The town didn't want what we had. He had already made two other presentations to them. We had sent our best people down there, and both times they came back rejected. I didn’t have anyone, not one person in my company, who could give a town like Ocean City what it was asking for. Nobody with the care it needed. Nobody with that kind of creativity. No one with the eye Ocean City needed.
We were going to lose the Ocean City job, and there was nothing I could do about it. So of course I wouldn’t tell Ruby. The last thing I wanted was to disappoint her.
Chapter 5
Ruby
"Iwork fourteen-hour days so you can sit on that porch in a house we built.”
How dare he say that!
I was angry then, but as the fight continued, I felt something in me change. The anger disappeared and was replaced with something even worse. A flatness. A calmness I didn’t have before. An emptiness. A feeling like all the color had drained from my world.
I put my mug down carefully in the sink and walked out of the kitchen and headed upstairs. I didn’t want to see him anymore. Not because I was mad, but because of how much I missed him. The old him.
I sat down in the chair in my dressing room and thought about all the times I tried to tell Oscar something only to watch it blow right past him. When did he stop listening to me? I wasn’t sure, but I was tired of not being heard.
And then there was Ocean City.
It wasn’t that he had a project I didn't know about. It was that Oscar usually told me everything. The deal that almost died, the contractor who walked off, the inspector he couldn't stand. Oscar loved talking, and I loved listening to him. So why didn’the tell me about this one? And if he kept that from me, what else wasn’t he telling me?
I work fourteen-hour days so you can sit on that porch.The sentence repeated in my mind, getting worse each time. As if all I did all day was sit out on the porch. As if the house ran on its own. As if our son had raised himself while I admired the view of the yard.
Our son. Jeremy had no idea how much I missed him. We did so much together. The more I thought about the way things were between Oscar and me, the more I realized I leaned on being a mom to make up for the loss in my marriage.
I walked to the end of my dressing room, and out of habit, knocked on the door to Jeremy’s room before opening it. His room was still the same. He had only been gone a couple of months, and he was already talking about coming home during break.
His favorite sketches were still up on the walls. The ones that were a tribute to his favorite spaces, as well as the ones he created on his own. He already had a good eye, and his sketching was better than mine was at his age.
On his desk were a few framed photos. One of him with his grandparents, one of him with his friends at graduation, and a third, which was my favorite.
The photo was of the two of us at Taliesin West, taken in the spring of his junior year, when we were out west looking at schools. There was no way we were going to be that close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home without seeing it, so we made sure to get to Arizona.
We were standing in the desert, both of us grinning like idiots, with the long low lines of the Wright’s home and studio behind us. I remembered the day as if it was yesterday. Jeremy linked arms with me, the two of us talking over each other about the pitch of the roof and the way the windows allowed so muchnatural light. I wasn’t anyone's accessory that day. I was a person who loved a thing, standing next to another person who loved it too.
The doorbell rang. I put the frame down and checked my watch. Right on time for lunch.
As I opened the front door, Adam held up a leather portfolio. "I brought the plans nobody wants. Figured you should see what they've rejected. It might help."
I made a couple of sandwiches, then we sat at the kitchen table, and he told me about the Ocean City project.
The land had been in one family for generations, but the man who owned it now was getting older, and wasn’t in the best of health. The property was more than he could keep up. A national builder had started calling, and they wanted to build a high-rise that would stand out like a sore thumb and block the neighborhood’s view of the ocean.
"The town panicked," Adam said. "Nobody down there wants some out-of-state outfit paving the place over. So the owner gave them a way out. He'll sell to the town for well under what the big builder's offering, as long as they bring him plans for something they can both live with. He doesn't want to be the man who sold Ocean City to the highest bidder."
"And the town came to you."
"Yup, the town came to us. You know how it is, we’re still considered a local builder. We’re boutique, niche, and our work is quality. We did two presentations for them, both with slideshows and handouts. We really thought we knew exactly what they wanted, but they turned them both down." He turned the portfolio to face me but left it closed. " I don’t have the design ideas to tell my team what to put there. You know I’m not an architect. But I knew we hadn’t hit the mark Something was missing.”
I opened the portfolio and saw the problem right away. There was nothing special about these designs. Even the streets were drawn in a grid pattern instead of having curved roads. I flipped through the sketches and stopped at a modern, open concept floor plan I designed twenty years ago.
“Really?” I said, with a laugh, pointing to it. “It’s not right at all for this.”
“I know, but that’s my point.” He pulled the portfolio to him and flipped to a colorful picture at the back. “You’ve got to see this, Ruby. There's a carousel on the property. Almost a hundred years old. Hand-carved horses, the original organ, you get it. Half that town learned to walk in front of it, the other half got engaged on it. You can't knock it down and drop in a clubhouse. They'd be right to throw us out if we tried."
I didn't answer. In my mind I was already sketching and imagining a quaint walkable village. A carousel that old wasn’t something to push off to the side or try to hide. The key was to build everything around it.
I was just about to get up and grab my sketch pad and share a few quick drawings with Adam, when Oscar came into the room.
