Patrick and Lisa

I met Patrick and Lisa on a Sunday afternoon more than a year ago. Well, I didn’t exactly meet them – I didn’t even learn their names – but I did say hello, at a house open for sale in the neighborhood. I was considering putting my own house on the market and I wanted to scope out the competition. It was a nice house, with obviously new granite countertops, an immediately attractive feature, in the bathrooms and kitchen. But the house had an equally obvious disadvantage: a spiral staircase, which is discouraging to potential buyers with vertigo or those with small children. Or people thinking of having small children. An attractive young couple, Patrick and Lisa were prowling the upstairs as I was surveying the garden where I decided that my house was more saleable even though it didn’t have new granite nor Japanese stones oh-so-carefully-raked just beyond my living room windows. We left the house at the same time and on a whim, I said hello and asked if they were interested in buying a house. They said yes but politely refused my offer to show them mine because they said they were meeting someone and were already late. They smiled and thanked me for my courtesy. I smiled and said, as we do, “perhaps another time,” and we each went our separate ways.

“Another time” came sooner than expected. I decided to list my house and the first people to look at it were Patrick and Lisa, properly introduced this time by my real estate agent. They loved my house, she later reported, but they needed to sell their condo and were only in the preliminary stages of their search. A few weeks later, Patrick and Lisa returned for another look. They’d put their condo on the market and were now more serious about buying. They still liked my house, especially its easy access to the outside where Patrick liked to grill their dinners. But they couldn’t commit. The market wasn’t good – “it’s not a good time,” my agent said – and after six months, I took my house off the market. I lost track of Patrick and Lisa.

A year later, just this last May, I reconsidered. My knees were worse and I could no longer work in my garden. I had some trouble going up and down stairs. And the responsibilities of maintaining a house 35 years old grew tiresome. But the clincher was my learning that an apartment like the one I had wanted at The Fitzgerald was about to become vacant. The Fitz would hold it for only two weeks beyond the current tenant’s move-out date, which meant that at the most, I had a 30-day window of opportunity. I consulted a new agent to whom I explained that I would list my house with her but if I lost the apartment, I’d have to take the house off the market. Was she willing to take the house under those circumstances? She was. We agreed on a price, substantially below my previous one, but then, it’s not a good time. I asked my new agent if she could contact those who’d looked at my house before. She could, but none of them was interested. Well, how about Patrick and Lisa? My agent said they’d sold their condo but had decided to rent for a year. She’d lost track of them.

As you know, my house soon sold and only a week after a young woman looked at it, I had a contract. I rushed to The Fitzgerald and got the apartment I wanted. I went back to all my old plans for the apartment and started gathering together the things I’d need to convert a colorless environment – albeit one with granite counter tops – into one where I will hope to be comfortable and content. Among the changes was a plan for a wall of Ikea bookshelves in my bedroom. I bought the shelves and had them delivered to the apartment. As the men were leaving the building’s garage and consulting a map of the city, I asked if they needed directions to wherever they were going next. “Oh, no,” they said. They could find it easily enough. I went back to my apartment, admired the many boxes that were to become my bookshelves (all the while wondering if I’d bought the right finish) and drove back toward home. Coming down Lanvale Street, on my usual route, I could see the Ikea truck parked on Mason, at the edge of my townhouse community, obviously unloading another order. On a whim, I stopped to say hello to the men and to compliment them on their handling of my own delivery, thinking it quite a coincidence that they had just come from a place where I was going, to a place that I was leaving. Even stranger was seeing Patrick come out the front door behind one of the men. We said hello and I asked if he and Lisa and had bought the house. “Yes,” he said. Ever since seeing my house, they’d wanted to live in the complex and they’d been lucky to get this house at a price they could afford. Patrick explained that they were putting in an Ikea kitchen. “Where are you moving from?” I asked. And he answered that they’d been living in The Fitzgerald and he started to explain where the building was. We laughed at the coincidence that they were moving to where I’d been living and I was moving to where they lived. “You’ll love the building,” Patrick said. “We’ve been very happy there.” And I went home, to my house on Linden Green, marveling at the strangeness of the world.

My installer came to my apartment in The Fitz to put up the bookshelves and when he got to the last cabinet in the row, I realized it wouldn’t fit. I had measured the wall improperly, quite unusual for me, but due to a projection at one end that wasn’t on the floor plan (a poor excuse; I should have measured more carefully). So I went back to Ikea to buy a like cabinet but in a smaller size. While I was at the delivery-arranging service desk, I saw Patrick through a window into the return area. The paperwork necessary to my delivery and return was vexing the earnest young man from Ikea so while he was trying to figure it out, I went over to Patrick to say hello. He was as surprised as I was. “Didn’t you like your kitchen?” I asked him. That wasn’t it, he said; Ikea had delivered the wrong color. But how nice it was to see me, and how strange that of all the people at Ikea on a Saturday afternoon, we should run into each other. “And I understand you’re moving to The Fitzgerald,” he said. “Into what apartment?”

“432,” I said. He seemed shocked. “We live in 431.” And then he added, laughing, “This is really getting weird.” And I agreed.

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