“Five,” Abby said proudly.
“Five. A very special age. Yes, special.” Her milky eyes clouded further with some distant memory before she smiled, brushing away the thoughts with a few blinks of her thin eyelashes.
Abby looked up at her house, staring at the leaded-glass windows above the doorway. “I like your house. It’s really pretty.”
Elsie smiled broadly, her tiny teeth dwarfed in her mouth. She patted her knee. “Thank you. I’ve lived here for a very long time.” She leaned forward. “If your mom says it is all right, you may go inside and get the candy dish from the living room. It’s a special dish that’s pink with a bluebird on it.”
Abby looked at me, and I nodded my permission. She disappeared inside, walking with her back straight and her feet flexing in front of her, knowing she was being watched.
“If you have things to do at that house, she can stay here with me,” Elsie said. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
I hesitated, looking back the house, and then to Elsie’s porch, where Abby reappeared, proudly holding a candy dish full of individually wrapped chocolates.
“Would you like to stay here with me, Abby, and talk?” Elsie asked. “Afterward, I have a pond in my backyard if you would like to feed my koi.”
When Abby nodded her agreement, digging into the chocolates, I slowly walked off the porch. I would only be ten feet away, I reasoned.
“Maybe save that Frank Sinatra story for another time,” I called to Elsie.
She winked at me and then turned to my daughter. I lingered around the edge of the lawn, listening, as Abby bubbled over with talking about her friends at school and her favorite subjects. She was happy to have a captive audience, and Elsie, to have chatter to fill the silence.
I picked up the hedge trimmers and began to work on the hawthorn bushes, stopping mid-clip every few minutes as I listened to their conversation.
“. . . and then every summer, the roses would be in full bloom and Mrs. Moore would be out there for hours, tending to her garden. . . .”
I smiled as I attacked the thickest of the bushes, imagining the roses restored and the brilliant flowers exploding with color all over the side of the house.
* * *
After the bushes were trimmed back and the outside of the house had begun to appear less like something out of a horror movie, I walked back over to Elsie’s house to retrieve Abby. The crew had left for the day, leaving piles of broken concrete stacked in the Dumpsters lining the driveway. The sun was beginning to set, and chickadees chirped in the birch trees flanking the front porch, like a factory whistle sounding at the end of a long workday.
“Ready to go?” Abby’s eyes had begun to droop, the candy dish in front of them had long been emptied, and the lemonade drained. Elsie, on the other hand, looked energized, her eyes bright and her cheeks flushed.
Abby nodded and stood up, wiping her hands on her yellow romper. “Well, bye. Thanks,” she said casually as she walked toward me.
“No, thank you,” Elsie said quietly with a smile. She watched as Abby climbed down the front steps and headed toward my car. She turned to me. “Your daughter is quite the little lady.”
I smiled and was about to turn around and head to the car to join Abby, but she continued.
“You know, I don’t have many visitors to my house anymore. I used to, back when the block was young and there were mothers pushing carriages up and down the street, trying to get their babies to sleep.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “But now, everyone is indoors.”
I swallowed. “Do you have any children?”
She slowly turned to look at me, her thin lips pressed together. “No. It was just Harold and me. Until five years ago. Cancer.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
An embarrassed look flashed across her face as she wiped at her eyes. “Ah, too many memories.”
I shifted. “Speaking of memories, I found a box of things that might have been from the Moore family. I’d love to give it back to them. Would you happen to know a forwarding address?” I said.
“Oh. No, I don’t,” she said quickly. Her mouth twisted into a frown. “What kind of things?”
I went and retrieved the attic box from my car and set it on the porch. I carefully lifted the book and handed her the photograph of the young man standing next to the car.
She stared at it for a long time, slowly bringing one shaking hand to her mouth. She blinked rapidly, like she was sure the photo would disappear.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“David Moore,” she said quietly. She turned the photo over and saw the date, then nodded slightly. “Just as I thought. He would have been nineteen here.”
“Were you friends?” I glanced back toward Abby and saw that she was picking the dandelions that had sprouted in the yard.
Elsie didn’t say anything and handed the picture back to me. “That was the summer of the cicadas.”
“Like this year,” I said as I tucked the picture back into the book.
“I remember it, because David had just gotten that car, the one you see in the picture. He was so proud of that car. He saved up all year to buy it, and drove it around the block for hours after he bought it. His parents thought it was frivolous, getting a convertible, but he loved it.”
“I can tell from the picture,” I said.
She looked down at her hands briefly, before she looked back up and smiled. “The cicadas that year were late, supposed to come out in early May, but they didn’t. We all waited on the block, expecting to wake up and find them clinging to the bushes and the trees. David bought that convertible in June, and the next morning, the cicadas showed up.”
I laughed. “I can imagine it wasn’t as much fun to drive a convertible with those insects flying around.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Abby slowly begin to walk toward me, her shoulders slumped with frustration. I took a quick step toward her, to let her know that I was coming.
Her thin lips twisted into a smile. “No, it wasn’t.”
