Dog House by Carol Prisant Page A

and safely standing in the hall, and I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the kitchen where triumphantly, I flipped on the light switch.
    There was my dead man standing tall and true in the far corner.
    There was the wedge of canvas, sticking to that corner like glue.
    But the entire rest of the ceiling had fallen down.
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    And Millard loved it.
    He loved being right about this money pit of a house. He loved knowing what I didn’t know: that a broom and some drywall would put all to rights. And despite his inherent feminism, he loved my ineptitude. Most of all, he loved the egg on my face. In some major, mysterious way, it eased his angst AND ... it would give him a really good story to tell on his impulsive, impossible, maladroit wife.
    But to have him laugh like that every day for the rest of our lives, I’d have swept up old plaster forever.

    His own most challenging jobs turned out to be the mere placing of a lally column under the sagging ceiling of the garage; the putting in of hooks and screw eyes on the lower halves of those tall, warped screen doors that didn’t completely close and latch; the locating and repair of the open sewage pipe (yes, sewage pipe) that had been mucking up the lawn; the carrying of some HEAVY new telephone poles down to reinforce the bulkhead—at low tide, of course, with plenty of male help; and finally, the simple installation of our new dishwasher and the repair of some plaster that had fallen from the living room ceiling because the pipes had once burst, and ...
    Hey, there we were, with nothing to do but cosmetics!
    We’d never been much for new kitchens and bathrooms, anyway. We were all about moldings and clapboards, faux graining and correct wallpapers, so we didn’t mind the 1955 stove or the 1915 flush-o-matic toilets—all seven of them.
    Cosi took the move in stride. She weed in every room, upstairs and down, and pooped only in the rooms we hadn’t started to work on yet.
    Thus, finally, with the exception of the unique, dank Spring Room that housed an artesian well in the basement and seemed to be permanently under three inches of water, most of the scary repair was enough under control that we began to congratulate ourselves on our “bargain.” Or rather, I congratulated ourselves. Millard never would admit to me that he loved the house. Never. Although he carried not one, but two pictures of it in his wallet, which were two more than he carried of Barden or me.
    By the Fourth of July, 1986, the house was working sufficiently well that we could think of inviting his recently remarried father and stepmother for a visit. We had no air-conditioning, but we did have a million numbered screens that we hurried to hoist up before they arrived. Millard and his father were Georgia-born and never-no-minded the heat. I could be an occasional good sport, depending on the humidity. Joan, the new wife, we weren’t sure about. She had been my mother’s friend (bridge, not golf), and my own darling father, whom I’d lost just that spring, had once hinted to me that he wasn’t so fond of Joan. This was so unlike my father that I’d remembered the comment but decided to reserve my own judgment.
    They arrived on a scorching afternoon, and after the five-dollar tour, during which they tried really hard to be polite about our elderly, eccentric project, we all sat back and relaxed on our sparsely furnished wraparound porch, sipping iced drinks and admiring the egrets. lVlillard’s father, courteous and cheerful as always, had his usual fastidious napkin wrapped around the omnipresent glass of scotch and, beaming proprietarily at his bride, good-naturedly boasted that everywhere he’d asked in Pittsburgh, he’d heard the same thing about her: “Joan was a real lady.”
    Oh dear.
    She was something of a cipher as well: attractive, of course, slim, pleasant, sure of herself, but with an abrasive Pittsburgh accent