Building a Home with My Husband Read Online Free

from being green, Hal must have a design that’s not so gauche that it would call into question his architectural creds. But the search lacks these parameters. So we click on “No maximum price.”
    Sixty-three options appear, but only on the final screen do we find affordable possibilities—and every one is hideous, ramshackle, adjacent to sewage treatment plants, on four-lane commercial strips, in areas oft-cited in the police reports, or too snug for our sofa.
    Hal lifts a bottle of water off my desk and holds it to his mouth like a microphone. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s true,” he intones in a radio announcer’s stentorian voice. “There is no hope for our two heroes.”
    “Other people find ways to move,” I say, slumping in my chair. “We could, too, if only we’d started saving in our twenties, instead of being artists.”
    “For our two pauper heroes,” he amends. “For them, there is only doom.”
     
    January eases into February. We debate our house all the time. I’m adamant about moving and Hal’s completely cooperative, but real estate prices remain uncooperative. We do get an unexpected shot of hope when we learn that my book is going to be adapted for a television movie, but then realize that the funds won’t be nearly enough to rescue us from the final screen on the real estate sites. To make matters worse, at one of our many neighborhood parties, when I’m sounding off about our burglary, a former resident who’s back to see old friends says, “I moved away because I wanted to be in the suburbs. The day after we moved, we were robbed. Everyone in our neighborhood has been robbed. It can happen anywhere.”
    “Yes,” say other people at the party. “My pocket was picked in Princeton.” “Our car was broken into in Cherry Hill.”
    “Nowhere is safe,” I say to Hal as we walk home from the party.
    “We could stay,” he suggests.
    We reach the house. The local planning office says it’s “of a vernacular Second Empire style.” I prefer to think of it as Forgettable Flawed.
    “We could,” he repeats.
    “You hate mansard roofs. This has a mansard roof.”
    “A Victorian one, so that makes it more bearable.”
    “And the downspout doesn’t work,” I say.
     
    Spring advances. Buds dot the sycamores outside our windows, then open like the relaxing of fists. Neighbors sweep winter off their steps, let their children ride tricycles without coats, hang Japanese lanterns on porches. The park fills with daffodils and ducklings.
    So it is that on a glorious April day, we’re out for a stroll in the park. We’ve just cracked jokes with a dog walker we know from neighborhood parties, and as we resume our loop around the Brandywine Creek, I mention how much I like the friends we’ve made in our neighborhood.
    “You know, we like a lot of people here,” Hal says. He directs my gaze. Nearby is a picnic table where a red-haired mother draws pictures with her red-haired daughter. He gestures toward a man collecting seed pods along the cobblestone road, Monkey Hill, that slopes up from the park zoo. He nods toward a couple jogging past the fountain with classical statues. We know all their names. We have spoken with them in shorts and bad hair, in down coats and good spirits, with groceries in our hands and worries on their minds, in front of the mural a resident artist painted on his wall and beside the toy truck the little boy plays with across the street. Newcomers or old-timers, black or white, gay or straight, corporate or Bohemian, they are talkative and open. “We live in a great place,” Hal adds.
    As we cross the nineteenth-century stucco bridge over the Brandywine, then continue beside the river until the small dam at the bottom of the steep street that leads to our neighborhood, I think, for the first time, about how our house, boring and decayed though it is, is right in the middle of the very characteristic that everyone seeks but that’s never a parameter on