First nights in the country by herself were always spooky, and this one was no exception. Bridget’s heart raced with every creak and rattle, and the noises were constant, thanks to the torrential rain and terrified cats. She kept wishing her kids were sleeping upstairs, that Will was reading in the loft, or—even better—that Sterling was in her bed, telling her how overjoyed he was to be there, even in a typhoon.
In the middle of the night, during the worst of the storm, the lightning split a big branch off the willow tree and left it for dead in the pond. Heavy winds pressed on the backside of the tennis court fence until the rotted cedar posts fell over, taking the chain link with them. When Bridget woke up the next morning, having barely slept all night, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees, and there were deer grazing on the weeds that grew between the deep cracks in the asphalt court. With three sides of the fence still up, it looked like she’d opened a petting zoo.
It was early, and Bridget had over four hours before she had to look presentable, so she threw on sweatpants and sneakers with the T-shirt she’d slept in. Before brushing her teeth or her hair, she went to the kitchen, where the old Sub-Zero was buzzing loudly in the background. She made small talk with the cats, Eliza (as in Doolittle) and Henry (as in Higgins). While the coffee brewed, she turned on NPR to drown out the racket coming from the fridge and texted her boyfriend in New York, knowing how much better she would sleep once he was under the same roof:
Beautiful, sunny morning! Can’t wait for you to get here :)
She added a heart emoji.
Sterling answered right away:
Read your email.
And then:
Please.
His clipped, businesslike tone grated, but he was right to be annoyed. Sterling was a novelist, and he’d asked her to proofread the foreword he’d written for a Cambridge University Press book on literary symbolism. She was certainly no expert on the topic, but she was a good and careful reader. Unfortunately, she’d let that task, along with a slew of other pressing matters, go undone that week while she was preparing her Upper West Side apartment for summer subletters. They were acquaintances of Sterling, his Dutch publisher, her husband, and their sixteen-year-old daughter. The family had arrived safely the night before—notifying her with a text that her place was smaller than they’d expected—at the same time that Bridget was discovering that an industrious mouse had spent the winter nesting in her underwear drawer.
Bridget pulled on a sweater she found draped over a chair, fed the cats, and ate a handful of stale granola. Alone in the Connecticut house, she wouldn’t have to think about feeding anyone other than herself and the cats. That would all change when Sterling arrived, but for the next two weeks, she could eat whatever she wanted at whatever time she chose without sitting down or even using a plate if she didn’t feel like it. In the early evening she could stand at the kitchen counter—in the same spot where she’d dutifully cut up watermelon and poured glasses of milk for her kids when they were young—drinking wine and scooping pub cheese onto crackers and calling it dinner.
She decided to go outside to assess the storm damage, and on her way to the front door, she noticed a puddle directly under the skylight. That was unfortunate. Looking up to see where the water was coming from, she saw a brown stain on the lower left corner, nothing too serious. She got a beach towel and dropped it on the floor.
Opening the door, she let her city cats run out after her. They dropped to the ground like a rookie SWAT team as they took in the scent of bears and bobcats in the woods and hawks overhead. Dozens of downed branches, still holding on to their tiny green leaves, were discarded all over the lawn. On the tree limb that was now floating in the middle of the pond, four turtles were sunbathing. The grass was soaked, the pond was full, and the wind was cool. The storm might have wreaked havoc, but it had left everything gloriously clean.
The peace was disrupted by the sound of a pickup truck coming up the long, wet driveway and making a sharp turn in front of the garage. The driver turned off the engine and opened his door. Her caretaker, Walter, stepped out slowly, reaching back to the passenger seat for a carton of eggs before walking over to her in the yard. “Thought I’d come see how you made out last night,” he said.
Bridget had never quite adjusted to the idea of unannounced visitors, but she’d learned long ago that locals had a different code of conduct from weekenders.
Walter stopped to peer up at her roof, putting an arthritic hand up to shade his eyes. He was tall and skinny, wearing jean shorts hiked up with a belt and a red T-shirt tucked in, giving him the look of a knobby-kneed, overgrown toddler.
As caretaker of the property for the past fifteen years, Walter had repeatedly alerted Bridget to problems with her house. He would call her in New York—in the middle of a meeting, a rehearsal, a concert—to report bad news: You got ice dams on the roof. There’s a litter of baby squirrels in the attic. The heat’s out in the guest cottage. It was up to Bridget to do something about these problems, and she tended to postpone repairs. She had, of course, addressed the direst issues, but she’d allowed all cosmetic or even mildly structural problems to fall by the wayside. The result was a wonderfully lived-in, cozy, but shabby home that could use a fresh coat of paint, a new hot water heater, and an exterminator.
He showed her the egg carton. “From our chickens.”
“Thanks.”
But instead of handing the carton over, he held on to it, pointing his finger at the bushes. “Be careful with those cats. We don’t let ours out. They kill the birds. It’s a big year for bears, you know.”
“Is that right.”
“And foxes and coyotes’ll kill cats, too. Seen any herons?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
“They’ll eat your fish.”
It was hard to know in Walter’s worldview which predators were bad and which were good. One minute he was cursing the herons for eating the smallmouth bass in his pond, but the next he was cheering the bobcat for catching a rabbit. Bridget tried to avoid such topics since they rarely saw eye to eye: she felt happy for the heron and bad for the bunny, for example.
“Your kids coming to visit?”
“Too busy,” Bridget said. “Isabelle moved to Hong Kong and works sixty hours a week, and Oscar rarely leaves DC.”
“How’s that friend of his?”
“Husband,” Bridget corrected. Bridget was humble by nature, but she couldn’t help but speak well of her twins and son-in-law. “Matt’s working for a congressman now, as his chief of staff.”
“A Democrat?” Walter said, frowning.
“Jackson Oakley. The young star of the party.”
Politics, also a world of fighting animals, was another topic Bridget knew better than to discuss with Walter.
“When’s Bill coming? Haven’t seen him in a while.”
No one, but no one, called Will, her oldest friend and music colleague, “Bill” other than Walter, and he had insisted on using the nickname for years in spite of frequent attempts to retrain him. “I’m not sure. Will’s pretty busy this summer in New York, and our trio’s on a break until our new violinist starts—”
“Uh-oh,” Walter said slowly, catching sight of the tennis court. “Oh, boy, would you look at that.” He shook his head. “You gotta fix that in a hurry, or the rest of the fence is coming down with it.”