she said anxiously. "Never get between a pregnant woman and a bathroom. I've got to pee so bad it isn't funny."

"First things first," he laughed, stepping aside. He headed out to her car, to discover her suitcase lying on the back seat. He grabbed it and headed inside, leaving it on the dresser of the big bedroom. He was just getting back to the living room when she came out of the downstairs bathroom. "Oh, damn!" she exclaimed. "That feels so much better!"

"You know, there is a service plaza on the turnpike not far back," he teased. "You didn't have to press on regardless."

"Hell, I stopped there," she said. "Christ, I'm going to be glad when these commutes to see you are over with. Is everything set up?"

"As much as can be," he nodded.

It had been a busy couple days back on Tuesday and Wednesday, but things had gone pretty well. As it turned out, Lloyd had hit his prediction about Court right on the nose. Well, nearly -- he'd taken off for a couple hours to do some odds and ends, but was back at the big table with a cup of coffee, killing time till lunch when the two of them walked in. Right from the beginning, Dave remembered Jerry, but until that moment wouldn't have been able to put the name together with his face. He was in his late fifties, a few inches shorter than Dave, lean and muscular, with short-cropped gray hair and black horn-rimmed glasses. Lloyd had made the introductions and explained how Dave was thinking about having a house built. The problem, as Lloyd put it, was that Dave's ducks were all over the place though they showed signs of getting into a row. Court told him that he could handle it, but it was going to be a case of first come, first served, although there was nothing else right at the moment that looked like it might come out of the woodwork to get in the way.

While Court said he could handle building the house, designing it was another issue. He explained that he preferred to not design anything much more complicated than a two-car garage, but there was a good designer, Steve Grimes, he often worked with who could handle that part of it. "He's actually just a draftsman," Court had explained. "But he's kind of a jack-leg architect. He'll be quicker and less expensive than if you hired the real thing, and you'll probably get a more-livable space out of it."

Not only did Court recommend Grimes, he took Dave over to meet the guy. He was about Court's age, give or take, shorter yet, with thin hair plastered firmly onto a nearly bald head. He assured Dave that putting something together in a hurry wouldn't be a problem. He had literally tens of thousands of floor plans available and could order prints to go with them fairly cheaply, and also make any needed modifications to the prints. "One tricky thing," Dave told them. "I want ten-foot ceilings all through the house, and eight-foot doors. I realize those may have to be custom made, but don't go talking standard-sized doors to me. Cabinets and countertops will probably have to be made special, too. We'll have to sit down with my fiancée and get her input on things, and go from there." Dave also pointed out he was still had to be sure about getting the land he wanted, but if things could be worked out they made a tentative appointment for Saturday morning to work on the details.

When Dave and Lloyd got back to the office, Dave tried Don Paxton again; Emily had had the phone number after all, but there wasn't any answer when he called the first time. This time there was; he'd just gotten in off the golf course. Paxton told him he'd finally gotten the worst of the insurance issues worked out. "Hey," he said. "When those insurance guys tell you they're quick to settle a claim they are full of shit to the eyeballs. Don't ever believe it." He told Dave he thought it was unwise to sell the property before the insurance issues were settled, but now that they were, he was planning to list the place the next time he was in Bradford, which wouldn't be before summer. "I don't mind not paying a commission to a real estate agent," he said. Dave offered to pay the price of a fair appraisal, when it could be worked out, but he needed a few more days to run it by Shae and straighten out a few other things before he could close the deal.

With that done, Dave called Michelle in the Dunlap and Fyre office, to ascertain there wasn't anything waiting for him that couldn't be put off a while. He hadn't wanted to tell her what really was going on -- building a house was a sure sign he wouldn't be back working in New York, and he wanted to keep his options open as long as he could. But, she accepted his explanation that "something has come up here" and let it go at that, and no, there wasn't anything at their end that couldn't wait for a week or two.

The next call was to Aaron Tietelbaum, who told him that buying a house was a great tax move. "It'll actually work better if you take out a mortgage on it," Aaron said. "You can always pay it off early, but there's a lot of things we can do with homesteads. Oh, and make sure you get a fixed rate mortgage. Adjustable rates are a good deal right now and will probably go lower, but sooner or later the bottom is going to drop out of the market, and we'll be looking at double digits. If you have a fixed rate, you can just sit back and grin at the poor people trying to make those huge balloon payments."

