The Magnolia Story(14)

I don’t mean to overstate that, because my dad was a huge hero to me too. He was the one who was there, who loved us, who was at every ball game, and my granddad wasn’t the doting, overtly loving kind of guy. But he was kind of the patriarch of the family, and spending time with him on that ranch made a big impact on my life.

I may have grown up in the suburbs, like most kids did, but I’ve always felt like J. B. and I had a lot in common. And I’ve always felt like I was born a hundred years too late.

For either of us to romanticize farm life was probably a silly thing to do. It’s a lot of work. For my friend, living on a farm just meant she had a whole lot of chores to do. But no matter how much I heard her complain, I still thought, That’s what I want someday. So having that little taste of farm life on our honeymoon sure felt right to both of us.

Days later, somewhere along the woodsy coast of Maine, at around eleven o’clock at night, we had another memorable moment. We were tooling around a corner when Chip slammed on the brakes, squealing to a dead stop. He and I both stared out through the windshield and said, “What in the world is that?!”

Luckily we weren’t in a hurry and weren’t driving too fast, because right in front of us was this big, awkward-looking moose standing right in the middle of the road. Neither one of us had ever seen one in person, and we just could not believe how big this thing was. It was like a dream come true for me to come across an animal like that in the wild.

Once I realized what it was, I was like, “What should we do? I feel like we should do something!” But Jo said, “Let the poor thing go,” so I did. We watched that majestic beast wander off into the woods and disappear in the darkness just as fast as he’d shown up in our headlights.

I feel like the moose was our final big find of that trip. We were both tired, and after seeing something that magnificent, we decided it was time to head home. We took a different route down through Boston and realized as we drove through the city that we were basically out of money. We had nothing left. We stayed on the interstates after that and made it back to New York with as few stops as possible, arriving just in time to fly back home.

Jo’s idea of being “broke” was when she had, like, $1,000 left in the bank. But “broke” for me meant actually broke. I wasn’t much for bank accounts or credit cards back then. So once we got back to Waco, we literally had no money left for a hotel room or anything. We had no choice but to go straight to the vacated rental house we were planning to move into.

The students had just moved out of it while we were on our honeymoon, and it was nighttime when we got back home, so we didn’t have a chance to get in and inspect it or clean the place or anything like that. We just drove in from the airport and pulled up in front of that little yellow house on Third Street, at the end of this dreamy honeymoon of a lifetime—

And Chip carried me over the threshold. Right into a nightmare.





FOUR



THE HONEYMOON’S OVER

The rental houses on Third Street that Chip owned when we got married were really small, and not the most attractive homes. I wouldn’t have chosen to live in any one of them if I could avoid it. Thankfully, though, the nicest one of the bunch happened to open up at the end of the spring semester, and Chip hadn’t put any summer renters into it yet. It was a yellow ranch-style with a nice white porch on the front and a pair of huge magnolia trees in the yard, and it was bigger than the rest—maybe twelve hundred square feet or so. It was just pretty enough that I was excited to live there and fix it up—to make it feel like our very own home.

Chip and I were both exhausted when we finally pulled up in front of that house, but we were still riding the glow of our honeymoon, and I was so excited as he carried me over the threshold—until the smell nearly knocked us over.

“Oh my word,” I said, pinching my nose and trying to hold my breath so I wouldn’t gag. “What is that?”

Chip flicked the light switch, and the light didn’t come on. He flicked it up and down a few times, then felt his way forward in the darkness and tried another switch.

“The electricity’s off,” he said. “The girls must’ve had it shut off when they moved out.”

“Didn’t you transfer it back into your name?” I asked.

“I guess not. I’m sorry, babe,” Chip said.

“Chip, what is that smell?”

It was the middle of June in Waco, Texas. The temperature had been up over a hundred degrees for days on end, and the humidity was stifling, amplifying whatever that rotten smell was coming from the kitchen. Chip always carries a knife and a flashlight, and it sure came in handy that night. Chip made his way back there and found that the fridge still had a bunch of food left in it, including a bunch of ground beef that had just sat there rotting since whenever the electricity went out.

The food was literally just smoldering in this hundred-degree house. So we went from living in a swanky hotel room on Park Avenue in New York City to this disgusting, humid stink of a place that felt more like the site of a crime scene than a home at this point. Honestly, I hadn’t thought it through very well. But it was late, and we were tired, and I just focused on making the most of this awful situation.

So we opened some windows and brought our bags in, and I told Jo we’d just tough it out and sleep on the floor and clean it all up in the morning. That’s when she started crying.