“So, what happened to him?” I took another step toward Abby, who whimpered with exhaustion as she walked back up on the porch. I put my arm around her and drew her toward me, smoothing her sweaty hair across her forehead and kissing the top of her head. I thought of David’s expression in the picture and knew there was more to the story.
“He died,” she said quickly. Her hands folded in her lap in a precise, matter-of-fact way, and she glanced at Abby. “Later that summer. In a car accident.”
After a pause I exhaled. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”
“When someone is taken so quickly like that, it never quite feels real. You never come to terms with all the . . .” She trailed off and looked down.
“Regrets,” I finished before I could stop myself.
“Yes,” she said quietly, giving me a knowing look.
“Mom, I’m so tired,” Abby said as she hugged me tighter, her body limp against mine.
“It’s getting late,” Elsie said with a nod to Abby.
“Yes,” I said slowly, hoping she would continue about David, but her face was blank.
Her gaze was focused on the backyard of the Moores’ house, her mind lost in some moment from the past, but I stopped mine from wandering back to those first sun-kissed summers on the pier with Matt.
CHAPTER 9
Six days after we lifted the house, a bearded crew member checked the support posts on the house before giving the thumbs-up. The hydraulics operator, perched in the seat of a crane, nodded, and then slowly moved one of the control handles forward. With a loud creak, my 275,000-pound house began to lower.
I twisted the gold band I wore on my right hand—a present from Matt after Abby was born—nervously as the house moved. Abby was at my side, holding her breath. Crew members stood on the perimeter, leaning forward in tension, ready to give the Stop signal to the operator should something begin to go off-kilter.
“This is so exciting,” a neighbo
r behind me whispered. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house. Word had gotten out that we would be lowering the structure today. It had become something of a neighborhood spectacle—floating in the air like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. It had once been an eyesore, a silent neighborhood pest that everyone either ignored or hoped would be swept away in a summer storm, but now, it seemed, it had become something of an underdog to root for.
My shoulders tensed as the house dropped six inches quickly, and the crowd behind me sucked in a breath. I gripped Abby’s shoulder and she yelped in surprise.
“What if it falls?” I heard someone say.
“Then I’m screwed,” I muttered under my breath. I released Abby’s shoulder and twisted my ring faster and faster until finally, a puff of dust and debris emerged as the house once again met the foundation. There was a pause before the operator shouted, “All clear!”
I collapsed forward, hands on my knees as relief flooded through my bones. The neighbors behind me clapped and cheered. Abby threw her arms around me, and I gave her a crushing hug.
“Mom! Ow!” she shrieked.
The house was ready. I was ready.
* * *
At the end of the day, a black Yukon with a Salty Dog Café license plate frame pulled into the driveway. Abby had forced us to buy it when we were on vacation—our last vacation—on Hilton Head Island. She loved the black Labrador puppy wearing a yellow hat that decorated the frame, especially since it was during her phase of wanting a puppy. She stomped her foot and clutched the frame in protest until we finally acquiesced. It was a leftover from a previous life, an unexpected reminder that had the power to knock the wind out of me when I least expected it.
Matt got out of the car with an uneasy smile. He wore a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and dark jeans with tan loafers. His sandy blond hair looked lighter, as though he had been outside in his pool. Both he and Abby had the kind of hair that turned sun-streaked in a matter of hours in the sunlight, the kind of highlights worth a fortune in a salon.
My pulse quickened when I saw him. Each time I saw him, I still saw the man whom I had married and the boy who had first kissed me over Labor Day weekend a million years ago. It was still strange to see his hands by his sides, not reaching for me, not pulling me toward him. Many times, a flash from an alternate universe would occur, and I could see myself running toward him, feeling his arms wrap around me as he pulled me close. Telling me we could start over, that he was sorry for everything he had done. That he still loved me. That he wouldn’t stop until he found a way for me to forgive him.
Yet I also saw the man who stood in front of me as everything I had imagined and planned for the future had changed. I also saw the man who easily signed off on the divorce papers without so much as a protest.
I saw the man who became close with someone else, who gave his attention to another woman at a time when I so desperately needed him. I saw the man who had had an affair. Or, at least who’d been planning to have one when I caught him with incriminating text messages.
He loved me, once. We were in love, once. We had a good marriage, once. In the past, I never thought any of those things would have caveats attached, yet there we were. Everything, it seemed, had changed. Except for me and all those memories of him.
He was the light and the dark, monster and hero, all wrapped into one. My past, present, and broken future, all in the same person.
Abby flew toward him on the driveway. “Hi, Daddy,” she said into his shirt. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head.
“We just had dinner—chicken tenders—so she shouldn’t be hungry. And I put a paper in the bag from her teacher. It has the schedule for the kindergarten graduation next month,” I said quickly.
“Great, thanks.” He nodded. I held out her bag and I saw his hand shake as he took it. He slung the bag over his shoulder and shifted, looking around me like a flower aching to reach the sun around a pesky, overgrown bush. “House coming along?”
I glanced back at the house and nodded. “So far, so good.” My mouth twisted. “Doesn’t have a crystal chandelier, though.”
