Someday turned out to be a random Tuesday in August when our realtor called and said the owners had accepted our offer.
Waverly painted the front door yellow because she said every good house needs a yellow front door.
I didn’t argue because she was right, and also because I’d learned that Waverly being right was less a pattern and more a universal constant.
I was happy. Genuinely, deeply happy.
And the weird thing about being happy after a long stretch of being overlooked is that it feels almost suspicious at first.
Like you’re waiting for someone to show up and tell you there’s been a mistake. That this life was meant for someone else, someone more like Sutton.
But nobody showed up.
The life was mine.
I’d built it brick by brick, decision by decision, early morning by late night.
And then, in the way that life has of delivering irony with the timing of a comedian, I heard from Sutton.
Not directly. Through my dad.
Jean, who hadn’t spoken to me since the wedding non-invitation, suddenly called me on a Tuesday evening.
His voice had that grally, uncomfortable tone he gets when Loretta has told him exactly what to say, and he’s reciting it from memory.
“Oliver, your brother needs help. The lake house is in trouble.”
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny, but because the universe has a sense of humor that borders on sadistic.
The house they gave to Sutton.
The house I wasn’t good enough to co-own.
The house I needed approved dates just to visit.
That house was in trouble.
And suddenly, guess whose phone rang?
The lamp in the corner.
That’s whose phone rang.
I didn’t say yes.
I didn’t say no.
I said, “Tell me what happened.”
And I listened.
And what I heard was a story so predictable that I could have written it myself with my eyes closed.
Here’s what happened to the lake house.
Sutton and Jolene, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to renovate it.
Not just a fresh coat of paint and some new curtains.
I’m talking a full gut renovation.
They ripped out the original kitchen.
They tore up the pine floors that Grandpa Hank had installed himself in 1978.
They knocked out a wall between two bedrooms to make up primary suite because apparently the house where three generations of our family had slept comfortably wasn’t luxurious enough for Jolene’s vision board.
The renovation was supposed to cost about $80,000.
It ballooned to 160, then 200.
Sutton had taken out a home equity loan against his own house to fund it.
And when that ran out, he put another 40,000 on credit cards.
Jolene, who talked a big game about real estate but had apparently never actually managed a construction project, kept changing the plans.
New countertops, different tile.
Oh, let’s add a deck.
Actually, let’s extend the dock, too.
Every change order was another five or $10,000.
And the contractor they had hired was the kind of guy who said yes to everything because every yes was more money in his pocket.
And then the contractor disappeared.
Just gone.
Mid-project.
He took their last progress payment, something like $35,000, and vanished.
Left the house half-gutted. Exposed framing, no functioning kitchen, one working bathroom.
The beautiful porch that used to lean charmingly to the left now leaned aggressively to the left because they’d messed with the foundation supports during the renovation and hadn’t shored them back up.
Grandpa Hank’s lake house looked like a crime scene.
On top of all that, Sutton’s real estate business wasn’t doing well.