The New House

Tom Fitzgerald stood in the doorway of the attached two-car garage on a Saturday afternoon in May 1958, holding a cardboard box marked KITCHEN POTS in his cousin’s handwriting, looking out at the street in front of the house he had bought four weeks ago and to which he had moved in that morning.

The street was called Sandstone Way. It had not existed three years before. The house stood on a half-acre lot that had been the corner of a Truckee Meadows ranch since the eighteen-eighties, until the ranch had been subdivided in 1955 and the lots had been sold off one by one to a development company in Sacramento. The development company had put up forty-eight houses in two phases, all of them ranch-style with attached garages, all of them roughly the same in their plans but rotated and faced and trimmed in small variations so that no two looked exactly alike from the curb. Tom’s house was the white one with the green door. Two doors down, on the corner, was the same plan in tan with a yellow door. Across the street, the same plan again in a soft brick red.

He was twenty-eight. His wife Linda was twenty-six. They had a daughter, Anne, who was two and a half and who was, at this moment, asleep on a folded blanket on the living room floor because the crib was still in pieces in the back of the panel truck.

His father was carrying a box from the truck to the front step. His father was fifty-six. The two of them had been moving boxes for an hour. The father, whose name was Michael Fitzgerald and who had spent thirty-four years putting riveted steel and poured concrete onto the bones of Reno before the riveted steel and the poured concrete had given way, in this neighborhood, to two-by-four stud framing and asphalt shingles, set the box down on the step and put his hand on his lower back.

“That’s the last from the truck,” he said.

“Thanks, Pop.”

Michael walked over to where Tom was standing in the garage doorway. The garage was empty. The car would not arrive until tomorrow, when Linda’s brother brought it back from the dealer in Sparks. The two men stood looking at the empty cement floor.

“Slab’s good,” Michael said. He bent down, ran his fingers along a joint. “Whoever poured this knew what he was doing.”

“Linda’s uncle did the inspection.”

“Did he.”

“He said the framing was honest. He said the roof was honest. He said the wiring was a question mark, but he said the wiring on every house in the development was the same question mark, so he was not going to hold it against us.”

“That sounds like Linda’s uncle.”

“It is.”

Michael straightened. He walked out of the garage, hands in his pockets, and looked up the street. From the corner he could see, across the open field that was still ranch property and would remain ranch property for two more years, the western face of the Sierra. The afternoon sun was coming down. The street had four houses on it that were occupied, three more that had sold but had not moved in, and forty-one lots that had been graded but not yet built on.

“You can see the mountains from here,” Michael said.

“From most of the street, yes. Linda likes that.”

“I bet she does.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“You ever think,” Michael said, “about how far this is from the bridge.”

“How far what is from the bridge.”

“This. The house. The kitchen. Anne’s bedroom. The way Linda has the windows facing.” He nodded south, toward the river they could not see. “It is three and a half miles, I think. By the road. Maybe four. From this front door to your grandmother’s old kitchen at the Depot Hotel, where she cooked. Or to where Grandpa Patrick was on traffic duty in nineteen ought five. Or to where I was hanging on a beam on the Riverside Hotel in twenty-seven. The whole family’s worth of work, all those years, was within four blocks of the river. And then there is this.”

Tom did not say anything.

“I am not making a complaint,” Michael said. “Your mother thinks the new neighborhoods are the best thing that ever happened to this town. She is probably right. There were eight people in the apartment I grew up in. I do not wish that on anybody. I am only saying that I am standing in my son’s garage in a part of Reno I did not know existed five years ago, and your great-grandmother Bridget is buried two miles east of here, and I am noticing it.”

“I notice it too.”

“Good.”

A station wagon went by on the cross street. A small dog stood up in the back. The dog watched them as the wagon passed.

Michael clapped his son on the shoulder. “You bought a good house, Tom. The slab is good. The framing is honest. The roof is honest. The wiring is a question mark, but it is the same question mark as everybody else’s.” He smiled. “I’ll go put on coffee. Linda has the percolator in the box marked KITCHEN STAINLESS. I saw it.”

He went up the step and through the front door. The screen door rattled shut behind him.

Tom set the box of pots down on the cement floor of the garage. He walked to the open end of the garage and stood with his hands in his pockets and looked west, the way his father had looked. The sun was on the Sierra now. The unfinished houses up the street had bare studs that caught the light and held it briefly the way new wood always does. From somewhere two blocks over, a child’s tricycle bell rang once.

Tom stayed where he was for a moment. Then he turned and went into the house to find Linda.

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