Free Ten Beach Road by Wendy Wax

corner of the master bedroom just beneath one of many grime-stained windows that were either missing panes or didn’t quite close. The room had been enlarged at some point, and with its dressing area and master bath filled with funky green tile and ancient fixtures, it took up the whole west side of the upper floor. But the plaster had fallen off a sodden section of the ceiling, where shards of daylight and blue sky could be seen, and lay in clumps on the floor, which was covered in a moldy pile of green shag carpet undoubtedly installed at the same time as the kitchen.
    They saw three more bedrooms and two more funkilytiled bathrooms as Franklin expounded on the damned Florida cypress, the tile and woodwork, the stone accents, the house’s symmetry and generous proportions. The 1920s hardware, dull and scratched though it was, might have been the crown jewels. At least in his eyes the broken windowpanes, dripping sinks, flaking chrome, and peeling wallpapers, along with the other countless signs of age and neglect, simply didn’t exist.
    “They just don’t build houses like this anymore,” John Franklin said as he led them back into the master bedroom. “Not at any price.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.” Nicole crossed her arms and looked the Realtor in the eye. She’d spent close to a year hiding her fear and desperation. Now she felt as if she’d crawled on her belly through the scorching sands of some desert only to discover that the oasis shimmering in the distance was a pile of camel dung.
    “It does have great bones,” Avery Lawford said. “And I can see they’ve tried to renovate within the original footprint of the house, but . . .”
    “Maybe it just needs a facelift to get it ready for sale?” Madeline asked hopefully.
    Nicole snorted. “This house needs serious reconstructive surgery.” She could feel her anger mounting. She didn’t even have enough money for a Lifestyle Lift. Not for herself, and not for this house. Full-blown plastic surgery was out of the question.
    “If we put up a sign and sold it ‘as is’ what could we get for it?” she asked.
    Franklin shook his head. “I wouldn’t do it. You’d get maybe a million, which would be like giving it away.”
    They looked at each other. A million sounded like a lot until you deducted the sales commission and divided it in thirds. She might end up with enough to spend the summer in the Hamptons trolling for clients, but only if it sold quickly, like in the next twenty-four hours.
    “Come on,” Franklin said. “Let me show you why you don’t want to do that. You have a significant ace up your sleeve. I really should have started there.”
    He put a key into a deadbolt lock on one of the master bedroom’s French doors, manhandled it open, then led them out onto the balcony. A peeling wrought-iron stair wound down to the patio below, but no one looked straight down. They all looked out over the barrel roof of the loggia, past the cracked and empty pool and out over the seawall, their gazes inexorably drawn to the house’s true reason for being.
    “Wow.”
    “Oh, my . . .”
    “Good God!”
    They stared in wonder out over the very tip of the tip of the barrier island and watched the bay and Gulf meet head-on in a choppy dance of whitecaps and sea swell. The water slapped into itself, swirling and eddying. They were surrounded by water on three sides, the house at their back. To the west a jetty angled out toward the shipping channels and, presumably, the distant shores of Mexico. On the east lay Boca Ciega Bay. But in front of them in this slim comma of water, the vastness of the Gulf funneled into the more intimate confines of the bay. Beyond the pass, small mounds of land poked haphazardly out of the water, seemingly uninhabited but for the birds using them as landing strips.
    It was an intensely personal experience. Like having all of nature—sky and sea and everything that lived in either—performing for your own