A floating home has a straightforward name. People often refer to floating homes as ‘houseboats’, but a boat implies locomotion, and most floating homes only move with a tug. Derek would tease me by calling it a mobile home, and they do have similarities. They can be moved easily from place to place with the assistance of a towing vehicle, but once docked, they tie up to existing gas, electric and sewer lines to provide all the comforts of modern living. Instead of residing in a ‘park,’ floating homes park in a moorage. Like a marina, the moorage’s dock fingers splay out from dominant walkways, and tugs nudge the homes into the gaps of water between them.
I pushed Derek to take a tour of the home we would come to call ‘the tender house’, even though it was out of his price range, just to get him past the looking stage. I was sick of him talking, looking, talking, looking, and talking about moving but doing nothing. I made the appointment, arguing that no harm can be made by looking. I accompanied him on the tour of the quaint, gated community on a rainy dark night. I entertained his fantasies of how to arrange his life within it, I helped calm the nerves of the friendly property manager/neighbor in regard to Andee, repeating Derek’s words that she swam like a fish, and when he decided that he couldn’t make it work financially, I offered to help.
Living on the edge of my budget had stressed me out for far too long. Splitting expenses would give us both some more breathing room I argued..and the kitchen had an island, and ample storage space, and a dishwasher, gas range, convection oven and microwave. The bathroom featured forced heat above the space directly outside the shower to make the transition more comfortable. All closets came with built-in organizers and the upstairs bedroom had it’s own bathroom with a laundry chute that emptied directly into the washer/dryer below. The tender house, a 500 square foot float with a separate room three steps across the deck from the back door, made the compact quarters more livable. (In nautical terms, the word ‘tender’ refers to a small dingy that trails after a boat. This word also applies to a cargo cab of a train, and extenuates to any ancillary vehicle used to carry supplies the guest house / rec room / man cave / bar / office, it suited the application of the user, while providing an unobstructed view of river recreation.)
“Are you ready to deal with a kid?” he asked me skeptically.
I gave the affirmative based on a few simple assumptions I considered so obvious as not worth mentioning at the time. Andee was 10, an age when the wipe-the-butt child maintenance has ended and the guidance part begins. Also, she already had parents so I would take a peripheral role, like a babysitter or an aunt, bereft of the authority to set rules and boundaries yet able to enforce them. Lastly, she spent two weeknights and every other weekend with her mother. That meant that 50% of the time the house would belong to Derek and I alone, limiting my responsibilities even further.
I had utmost confidence in my resilience. I had lived with 4 complete strangers in a 3-bedroom apartment next door to a Hatian family of 9 in another 3-bedroom apartment; I had lived with people whose snores resounded throughout the house, with roommates who failed to pay their obligations leaving me with past due bills in my name, in an apartment building that went on lockdown after the subject of a police chase took refuge within, with fearless mice who jumped up on the counter while I was cooking, in a beach bungalow with no heat, an hour from work with no car, and in a foreign country. The tender house surpassed any of my former residences in luxury and cool factor. I would live with an infant (not mine) if I could live there.
None of my residences, even the best, came close to generating the optimism of the floating home. The layout, the view, the culture of the moorage surrounded by friendly neighbors of means. The move would bring peace of mind to so many elements of our lives.
We moved my apartment first, then Derek’s place. During that portion of the transfer I kept busy arranging the necessities for our inaugural night. My first red flag appeared before Andee even entered the house. Derek came into the kitchen to take a break before heading back to fetch more stuff and complimented my quickness at arranging all the essentials. He then proceeded to open cabinet after cabinet, above the counter, above the stove, above the refrigerator, searching for something. Finally in exasperation he asked me where he could find the drinking glasses. Naturally, with so much kitchen storage, I had chosen the pull-out drawers under the loft space as the most accessible place for tableware, being a cabinet no taller than four feet from the floor. Derek asked incredulously why I would put the glasses so far from the fridge and sink. I asked him how Andee would reach the cabinets above the counter space. My response seemed to surprise him. That should have set off a siren.