Only then did Dave talk to Shae for the third time that day to tell her their ducks were starting to line up and they had to deal with things on Saturday. His previous call, before heading out to the Chicago with Lloyd, was to bounce the general idea off of her, and to tell her the Paxton property might be available for a home site. "God, that would be so neat," she said. "We had a lot of fun there in the old days. Is the pool still there?"

"Yeah, but no water in it," Dave told her. "I don't know if they pumped it out for fire fighting, or it leaked out, or what. I didn't even take much of a look to see what kind of shape it was in. I just wanted to re-familiarize myself with the property."

All of the running around made Tuesday a day he was likely to remember for a long time. That evening, during the late call after story time, they brainstormed a little on what they wanted in the house. Dave had hoped Shae would have some reaction to the deadline ultimatum she had for the producers, but it hadn't worked. Sean had made himself scarce for the rest of the afternoon; in the nightly phone calls she reported he'd spent most of the time at the network offices or hiding in a hole or something.

Now, Shae was here, and they could talk about some of those things without having to do it on the phone. It was still going to be a busy weekend. "I've opened negotiations with the bank here about a construction loan," Dave told her. "They're like any bank, they're going to drag ass till the cows come home, but I talked to Aaron, and we can kite money around as we need to until the bank figures out what they're doing. They drag it out too long, and I'll just pay cash and eat the tax bite, but I'd rather have the cash in mutual funds getting eight and nine percent while I'm only paying six percent on a mortgage. I made that pretty clear to them, and I think it will speed things up some. That's one thing about having money, it smooths out a lot of the horse shit."

"Funny how that works, isn't it?" Shae smiled, still walking around the living room to get some of the road kinks out. "I appreciate your keeping me informed on this stuff. I realize it's pretty much your money, but it's going to be our house."

"Well, I'm just glad you could take the trip here this weekend when it wasn't your turn," he said. "Just because of the season, we need to be getting hot on this, but if everything goes all right, we should be able to move in by the time the snow flies. No promises about it being before the baby comes, but there's a chance."

"It would be nice," she sighed. "But however it works out, I'm going to enjoy being here with you for the summer, and even if we don't get to live in the house right away, it'll be nice to know it's there waiting."

The thought almost stopped him. "You mean they may actually meet the deadline?"

"Actually, I doubt it," she told him. "I finally got to Sean over lunch hour today. He, uh, he tried to sneak out without talking to me, but I sort of blocked the door until I said my piece," she giggled. "Needless to say, he's not happy to be told to shit or get off the pot. That's what he does to other people. Anyway, he told me everything is still up in the air. There still is no decision about next year. Anyway, with what came down this week, I told him August 1 and I wasn't planning on dragging it out a day past that. I also reminded him I've been working without a contract for months, and there's nothing to keep me from not even showing up Monday. So, yeah, there is a chance there could be another year of Avalon."

"Damn," he frowned. "I guess I've pretty well got things settled in my mind that we're both going to be here for the next school year. But, I haven't exactly burned my bridges at Dunlap and Fyre yet, either, just in case I have to spend a winter in the city with you. It's going to be harder to do it with a nice new house sitting here in Bradford."

"Yeah," she sighed. "I just wish the hell now that I'd told him June 1 and let it go at that. Well, there's still the Charlie's House solution."

"Huh? That one went past me."

"Oh, you remember me telling you how Charlie's House became Avalon. A couple of the principals decided to hold out for more money than they were willing to pay. Since I don't have a contract, they might have to make it worth my while to keep me, and the price is going to go up the longer they drag their ass. But I don't think I want to give up the lease on the apartment before August, just on general principles."

"You know what?" he said. "It sounds like someone wants to kill it but have someone else to blame for doing the dirty work."

"Yeah, God, don't you just love office politics?"

