Home Ownership: A Cautionary Tail

It was Tea Time.

Not simply time to drink tea, in the traditional American sense; that meant zapping some tap water in the microwave and dunking a bag of Lipton for a few minutes. That was a travesty.

It was Tea Time—which, to Agatha, meant stopping everything she was doing.

First, it meant cleaning her workspace. Tea Time demanded the space to breathe, and she couldn’t do that with her desk cluttered by the detritus of her day-to-day responsibilities. She moved her work laptop, wiped down the table, cleaned up the litter of hand-written notes. She wanted the tea to dominate her space, not the notes for her next YouTube makeup tutorial.

Second, it meant opening the windows. Their wretched apartment was always musty—damn it, she changed the filters on the purifier just last week—but getting a waft of fresh air did wonders for the mood. They lived in the grungiest, dingiest part of town, but even in Connecticut’s best approximation of an urban Lollapalooza, the air wasn’t technically a health hazard. The occasional downpour was a real treat during these times—rain made the concrete outside smell practically fresh-laundered.

Third, it meant quiet. She made sure to silence her cell, turn off the telly, power down her desktop—anything and everything that could possibly ping, notify or otherwise alert her was well and truly comatose. Agatha wasn’t a violent woman by nature, but if something started beeping at her before she saw the bottom of her cup, she knew where Bob’s Smith & Wesson was stored.

She pulled the loose-leaf Earl Grey from her secret stash in the cupboard (it felt like an Earl Grey sort of day), set the kettle to 100 degrees, and waited for the water to boil. She hummed to herself, trying to ignore work, the apartment, and all the other niggling things clamoring to drive her mad. For the next ten minutes, it was just her, the tea, and a blessed moment of peace.

She was just settling into her Tea Time reprieve when the door abruptly slammed, propelling some of her beloved tea over the rim of her cup into the saucer beneath.

“Honey-buns, I’m home!” Bob bellowed.

She winced.

Bob rounded the corner bear-hugging a number of paper grocery bags—the ones without handles, of course. Reaching the table she was seated at, he dropped the contents with a relieved exhalation.

More tea splashed, this time onto the table she had assiduously cleared moments before.

Her face twitched.

“Oh, hey! I know how much you love tea, so I got you some Lipton!” Bob said cheerfully. He rummaged through a bag and presented the bright yellow box triumphantly, as if it contained the Christ-child’s frankincense.

Agatha bit her lip. As ridiculous as her husband could be, he did have his surpassingly brief moments of charm. She appreciated the sentiment, but he wasn’t really helping his case with the Lipton, or the interruption. She took a breath.

“Thank you,” she said, as neutrally as she could manage. Bob beamed, then began to shift some of the groceries to the refrigerator behind her. She scooted her seat forward to give him room as he shuttled jars of red peppers and pickles.

“You know,” Agatha said carefully, “we don’t have to settle for Lipton all the time. There are other brands we could try.”

“Wait, really?” Bob called out over his shoulder. “Aren’t they all the same—just leaves? And…” He pauses for a moment. “Is that a British accent?”

She coughed discreetly and took a sip of tea to suppress a biting retort. “There are some...minor differences between tea brands, yes.”

“Oh. Huh, I guess you learn something new every day.” Bob stood up and landed a quick peck on her cheek. “By the way, Cupcake, I have good news!”

She raised an eyebrow. “Last time you had ‘good news,’ you came home with a box of live chickens.”

Bob guffawed. “That was great! Urban agriculture is all the rage right now.”

“Bob. We live in a one-bedroom apartment in godforsaken New Britain. We had to give the chickens free rein of our living room. Do you remember what they did to the upholstery?”

He frowned. “I mean, the sofa needed replacing anyway. It wasn’t all that bad. We had fresh chicken for weeks!”

She shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”

“Anyhow, the good news: I got a lead on a house...and I pulled the trigger!”

Agatha jolted. “Wait, you what?”

Bob put up his hands placatingly. “I mean, I did the legwork. The housing market is ridiculous right now, so I found the cheapest possible home that will still put us outside this dump. You wanted me to find a home, right?”

She rubbed the bridge of her nose; she could feel that telltale ache starting to flare. “I mean, yes, I did ask you to handle it.”

“And I found the perfect home for a complete steal! You said you wanted something far from the city, right?”

“...Yes.”

“And you said you wanted something that wasn’t surrounded by neighbors, right?”

“...This is technically true.”

“Plus, you said you wanted something affordable.”

She frowned. “I think the specific sentiment I’ve expressed in the past is ‘we’re never going to be able to afford to leave this godforsaken place because of the housing market.’”

“Exactly! So this place meets all of our requirements! Sweetie-pie, it’s perfect for us!”

Agatha sighed. “Okay. Alright. Fine. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this is not automatically a bad idea. Let’s also ignore the fact that making a unilateral decision to purchase a house was inadvisable. What is this place like?”

Bob coughed, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “I, uh. Yeah. I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure?” she exclaimed, her voice rising steadily in volume. “You bought a house and you don’t know what it’s like?!”

