The Hopefuls(62)
—
As we packed the car, Matt started to worry that we should’ve gotten a U-Haul. “I think we’ll be okay,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure. We were trying to arrange the bags so that we still had a sliver of visibility out the back window and somehow kept making it worse. Most of what we were taking was clothes, but there were some other things I hadn’t wanted to leave behind. When I packed the coffeemaker, Matt gave me a look, but didn’t stop me. Once we were finally done and everything was in there, the car sagged low to the ground.
“Is that going to be okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” Matt said, and then he bent down to look at the tires. “I mean, I really hope so.”
We took three days to drive to Houston, even though we could’ve done it in two. We didn’t want to feel rushed and I think Matt assumed (rightly so) that he’d be doing the majority of the driving. I did take over during a quiet stretch in Alabama so that Matt could rest. I was nervous at first, but after a while it felt okay. I didn’t dare go over the speed limit and I stayed in the right-hand lane, but I still considered it a success. Matt’s eyes were closed and I was sure he was asleep when I heard him laugh lightly beside me and say, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
—
Ash and Jimmy lived in Sugar Land, a city about twenty minutes outside of Houston, which was (as Jimmy always said) considered part of the “greater Houston area.” I laughed when I first heard the name, and Matt said, “It gets better. The motto is ‘Sugar Land, where life is sweet.’?”
I’d seen pictures of the house and Matt had described the neighborhood to me, but it still didn’t prepare me for actually driving into their community and seeing all the sprawling lawns and open land. There were manmade ponds all around us, golf courses and pools; we passed a town square that was so artificial-looking it felt like a movie set. And as we pulled into the Dillons’ driveway, I turned to Matt and he shook his head. “I told you,” he said. “It’s huge.”
Ash opened the front door before we’d even turned off the car, and started waving like an excited little kid. I’d texted her about a half hour earlier to let her know we were close, and it seemed like she’d been watching out the window for us ever since. “I’m so glad y’all are finally here,” she called, running out to our car. She had a sweater on, the sleeves pulled over her hands, but no jacket, and she shivered as I hugged her. “Jimmy just ran to the store, but he’ll be back to help you unpack all of that.”
She grabbed me by the hand and started pulling me toward the house. “I’ve got to give you the tour,” she said. I turned back to look at Matt, who just shrugged like there was nothing we could do to stop her. He grabbed a couple of bags from the backseat, and Ash looked back and said, “No, no, wait for Jimmy!” but didn’t slow down at all.
When we got into the front hall, she finally dropped my hand and turned to face me. “Okay, we’ll start here, of course.” She clapped her hands together, almost giddy, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What?” she said, but then she laughed too. “I know, I’m acting like a complete nut, but I’m just so excited that you’re finally here!”
The Dillons’ house was grand—that was the first word that popped into my head. The ceilings were high and there was a long curved staircase in front of us. There were five bedrooms, and a guest suite downstairs, and I understood as soon as I stepped inside why they’d insisted that we live there. There was no way they could possibly use all this space; it was almost obscene.
As we walked through each room, Ash talked about the different paint colors she’d chosen, explained in great detail why she’d decided to use wallpaper in the bathrooms. She talked like she couldn’t get the words out fast enough, almost like she’d been dying to tell someone all about the house and I was the first person she’d come across.
I recognized some of the furniture as the pieces they’d had in DC, but there were also lots of new things. It didn’t surprise me that the whole house was already completely and perfectly decorated, but it was still impressive. I had friends who moved into houses and let rooms sit empty for years, but Ash had every detail taken care of. Every side table had little groupings of tchotchkes, tiny ceramic boxes and silver picture frames arranged just so.
“This is gorgeous,” I said. “I can’t believe you’ve done all this already.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that much,” she said, pretending to be modest. “My mom helped a lot. And so did Jimmy’s mom, although I didn’t ask her to.”
We walked out to the back patio, where there was a fire pit and the biggest grill I’d ever seen built into a stone wall. “Jimmy is obsessed with this thing,” she told me. “I think it’s what finally sold him on the house.”
She waited until the end to take me downstairs, where we’d be staying, which made me a little nervous, but once we walked in, I saw there was no reason to worry. Matt had assured me that the area felt completely private, but I’d still wanted to judge it myself. It was basically a little three-room apartment in their basement. (Ash kept calling it a mother-in-law suite, which I thought was hilarious since she’d probably burn the house down before letting Jimmy’s mom move in.) There was a sitting area with a flat-screen TV on the wall, a tiny kitchenette, and a bedroom with a master bath attached. Ash and Jimmy’s room was two floors up and on the other side of the house, so while I’d been afraid that the four of us would feel like roommates, the size and layout of everything made it more like we were tenants in the same building.