“Here.” He reached in front of my knees and opened the glove compartment—not the first place I’d think of for keeping my own super-secret documents, but to each his and her own. He pulled out a spiral-bound artist’s pad and placed it in my lap.
I opened the cover. On the first page was a careful drawing of an old building in a row of others, part of a historic downtown district like ours, but three stories instead of two. The drawing wasn’t fully executed. Trees and bushes and a big dog on the sidewalk were only quick impressions from a pencil. A stylish wash of light strokes colored them in. But the drawing couldn’t truly be called a sketch, either. The lines of the building itself were straight and true, measured and drawn with a ruler.
“Wow,” I said reverently.
“I park in front of buildings and draw them,” he explained.
I turned the page to reveal an even more detailed drawing of an exquisite old store. “Where is this one?”
“Duluth,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the pad. “Most of them are in Duluth.” As I turned the page to an elaborate cathedral, he said, “That’s in St. Paul. I got grounded for that one, because I didn’t tell my parents where I was going or why. They wouldn’t have let me.”
I turned the page.
“I’m probably going to get arrested eventually,” he said. “Someone will think I’m casing the joint.”
I turned another page. There was no end to these gorgeous drawings. Every one of them should have been copied a million times and framed and sold in a tourist shop here in town. They were that pretty.
“I have too much time on my hands, obviously,” he said. “I should get a job.”
I shook my head. “These are beautiful.”
“Thanks.” He said this matter-of-factly, proud of his work but confident enough that he didn’t need my approval.
“You should major in art, not architecture.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “Great idea. My parents would lose their shit.”
“Yeah.” I turned the page to a grand house. “I can’t even take this in, all the detail. I want to spend a couple of hours with these another day.”
He laughed. “Okay.”
“I’m not kidding, for once.” I turned the page, and there was the house beside us, palm fronds softening the stark logic of the mansion’s careful proportions.
“I think it’s the coolest house ever,” Will explained. “It’s so much bigger and so different from everything else in this neighborhood. That’s why I wanted to ask you about it. I wondered if it’s a city landmark.”
“Oh, I’ll say!” I laughed. “I used to live there.”
He gave me a funny look. “Are you serious?”
“Why would I make up something like that?” I heard my voice rise in anger. I wished it wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it when I thought someone was assuming things about my family, and our income, and my dad.
Will’s voice rose in turn. “Because I’m the Fucking New Guy, and everybody is giving me incorrect information about the school and the town because that’s hilarious and I am a sitting duck.”
By “everybody,” I assumed he meant Sawyer. I wondered what wild goose chase Sawyer had sent Will on just for spite. And I regretted that our happy talk about Will’s cool drawings had unraveled into accusations. I said more quietly, “I really lived here. My dad used to buy run-down houses for cheap so he could fix them while we lived there. Then he sold them at a profit.”
“Oh.” Will’s brows knitted, and he pointed to the FOR SALE sign in the yard. “You weren’t able to sell it?”
“We did,” I said. “It’s been up for sale a couple of times since then. Folks probably buy it thinking they’re going to finish fixing it up, and fail miserably, just like we did. I can see why they want it, though. You wouldn’t believe the inside. High ceilings. Thick crown molding. An original chandelier in the foyer that makes the light look golden instead of white. And smack in the middle of the house there’s an atrium with a fountain, all tiny glass tiles in a mosaic of stylized mermaids. That fountain and the chandelier just look 1910.”
“That’s so cool!” Will exclaimed. “Did the fountain work?”
I almost said yes without thinking. “No. In my mind it works, though. That’s funny. I watch all these home improvement TV shows, and couples are always walking through a potential home and saying, ‘Ew, we couldn’t live here. The walls are blue.’ Well, paint them, Sally Jane and Earl! I understand other people can’t always see potential like my dad and I can.” I paused. “In fact, there are a lot of things I can see in my imagination that don’t actually happen.”
“I know what you mean,” Will said. “Me too.” His tone told me all I needed to know about what he was thinking.
I grinned across the car at him, so relieved that we were back to normal. But when he didn’t make a move on me, I looked toward the mansion again. It drew my eye. I couldn’t ignore its white angles glowing in the night. “My dad is brilliant. He has a contractor’s license, and he knows how to do everything in a restoration.”
Will didn’t say anything. As we continued to gaze at the house, I realized why.
I said, “You’re thinking my dad is pretty bad at flipping houses, since we didn’t finish it. After my mom left, he wanted something more stable. The real estate market was up and down. He had four girls to take care of on one income, and he needed a sure thing. He took a job at the boat factory, thinking he would use that money to supplement his real estate income. Then the factory job offered him extra shifts. He took them. He was never home to fix the house. And then our family shrank, and he realized we’d save money if we moved to a smaller house. That’s why we’ve moved four times in the last seven years. When I leave, he’ll probably move into a mailbox. A run-down one.”
“Why does your family keep shrinking?” Will asked gently, like he suspected this was a touchy question.
It was. It was so touchy, in fact, that my family had been the subject of many rumors over the years, most of them true. I was surprised Will hadn’t heard them all by now.
“I would say you don’t have to tell me,” he offered, “because obviously you don’t want to, but I’d really like to know.”