"Oh, yeah," he shook his head. "That's the one thing I hated about not doing the trip to the city this weekend. I wanted to find out how it's going in our own little internecine struggle. What with all the stuff at the Courier and my regular job, I haven't been able to work on the book much in the last month or so. I try to write a few hundred words each day just to keep up progress, but I don't always manage it. I would really like to have it completed and able to run it by Michelle, and maybe Dick and Rob before any changeover comes. If Rayme is running fiction, I think it'll get dropped like a hot potato. If they want it, I'd like to have it pretty well accepted and under contract before Rayme gets any say. Originally, I wanted to present them with a completed book, but now I think it'll have to be fifteen to twenty chapters and a synopsis and outline. I think I want to do it sooner rather than later, too, and especially before they find out I'm building a big new house out in the heart of flyover country."

"I don't know," she sighed. "Maybe we ought to hold off on the house."

"It would simplify things," he shook his head. "But on the other hand, everything else is falling into place. Frankly, if we don't get something nailed down with Court, it could be a year before we could even get another contractor onto the site, and I'm not sure we want to wait that long. Face it Shae, we're trying to hang onto the strings of still believing we're New Yorkers when we're really trying to just get the hell out of there in the best shape possible."

"Yeah," she said. "You're right about that. But isn't hanging around Dunlap and Fyre going to help you with your book?"

"It would, if the timing works out right," he said. "If it doesn't, there's plenty of other places I can shop it around and still have an inside track. I think I'm editor enough to know it's pretty good, but if it doesn't fly there are other things I can do without hanging around what the truckers out at the truck stop call 'the dirty side'. And it includes sitting around the house watching reruns of my wife playing a little girl giantess while I dandle our baby on my knee."

"It'd drive you nuts," she said flatly. "It sounds good, but after a few weeks you'd go out of your tree."

"Well, if it happens, I think Emily might be willing to put me to work a couple days a week down at the Courier. Shae, I know we're both workers at heart and don't want to come to the realization we don't have to work anymore. And really, we don't have to, thanks to Julie. Granted, the money from her would provide us plenty to live on, but not extravagantly. If we want to take off in the summer and take the family to, oh, Europe or China or something, it would have to be out of what I might as well call supplemental income."

"Hey, lover," she grinned. "There is one good thing about not working."

"What's that?" he asked.

"Well, lover," she said in a sultry voice. "We'd have plenty of time to do fun things we like to do while the kids are in school all day. Things we have to wait for late nights on the odd weekends to do right now."

"Now that you mention it," he grinned. "There are some advantages."

Since the Chicago Inn was the unofficial business center of Bradford, Dave had worked out having a preliminary meeting with Jerry and Steve there before they went out to the old Paxton place, which would precede going over to Steve's and getting serious about floor plans. Since both Steve and Jerry were regulars there and Dave knew how to find the place, it seemed like a good way to get everyone settled in with each other before they got down to business.

Kayla showed up a little early to watch the boys, which meant Dave and Shae had the opportunity to get out to the Chicago a little early and maybe get a little extra coffee into them before the builder and the planner showed up. They got a seat at a larger table; the waitress greeted both of them by name, so he thought they must be becoming something of regulars themselves.

They were there long enough to get through a couple of refills before Jerry and Steve showed up, although the agreed-on time for the meeting hadn't come yet. Just before they were due to arrive, Shae decided to make use of the ladies' room, mainly to avoid the urge while out at the Paxton place.

Thus it was just Dave sitting at the table, drinking his coffee, when the two arrived. After a cursory round of good mornings, Jerry bailed right off on what was on his mind. "Dave," he said. "Steve and I have been talking it over out in the parking lot about this business of ten-foot ceilings and eight-foot doors. You realize it's going to cost you a ton, and Steve tells me there are bound to be some design problems with those numbers. Do you really need them that big?"

Shae couldn't have timed her appearance from the ladies' room more perfectly. "Yeah, I think I do," Dave smiled. "Steve, Jerry, I'd like you to meet my fiancée, Shae Kirkendahl."

Both the men looked up at Shae -- way up; she was wearing heels as was usual for her, although she planned on changing to tenny-runners out at the Paxton's. "Holy shit!" Steve said. "I remember you! That state finals game back in, hell, must have been '87. That was about the best basketball I ever saw."

