Nick knew there was some kind of famous quote about best laid plans. He couldn’t quite remember it exactly but was sure it had something to do with how no matter how great your intentions are sometimes things just don’t work out that way. That sentiment seemed to embody the beginnings of his house hunt with Peggy. Once they both got a chance to sit down and iron out the details it became obvious that they were both looking for different things when it came to a location to live. 

She had grown up just outside of the Bronx, in the same home where she and her family still lived, and had always dreamed of being able to live in Manhattan. She had a vision in her mind of an apartment overlooking Central Park, not too far from home where she could often be caught rubbing shoulders with celebrities in the elevator and having a doorman help with her bags as she hopped out of a Yellow Cab.

Nick on the other hand wasn’t interested in a cramped, overpriced apartment that looked out at another cramped, overpriced apartment. He couldn’t care less about other celebrities and would rather not have the paparazzi parked outside the door waiting to catch him walking to Starbucks in sweats so they could claim in big, bold letters that he was just like a ‘normal person’.

He considered himself to be a normal person and that wasn’t how normal people lived. When he envisioned their home it was outside of the city, close enough to drive downtown if they wanted, close enough to drive to Peggy’s family but far enough away that they could breathe. He wanted a yard for his dogs, some seclusion to hide away from prying eyes if he wanted, and a place nearby to dock his boat since he was suddenly only going to be able to get out on the water in the summer now that he was planning to live “up north”.

He wanted to build, she was happy to lease. He wanted en suite bathrooms for each room and she, having shared one bathroom for most of her life, couldn’t see the point in having four bathrooms for two people. They disagreed on everything down to whether they should pay for an interior decorator or just do it themselves. (Nick, of course, was the one who was happy to fork over the cash so he wouldn’t have to even think about paint chips and flooring samples.)

It wasn’t until Nick was packing up the last of his boxes in Los Angeles with the movers set to arrive the next day that they finally agreed on a place. In the end they had come to a compromise though he still felt somewhat slighted since Peggy ended up with more of her requests than he did. A wise man once told him though that relationships were about give and take and since she was the last to give it was now his turn. When he’d heard her voice on the phone animatedly talking about a place she had found he couldn’t help but be excited with her.

“I’ve got it narrowed down to two places,” Peggy boasted. “The first one though... it’s perfect. It’s in the area I had wanted, and it has a great view... not of another apartment building. Oh, babe it’s so great.”

“Why do I feel a ‘but’ coming on?” Nick wondered, putting down the tape gun in his hand on a random box while he waited.

“I know you said money isn’t an issue but this place is a little expensive.”

“Where is it? How expensive could it be?” he wondered. The condo he lived in now had cost a little over a million dollars and he had made a profit when he sold it. He had expected to use that money for the down payment on the new place, figuring he would spend about the same. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the money but his accountant always pressured him to look at the long-term and consider whether the same amount of cash would always be flowing into his accounts.

“The realtor emailed me the listing. It’s just along the Park, in The Dakota, it’s so beautiful. Three bedrooms, and three bathrooms just like you wanted. It’s all vintage inside and there’s this gorgeous wrought iron spiral staircase up to the second level where the bedrooms are. Really Nick, you have to see the pictures!”

“The Dakota?” he asked rhetorically, the name of the building seemingly eerily familiar. “Isn’t that the place where John Lennon lived?”

“Yeah!” Peggy replied excitedly, having hoped that the history of the building would be part of what lured him into getting the apartment.

“You want me to live in a building where a famous musician was gunned down in cold blood? The same building that Yoko Ono still lives in? That place will be crawling with paps all the time. Baby, cut me some slack here. I had enough of living the celebrity lifestyle when I lived in Hollywood.”

He could practically see the pout on her face through the phone and she let out a sigh. “But... it’s everything I wanted.”

“How much is it?” he asked, noticing that she had skipped over that part.

There was a long pause on her end of the phone and Nick resisted the urge to chuckle. He always found it amusing what Peggy considered to be expensive. She had been making decent money working for the private airline but she had a considerable amount of student debt and had focused all of her efforts on paying it down.

She hadn’t grown up with money and apart from a taste for designer clothes and shoes she was frugal most of the time. She was always on him about the fact that he never checked the price of anything before he bought it but it was just not a concern for him. He never wondered how much money was in his bank account he just assumed it was more than he could spend in a lifetime.

“It’s a little over five and a half million.”

This time it was Nick’s turn to be silent as he took in that amount. He grabbed his cell phone off the coffee table and immediately opened up the mortgage calculator app he had been using to work out monthly payments as they looked around for places. He punched in the appropriate numbers, his eyes going wide when the monthly payment was displayed on the screen.

“Absolutely not,” he said firmly. “I am not paying five million dollars for an apartment.”

“You said money wasn’t an issue,” she reminded him quietly.

He chuckled and shook his head, “Let’s put it this way. You keep saying you want to contribute, right? That you don’t want me to pay for everything? If you want this place that badly then I would expect you to pay half of the mortgage.”

Not wanting to back down so quickly she agreed, “Fine. How much would I owe you?”

“One hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars would cover your share.”

“That doesn’t seem like that much...”

“A month!”

That ended the discussion on living in Manhattan. In the end Nick had agreed to Peggy’s second choice. It was a house about 12 miles outside of downtown in a fairly desirable upscale suburb. The house was just over three thousand square feet, much smaller than Nick was used to, and had five bedrooms and four bathrooms but it had a backyard and was not far from a dock. At a more reasonable million and a half dollars he was happy to call the realtor and seal the deal.

The movers would be there to pick up his things the next day and start the drive cross country from Malibu to Beechhurst, New York. He planned to stay in California for a few days and tie up loose ends and by the time his things arrived they would be the proud owners of a home in Suburbia.

At the same time Peggy was packing her own things, having opted to rent a truck and move herself rather than hire movers. She had friends and family members that were willing to help and Nick didn’t argue with her. He wasn’t going to fork out money for every little thing she wanted and if she was willing to move her own things then he was going to let her. It had been a long time since he had moved anyone himself and thought it might be kind of fun to help unload the truck.