“
Now, Daniel and I propped ourselves up with pillows in his bed, our legs stretched out in front of us, passing the lo mein and dumpling cartons back and forth, digging into them with chopsticks while we heckled the married couple with more money than sense on the television.
“Really?” I yelled. “You have a quarter of a million dollars to renovate a Philadelphia row house, and that’s the cheap garbage tile you pick for the bathroom?”
“They have to make up for the money they spent replacing those hardwood floors somehow.” Daniel crunched into an eggroll.
I tsked and shook my head. “They could have refinished the original ones for half that, easily.”
“Oh, yeah?” He bumped my shoulder with his. “Refinish a lot of floors, do you?”
“I watch a lot of TV where other people refinish a lot of floors. I think that makes me an expert.”
He considered that. “Close enough. I’ll accept that.”
I slurped up one more bite of noodles while the couple on the screen bickered about the color of the shower tile. Their marriage wasn’t going to last beyond the renovation of that house. “I wonder what it’s like,” I finally said.
“I think the green would have looked better, but that’s not the hill I want to die on.”
“No . . .” I passed the lo mein carton to him. “I mean having a space like that. My place would fit in their kitchen, you know? I watch shows like this and wonder what it would be like to live that kind of life. Where you have an amazing space like that, and the money to make it exactly what you want.
”
”