Bob avoided eye contact. “Well, to be honest, you know Charles? He’s the one who busks guitar for a living and looks a bit like David Duchovny,” he added helpfully.

“Bob, that is completely irrelevant and I’m not sure that—”

“He has a good friend, John, and it’s John’s brother—who I’ve heard is totally reliable—he’s a realtor who was looking to offload a property at an extremely attractive rate. It was something he didn’t even have the opportunity to officially post, because demand is so high. I mean, you know how the housing market is. People are throwing their 401ks and their firstborns at sellers just to get an offer in the door!”

Agatha said, with exaggerated politeness, “So, let me get this straight: the housing market is hotter than sin, so you saw fit to consort with certain undesirables and buy a house completely blind because everyone else is buying homes like a bunch of suicidal lemmings.”

Bob made a face. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds like an awful idea.”

“That’s because it is!” Agatha exploded.

There was a brief pause, punctuated only by the sound of their neighbors inexplicably blaring Rick Astley, barely muffled by the thin drywall.

“We can take a look at the property now,” Bob said into the awkward silence. “I have the keys, and we can swing by whenever. Trust me, Cookie-crunch, it’ll be a lovely place. The realtor said that it was a quaint, cozy paradise with great wildlife.”

Gritting her teeth, Agatha stood up. Wildlife. “Alright, Bob. Take me to paradise.”

*******

“This,” Agatha said, “is not paradise.”

They’d arrived at the property. True, they were miles away from anyone else, and yes, they were outside the city. But the driveway to the home—their home—led directly to the shabbiest, most miserably moribund structure Agatha ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

The barn might have been painted red at some point in the distant past, but had aged to the color of fungal sepia. Agatha might have been able to overlook the sickly color if the structure looked sound, but she noticed immediately that the building listed distinctly to one side, and the barn door was conspicuously absent. The unintentional aperture did, however, give a fantastic view into the barn interior, which had excellent lighting via the gaping hole in the roof.

The complete lack of charm wasn’t only aesthetic, however. The odor as they entered the structure was definitely aromatic, and definitely bovine. A chorus of moos confirmed it.

“Bob. Our ‘paradise’ is a derelict barn.”

“Um. I mean, it does look a bit...rustic.”

“Bob. Our ‘paradise’ is a freaking derelict barn.”

“But look on the bright side, Honey-muffin. We now have cows. You love cows!”

“That was when I was five!” Agatha hollered. “This is a complete disaster! How did you manage to bungle buying a house! This barely qualifies as a hobbit hovel, let alone a home!”

“Ugh, stop being so negative for once! How can you look at this and see something so miserable? Reclaimed barn stuff is so in right now!”

Agatha jabbed at the ground, which was festooned liberally with cow pats. “Bob, we are literally standing in excrement, and the only roof over our heads—which has a hole in it, in case you haven’t already noticed—is the one we’re sharing with a bunch of cows. We have officially moved from ‘bad decision’ to ‘cataclysmic error’. Which, by the way, is exactly what happened when you decided to bring chickens into the apartment.”

“Don’t you dare take the high road on that one. You said they were delicious!”

“That is NOT the point. The point is that you make unilateral decisions that end up dumping a bunch of extra work on us!”

“But Cake-pop, cows are at least as delicious as chickens, and it’s not like—”

“Alright, stop right there. I swear to God, if you call me another variety of baked good or confectionary sweet, I will take this pile of cow poop and shove it up your—”

An impeccably-timed chorus of moos drowned out Agatha’s voice.

“For once in your life, can you not be so emotionally abusive?” Bob yelled. “This is exactly why your YouTube makeup business is nosediving; it’s because you can’t use makeup on your damn personality!”

There was an awkward silence.

“I cannot believe,” Agatha said acidly, her British lilt melting away into an infuriated New England inflection, “that you would resort to that kind of attack.”

“I’m sorry, it just kind of came out—”

“Do you know how much work it takes to be a beauty influencer? Keeping up with new trends and products? Wrangling all the recording and video-editing tech? Just because you have a conventional nine-to-five—”

“Look, Pudding-pop, I didn’t mean—”

Agatha grabbed a particularly impressive cow pat from the ground and began advancing on Bob.

“Hon—I mean, Agatha—there’s really no need to engage in this kind of physical aggression—” Bob stumbled away in alarm, trying desperately to defuse the situation. “Look, can we just talk about this for a second?”

Agatha kept advancing as Bob backed himself against the cow pen. She was within arm’s reach when Bob suddenly slipped and, with a yelp, tumbled tail over teakettle into a particularly fresh deposit of manure, splattering his entire ensemble with the kind of unintentional abandon that would make Jackson Pollock envious.

Bob sat up slowly, grimacing. The nearest cow’s tail thwacked him unceremoniously in the face. Agatha waited, foot tapping, eyebrow arched, as Bob sputtered.

“Okay,” he finally conceded. “It’s possible that I made a mistake.”