Jerry didn't miss a beat. "The thing of it is," he said. "If you have a door that tall and only thirty-two inches wide, it's going to look goofy as hell."

"So make them wider," Dave shrugged. "Go to thirty-six, even forty-two inches. Have you ever tried to wrestle a thirty-six-inch chair through a thirty-two-inch door? Look, I told you this was a no-give thing, and it includes things like ceilings and counter heights. We don't have to go all the way to ten feet, but nine-foot-six is do-able if you can't go higher. Like I said, I know it's going to be expensive, but I'm willing to pay extra to have it done like Shae needs it."

The breakfast meeting proved to be pretty productive. Dave had spent a little time over the past few days asking around about Steve and Jerry, and everyone he met had good reviews about their work. They shot the bull a little about basketball and living in New York, but the discussion soon turned back to the house. Dave and Shae had been able to work out several things they wanted to accomplish, including having a minimum of five bedrooms.

Dave had rather obliquely approached the boys earlier in the week and asked them if they'd like to have separate bedrooms when they got older, or whether they'd be willing to share one as they always had done. A little to Dave's surprise, they opted for separate bedrooms if they had the chance. When Dave explained it to Steve, the designer suggested taking the space of one large bedroom and dividing it into two smaller ones, but in such a way that the wall could be easily removed to make it into a single larger one again.

One thing Shae insisted on, a little to Dave's surprise, was that he have a special work room, well separated from the rest of the house, even if it meant having a separate building to get Dave away from the noise of a house full of small children to work. Dave agreed it would be good to have a separate spot, but he wanted to be at least available to the family. Given a choice, he said he wouldn't mind having a fair amount of glass in his workroom; he enjoyed looking out the window, not a diversion, but as inspiration for a scene. "I'll come up with something," Steve smiled. "In fact, I've had an idea for something like it kicking around in my head that might work just fine."

After breakfast, they drove out to the old Paxton place. The cable across the driveway was still in place -- it was going to take a socket wrench for the cable clamps, at a minimum, to take it down -- but Shae changed into tennis shoes and the four of them hiked the short distance up the driveway to the home site. "You know, that's really sad," Shae shook her head at the remains of the burned-out house. "I had a lot of fun here when I was a kid, and to see it like this makes me realize I'm not a kid anymore."

"Time passes and things change," Dave said, in what had become almost a mantra.

"I suppose," she said.

Dave turned to Steve and Jerry. "Got a thought I'd like you guys to think about," he said. "When I was out here the other day it happened to come to me that maybe where the house is, or was, or whatever, isn't the best place for it on the lot."

"I think you're right," Steve said. "I think you could have a much better view of the pond if you put it over the other side of the swimming pool. Plus, it'll get you away from those tall trees some. You've got a couple here that are getting pretty aged and don't look real healthy. You might want to think about having them taken out, but in any case, you don't want to wake up some night to find a tree trunk in bed with you. Among other things, that could hurt."

"Somebody make a note," Dave said. "We might as well get some tree guys out here before you actually build anything."

"Works better that way," Jerry said. "Now, if you were going to be over on the other side of the pool, then there's a few trees that'll about have to come out, too.

"I wonder how good the pool is, anyway," Shae commented. "It sure doesn't look good with the puddle full of dead leaves in the bottom."

Jerry walked over to it. "Gunite, from the looks of it," he said. "You said you were out here in high school. Any idea how old it is?"

"Couldn't be less than twenty years," Shae said. "It was here the first time I was here, in grade school, and just thinking back I don't think it was new then."

"Well, you might be able to salvage it," Jerry replied. "But actually, I think the pool area itself makes a pretty good location for the house, and it'd give you a start on a basement."

"I don't know how much good a basement is going to be," Steve commented. "As low as this is, with the pond there, you're going to wind up with a swimming pool anyway if you put one in."

"Yeah, that's true," Jerry said. "Do you have to have a basement?"

"Not really, if we can design in adequate storage space and utility space," Dave said. "But this is tornado country, and I would like to have a safe room if we can't have a basement."

"That doesn't have to be ten feet high," Shae said. "Use the extra space for steel and concrete."

