“You may not see its value on the open market,” he continued. “That part of town is no longer the wrong side of the tracks. The tracks moved. You could flip it like a flapjack. Make a pretty penny.”
“Absolutely not,” Dara said. “That’s our family home. We would never sell it.”
Derek lifted his eyebrows.
“I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t like me,” he said, smiling again, this time almost as though embarrassed, or something. “But there’s no reason we can’t be friends. And your sister . . .”
“I don’t have to like you,” Dara said, moving past him, a blast of the leather scent in her face. “You’ll be gone soon.”
The look on his face, surprise and something else, a wounded look, something.
It was satisfying, unexpected. A little boy’s face, his mother abandoning him at the mall.
She could feel him looking at her even as she walked away, walking as fast as she could.
* * *
*
The conversation hummed in her ear unpleasantly long after. What did he know about their house anyway? Yes, it was old, leaky, drafty, their house. There were uneven floors, windows painted shut, plaster crumbling, and roots growing in the pipes.
And it was big, far too big, their parents managing a down payment when the neighborhood was on its heels. No grocery store in five miles but at least three bars. No streetlights their first ten years there, no matter how many times their father called the city.
And it was true that the neighborhood had transformed in recent years, the corner deli replaced with a light and bright café, the public pool filled with concrete and replaced with a health spa, and all those creaky, charming prewar houses sold, razed, and replaced overnight with gaudy palaces.
The house was nothing to a man like Derek. The land was everything.
A man like Derek, he could never understand it was their home. It was their whole childhood. More than that, Dara thought, her eyes blurring.
Suddenly, she remembered something Marie had said, months ago, before she moved out.
They had been looking out the front window at the old weather-beaten colonial across the street, the sold sign on the weedy lawn. The latest of many.
“We could do that,” she’d said. “We don’t have to live here forever.”
“Is that so?” Dara had said. “You wanna run away with the circus?”
But Marie kept looking, her fingers on the windowpane like when she was little.
“We could put it up for sale.”
It hurt to hear. That house of their childhood, however varied and unsettled, their mother crying at her vanity table, her chignon slipping loose, their father raging down the hall, knocking his fist into that peeling plaster and demanding respect in his own home, or at least attention.
“We could,” Dara said pointedly, reminding Marie of the facts. “Charlie and I could. Because it’s our house. But we wouldn’t.”
* * *
*
Did you say something to Derek?” Marie asked later.
“About what?” Dara replied. Her sister had come upon her as she exited the powder room—the one she could never set foot in without thinking of her sister and Derek in there. The way the sink now wobbled on its base.
“I don’t know. He left early. He didn’t even say goodbye.”
Dara didn’t say anything, suppressing an unexpected smile.
“What if he’s done with me?”
“Marie. Marie.” There was something so desperate about it. Her sister who knew how she felt, her disapproval over this entanglement. But who else could Marie talk to?
“When he says he has to go, I follow him out the door. I chase him down the spiral stairs. I beg him to stay.”
“Pathetic,” Dara said as coolly as she could even though Marie’s intensity—her face pressed so close, her mascara sweat-stippled—was making her hot, confused.
“I don’t care. I don’t care. I have no shame. He ate away all my shame.”
“No wonder he’s getting tired of you,” Dara said. “I’m tired of you.”
“I need to hear his voice at night. I can’t sleep without his voice in my ear, talking and talking, all night.”
It was just like when they were little, Marie always begging to sit with their father while he drank his beers and watched Columbo reruns, old movies. How she would ask him to explain everything and he would, on and on. See, he looks like a magician, but he’s really a Nazi. I mean, Christ, look how clean he is.