He rolled his eyes slightly. “My mother won’t let up about that.”
“As she shouldn’t,” I said lightly.
“Very funny. She keeps getting on me to get up on a ladder and clean it, but I don’t have a death wish.” He smiled at me, and my shoulders relaxed with our banter. It was familiar, comforting.
He quickly shifted toward his car, moment over. “So, Abby said she’s been helping to fix things up in there. I’m not trying to be a jerk, but are you sure it’s safe for her?”
The smile vanished from my face, and I felt my cheeks redden in anger, but before I could answer, Eddie spoke from behind me.
“No, we’re not. Wanna come and test some things out for us? There’s a pile of electrical cords in a puddle of water and we need someone to dry them off.” Eddie made a motion for Matt to follow him. “Your hair is made of rubber, so that’ll ground the shock.”
“Funny,” Matt said. “Always nice to see you, Eddie.”
“Likewise,” Eddie called across the yard, his voice booming against the Yukon.
Matt watched as Eddie went inside the house before he turned back to me. “I was wondering if I could ask you something. Just a quick question.”
I kept a hand on Abby’s shoulder, although I considered asking her to go inside if his request should be anything but quick. “Okay.”
His eyes shifted down as he surveyed the long crack on the driveway that appeared as though it had been seal-coated many times, but kept returning. We’d had flooding rains two years ago, and I suspected that the water had swelled the asphalt to the point of no return.
Usually it didn’t happen like that. Usually the rain collected over time, widened the cracks, until one day, they were impossible to ignore.
“I was hoping you would agree to my mom and me taking her on a vacation. It would be to Disney World, maybe sometime in the fall.” His words tumbled out, and he almost seemed surprised by them. I still knew him well enough to suspect that he had practiced that speech on the car ride over, thought about the exact best way to phrase it, and yet it had all come out in a messy tangle.
“Disney World?” I said as I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Yes. She kept asking me if we could go after I told her about it, and I know she’ll be in school in the fall, but it’s really the best time with work.” His words grew smaller as he spoke, almost dimming down to a whisper.
I opened my mouth to protest, but Abby spoke first. “Please, Mom?”
“Of course. Sounds fun,” I said tightly, forcing myself to half-smile. I looked back at Matt. “We’ll have to discuss the details as you know more.” My chest grew tight as I thought of him taking her on the vacation, giving her all the experiences that we had once talked about doing together. I so clearly remembered having a teasing conversation about all of the trips we would have to do once she was born, and a trip to Disney World was high on that list.
Matt shifted his weight and shoved his hands in his pockets. “You’re welcome to come, if you want.” He shook his head. “My mom was the one who suggested it. Pushed for it, in fact.”
I didn’t know if he meant that she had pushed for the trip, or to invite me, so I didn’t say anything. I just shook my head slightly, immediately pushing any consideration of the proposal out of my head. It wouldn’t make sense for me to go. I would have been an add-on, an afterthought.
“Okay. Well, thanks,” he said again before he turned to get Abby in the car.
I said good-bye and watched him drive off with our daughter in the car he had bought right before we separated, with the license plate frame from our last vacation together.
All of those memories seemed to exist in another time and place, an alternate universe where I had no place living. A time when my life was secretly being defined by one decision at a time, making it imp
ossible to see what the sum total of everything might turn out to be—choosing work over a date night, one more episode of Law & Order over getting into bed at a reasonable time when we still might have had the energy to be intimate, simply asking him to put his dishes in the dishwasher, again, rather than doing it out of frustration that had built so high it would never be hacked down.
Barely acknowledging our anniversary, never buying each other Christmas gifts, forgetting to kiss each other good night. It all seemed so normal, the typical result of the sediment of our relationship settling into predictability. Certainly nothing to worry about. Until one day, we were different people from the ones who got married.
At least, it seemed that way. Sometimes I wondered if the divorce made us even more different. If we could have found our way back to the middle had he tried. Had he not entertained the idea of an affair or had he begged for forgiveness. Shouted it from the middle of the lake, or done some grand gesture worthy of a movie. Had he refused to sign the papers, saying he couldn’t live without me. But he did, he didn’t, and then he did.
And four years later, I stood on my cracked driveway and watched him drive away in the same car that had taken him away when he first left, when I had no idea that he would never come back.
CHAPTER 10
“Look, it all has to be taken out and replaced,” Thad, the plumber, said. He knocked a gnarled knuckle against the connected metal flues. “Unless you don’t want to sell.” He laughed, the tufts of hair in his ears wrinkling.
I stared up at the pipes that ran through the wall in the first floor, and Eddie shook his head.
“Well, obviously, that isn’t the case,” I said. “So, all of it has asbestos in it?” I already knew the answer, but asking prolonged the reality. All of the pipes would have to be replaced or else it would never pass inspection. If we weren’t going to renovate anything, we could leave the pipes in the walls, and there wouldn’t be any risk of exposure. But now, we would also have to jackhammer all of the cement outside to replace the piping to the street.
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