She looked down the road. “Where’s your place?”
“Up there,” he said, and pointed to the small bluff just behind and beyond the cul-de-sac at the end of the road. “The sort of Brady Bunch-meets-Frank Lloyd Wright-looking place.”
“That’syourhouse?” Vivien stumbled to a halt and looked at him in astonishment. “It’s…Wow.”
She knew the house, of course. She’d noticed it every time she drove by because though it looked pretty dated—all angles with its flat, half-pitched roof that was higher in the front than the back and the huge 1960s-style windows—she knew it had to have an amazing view of the big lake.
“Yeah,” he said with a bashful smile. “I got really lucky. The owner had to sell quickly, and it was the dead of January in the middle of a blizzard.”
“Is the view as amazing as it seems?”
“You’ll soon be able to see for yourself.” He gave her a warm smile, and she was annoyed when her heart gave a little thump.
This is not happening. You’re not going to let this happen again, Vivien Leigh.
“This way,” he said, pointing to a narrow walkway. “Through this little park here, then it’s just a little climb up a path over the rise over there. A lot shorter than taking the road, which goes out of its way to get up there.”
She didn’t say much as they walked, although she couldn’t wait to see the inside of the house. He carried the Nutcracker headpiece the whole way while she toted her duffel, and though it took extra effort to walk up the small path (calling it a “little” climb was a bit of an understatement), it was short enough that she wasn’t out of breath. Much, anyway. Though her calves might be feeling it tomorrow.
She was used to walking on flat surfaces all over the city—not climbing small mountains.
“That’s why I like to take this route when I run,” he said once they got to the top. “It’s a nice trail, and I have to work a little harder than on the treadmill or just running through a neighborhood.”
Someone had done some work to the outside of the single-story house since its original construction in the 1960s. You couldn’t do much about the roof, which not only rose to a steeper pitch in the front, bluff side, but it also canted up higher on the right, giving the front an almost triangular facade.
Instead of the brown siding and orange brick Vivien imagined had been the original, the exterior was covered in slender shale-brown bricks and fieldstone. They all had different depths, giving the wall a pleasing, uneven texture instead of a flat face. The trim was cream, and the front door—which faced the road, not the lake—was ocean blue.
“I didn’t pick it,” Jake said when she commented on the color of the door.
“I love it,” she replied as he unlocked it and gestured her into the house. “It’s unusual and gives what could be a drab-looking house a nice— Oh,wow…”
She dropped her duffel bag and stepped into the living room with its twenty-foot, slanted ceiling, then walked toward the large windows on one wall. They covered most of the west-facing side of the living room and the wall on the right. Lake Michigan—with all of her striations of cerulean, sapphire, cobalt, navy, and mint—was below and beyond, and the vast basin rippled and undulated as far as the eye could see. The Great Lake met the pale blue sky somewhere miles away, and nearly a hundred miles beyond that were the shores of Wisconsin. Layers of long clouds lined the sky, echoing the horizon: some puffy on top, some slender like a brush stroke, swathed above the line of the lake.
The house was situated so that the land and its surrounding throng of trees seemed to cup it protectively, holding the structure out over the water. But it was just an illusion from the inside, for there was at least a half mile of land between the base of the bluff and the shore, and the house was fully supported by the land. It was the clever design of the windows that made it seem as if the front of the house was suspended in midair over the lake.
“Go on out there.” Jake pointed to the side wall, which wasn’t only windows, as she’d thought, but a large sliding door. “You’re going to love that.”
Feeling a sort of tightness in her chest that she couldn’t identify, Vivien did as he suggested and found herself on a flagstone patio with its own breathtaking view. Located on the side of the house, it was protected by a tangle of trees and bushes on two sides, which, despite the chaos, offered some shade. A third side was the sliding door and wall of the house. And the fourth direction offered its own unobstructed view of the lake.
“Wow. Mike and Carol certainly did well for themselves,” she murmured, drawing in a deep breath of fresh air coming in from the lake.
“Mike and Carol— Oh, ha. The Bradys. Got it.” Jake folded his arms as he stood next to her. “It needs a lot of work and some updating, but this was the no-brainer selling point.”
“I’ll say.”
“I’ve got a ton to do with the landscaping,” he said, gesturing to the overgrown, encroaching trees. “I don’t think those vines are supposed to be there, and they look like they’re choking everything out. The arborvitae is way out of control—I think that’s what that is.” He shrugged. “Or maybe it’s boxwood. I can’t remember what the realtor called it.”
Vivien gave a little laugh. “City girl here. I haven’t faintest idea. The closest I ever got to a garden was walking through Central Park and trying to grow a tomato plant on my teeny balcony. It died.”
“I had a condo in Baltimore, so I didn’t do much there. I should probably just hire someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Well, don’t do what Trib did and put in a pergola—I think that’s what it’s called—with vines growing on it,” she said with a little giggle that sounded nervous to her ears.Why am I so nervous?“He’s all freaked out because the birds perch all up in it and crap all over the tables below.”
He laughed. “Ouch. Well, nothing I do could be any worse than the tree that was growing in the middle of the living room when I moved in.”
She looked at him, squinting a little in the afternoon sun. “A tree? Like, in a pot? Or something that had taken root and took over the house?”
He shook his head. “Neither. The previous owners—who built the place back in the sixties—deliberately planted a tree in the middle of the living room. It was over eighteen feet tall with a branch span of about the same.”
