They had added wireless this year. Just another small improvement in their investment that would allow them to raise the rent another point. More capital investments would happen in the fall that would increase the value of their property, maybe windows. They would have to look at the mortgage next year to refinance. They were getting older and they still had a long way to go before they could get out from under the Walter's bad decisions.
They hadn't lost everything, only the better half of it, so they had to make adjustments. After selling the house in Maine and the condo in New York, the biggest adjustment was renting the house in Bethany. They had bought it new before the Walter's mistakes became apparent. It was going to be where they brought everything back together. They had only spent one summer there. Now it was a source of revenue for ten weeks, $7,000 a week, $70,000 a year and crucial.
The last kid was out of college but staying in the mid-west, and only costing them a nominal sum, the other one was on the west coast and never getting married, at least not legally. From the outside, no one could tell that anything had really changed. It had been so long since the Walter had been officially with the firm, that keeping up appearances was relatively easy. She only had to worry about their friends.
It was harder starting in June. Every Friday morning at 6:00AM she would drive down from Washington with Lupe to clean the house for the next tenants. The house was rented Friday to Friday, but in reality it was Friday night to Friday Morning, giving them from 9:00AM to 3:00PM to get the house ready. Bobbie told her about a service she used for her six bedroom house in South Bethany. It was $250 a week, but she said no, because that was two and half grand that she was not going to give to Bobbie. She knew Bobbie ran the service herself using her niece to gather a bus load of workers to sweep two dozen or so houses that didn't fall under the supervision of a development board. She said "No thank you" and told Lupe to buy a second set of cleaning supplies in case they forgot to leave behind all they needed.
The first time she did this was hard on her. Not the work, or the idea that strangers would be in her summer home for the next two and half months, but simply put, that the things in the house would never be in the same place she left them. That her decisions regarding the organization of the house would be taken for granted, then mutated and distorted so that when she came back the following week, she would see the migration of objects as if they had been subject to the tides. The deck chairs in patterns that made no sense to her. As if high tide had raised them up just enough to float them to a new position within the boxed-in deck. The candles moved from the dinning table to the coffee table in the living room. The pillows had floated from the living room down the stairs to the den, mixing with the den's matching pillows.
She imagined the succession of hands touching, adjusting, moving everything in the house as she herself touched, adjusted and moved each thing. Besides the linen, the things that made her skin crawl when she imagined them being handled by others, she picked up, packed and put into the closet on the ground floor. Then she locked the door. There wasn't much that actually needed to be put away. They hadn't much time to own this place and when she inventoried the closet, it was all things that she herself had purchased. The crystal fish, the bowl from the potter in St. Michaels and the quilt she had found at a church swap, a church she did not belong to. While reviewing the list she realized that she acquired all of these things alone, while on quiet solo trips around Maryland and Delaware. It was when she was most comfortable.