"There's getting to be some pretty good commercial safe rooms being built these days," Jerry said. "We haven't had a major tornado in this neck of the woods for a while, and I frankly think we're overdue."

"Get it on your got to list," Dave said.

After nearly an hour, they figured they'd gotten about what they could get out of their visit. "Why don't you meet me at my house in an hour?" Steve suggested. "Give me a chance to organize a few thoughts and look through some floor plan books. Most of what we're talking about is pretty standard, but there are a few twists."

Steve's workroom was the front room of his house, only a couple blocks over from Dave's -- close enough that he and Shae decided to walk it for the sake of the exercise. The room itself proved to be a mess -- there was no other possible word to describe it -- but at least his drawing board was clear and there was space for an impressive array of computer equipment. "I'm old fashioned," Steve said. "I suppose I could do a lot of what I do in some sort of drafting program, but I like the feel of a pencil on a sheet of paper. Things seem to make a little more sense that way."

"I know where you're coming from," Dave said. "I'm thoroughly comfortable working on a computer, but I know writers who don't even like typewriters. One of the best writers I know always does his first drafts with a fifty-year-old fountain pen. He has someone type it up, and he does his editing in Word, but that first draft goes straight from his hands onto paper."

"A good description," Steve nodded. "I could be comfortable with that. I've dug out several commercial floor plans and renderings with some promise. I don't think they're exactly what you want, but they'll give me a better idea of what you like and what you don't. Give me a few days and I'll have something for you to look at."

"Scan it so Shae can have a look, too," Dave said. "She's got to head back to New York in the morning; we can e-mail it to her."

"Yeah, might as well," Steve told her. "It doesn't hurt that I have what's probably the biggest scanner in the city. Anyway, just to get into it, I don't think we want to do anything too avant-garde out there, because I've found that avant-garde gets old real quick. The site almost screams for something sort of colonial, in my opinion." He pointed to a stack of magazines sitting open one on top of the other. "Let's go through the pile and see where we come out."

Over the next two hours Steve just about wrung Shae and Dave dry. They learned things about their tastes they didn't even know. On occasion, he'd turn away from the printed plans, and in quick strokes sketch out an idea on a pad of paper on his drawing board. Some of his ideas seemed to make sense; others didn't. Dave particularly liked his idea for his workspace to be located in a cupola in the top center of the house, with windows in all directions. It was accessed by a spiral staircase from the living room. "It's really neat," Dave said. "But what happens when I want to get, say, a desk up the spiral staircase?"

"Right," Steve said, ripping the sheet of paper from the drawing board, wadding it up, and flipping it over his shoulder. "OK, here's another way it could be done. This has sliding doors on the front and back that go out to decks on either side. You're not going to be moving furniture every day, maybe not once a decade, but the back deck would be low enough to the ground that something could be handed up. Small stuff, well, with ten-foot ceilings the stairs are going to have to be pretty wide, so it should handle something small like an office chair. Let me play with it a bit, mostly because I like the cupola and widow's walk idea. It's going to be way more cost effective to build than a separate section of the house or even a separate building. Besides, with this you can sort of monitor what's going on in the house without being involved with it."

"Yeah, I find that appealing," Dave said.

Finally, as they reached the point where they were nearly overwhelmed, Steve let them go. "Let me simmer on this for a few days, and I'll have some sketches and renderings for you," he said. "That's a neat location and it deserves a neat house."

After a little more friendly talk, Dave and Shae headed on back to his house. "You know," Shae smiled, "For someone who's not an architect, I thought he had a better idea of what to do than I would have imagined."

"As far as I know, he's never had a day of college in his life," Dave observed. "But he has the vision, he's worked with this stuff for years, and he has the talent. Have you ever read a novel by someone with a doctorate in literature? They're forced to prove they're great writers, so all too often what they turn out is almost unreadable. They tend to get real pissy when you go to edit them, too. Just because you have a piece of paper doesn't mean you have the soul for what you're doing. Knowing that, I'm damn comfortable with him, and I think he's going to design us a great house."

"Yeah, I think so too," she smiled. "And I guess you know I really am looking forward to living in it with you."

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.