Read Online The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash - Free Book Online

something else and we would be moving again, leaving our house and whatever friends I’d managed to make when I finally figured out what kind of jeans the kids wore to school in that town.
    “You can take your house with you when you move?” I asked. My heart was pounding in my chest, my throat, my ears. We had left a house with an attic playroom and another with a three-car garage. My room in the house in Minnesota had two small windows that looked out over a steeply pitched roof. The windows were like two eyes that looked out onto the world. I loved to sit at those windows and read late into the night—stories about other girls in other houses in other places in other times. There were little houses on prairies and big houses in cities, houses with servants and houses with curtains that could be made into dresses. Sometimes I drew sketches of the houses so that I could get a better idea how far away the kitchen was from the dining room, or where, exactly, a big hallway led. Moving to the next place where Dad had a job—a better job! more responsibility!—wouldn’t be half as bad if I could take that room with me.
    “I suppose you could take a house with you,” my mother chimed in, “though it’s just wallboard and wood. I don’t know why anyone would want to.”
    I was around thirteen years old, and it was the first instance where I knew without a shadow of a doubt that my mother was wrong. The possibility of her flawed nature had occurred to me before that moment, of course—sometimes around the topic of blue jeans and hairstyles, but most often around the topic of my dad. He watched a lot of hockey. He took frequent business trips that seemed to center around his secretary. No matter what job he took, there invariably materialized an unfair boss, a boss who was a jerk, a boss my dad couldn’t tolerate. I wouldn’t understand until I was much older that my dad was a philandering flake, but at thirteen, I understood that my mom was putting up with a lot for what she seemed to be getting out of her marriage. The moment she said that a house was nothing more than wallboard and wood—a shelter, a lean-to that was easy to leave behind—was the moment when I started to hate her for it.
    I left my Google search and picked up the phone and called Vanessa. “Have you heard about that beach bungalow they’re selling in a contest?”
    “I understand that the owner’s lived there for forty-nine years,” Vanessa said. “Her husband just died and the daughter is moving her up to San Francisco. She agreed to go so long as she could find the right owner for her house.”
    “There’s something very cool about it.”
    “She picked the wrong year though,” Vanessa said. “The market’s too hot.”
    “Why should that matter?”
    “Did you ever hear of the Dutch Tulip craze?”
    “I can’t say that I have.”
    “The richest men in Holland fought over these dirty little root balls that could produce a flower that was just the right red or yellow. Huge fortunes were made and lost, but the thing is that those men couldn’t have cared less about the actual flowers. They weren’t gardeners. They just liked the art of the deal and the promise of making huge amounts of money in ridiculously short periods of time. We’ve got the same thing here with houses. People will do anything for the right house.”
    “Maybe that’s exactly why she’s doing this right now. To rise above all that.”
    “How is she going to tell who’s just spinning a yarn about loving her house? There’s no way to know. Someone told me the other day about this couple who won a bidding war on a house because they convinced the sellers how much they loved the kitchen—how they’d use the two ovens to bake their special holiday cookies and how they’d have other couples over for gourmet dinner parties in which the guests would slice and season the fresh ahi steaks at the big central island right before they were seared. Three weeks after