Francine laughed and pulled a pack of Camel 100’s from her yellow shorts. “Okay if I walk n’ smoke?”
“Walk n’ smoke. I like that.”
“That’s what Ben used to call it.”
“What’s-his-name,” Laura Jean corrected. “And please, I’m not some pearl-clutching housewife. Smoke your damn cigarette. And how is it this hot out already?” She put on a big pair of sunglasses, long ponytail swishing as they walked. “Okay, tour time. The block is basically a rectangle, and Mark and I are at the bottom right corner.”
She pointed behind them at the tidy red-brick split-level with a Notre Dame flag waving beside the garage.
“Did you guys go to Notre Dame?”
“Us?” Laura Jean laughed. “Hell no, we’d never get in. We’ve got twin girls there, going into their sophomore year. They decided to stay on campus for the summer, Mom’s heart be damned. Hawthorn Woods is apparently a bit too sleepy for girls their age. I’m still adjusting to the empty nest, so if you start to feel like my pet project, it’s probably because you are.”
A woman driving by in a boxy white minivan made little attempt to hide a curious stare at Francine.
“I was kinda hoping people would’ve forgotten about last night’s little incident,” Francine said.
“Some people around here have nothing better to do than mow the lawn and fantasize about their children’s potential. Oh God, I think I just described Mark and me. Anyway, do not take last night personally. I know they say a full moon makes people squirrelly, but Jee-sus. Okay, back to the tour. As you may know, we are now passing your lovely sister’s house. I miss her already. Pete’s a good one, too. Bit of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it personality, but that makes him a good foil for your hummingbird sis.”
A gaggle of boys wearing toilet paper on their heads rode past on mismatched bikes, narrowly missing Francine as they mimed karate moves and shouted the names of Renaissance painters. Someone’s little sister tried to keep pace, complaining about having to be a news reporter.
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Laura Jean explained. “Kids’ shows are so damn weird. But okay, this here’s Del Merlin.” She gestured at the house to the left of Ellie’s: a one-story ranch with gray siding. The open garage showed off a cherry red sports car, a true unicorn among the neighborhood’s uninspired stable of mostly brown and blue sedans. “Del’s basically married to that car. He’s well into his sixties, but if you’re willing to date up, he is widowed…”
“Thanks, but I don’t think I’m desperate enough to date retirement age.”
Yet, Francine added to herself, hoping she was joking. The first cigarette hissed in surrender as she put it out on the bottom of her shoe and pocketed the butt. She lit another and offered it, half in jest, to Laura Jean.
“No, thank you. I haven’t smoked since high school, and don’t you go asking how long ago that was. I will say, though, my sister-in-law is a pack-a-day woman and she’s got skin like a cowboy boot. Ditto her personality.”
“I’m pretty far from a pack a day, but it has picked up since the divorce.”
“Since you brought it up,” Laura Jean said, “how about giving me something more to chew on?”
“Something about my divorce?”
“Yeah. If I don’t ask now, I’ll have to wait for another natural transition. That could be minutes from now.”
“Hmm.” Francine dragged on her new Camel. “How to encapsulate the joy that was being married to Ben? First he was a stranger, then that cute guy who got his hair cut every other Thursday, then my boyfriend, fiancé, husband, ex-husband. Now he’s just a stranger again, but one who insists on a permanent place in my thoughts. Exes are weird like that, you know?”
“God and the devil, packaged into one person.”
“Bingo. I think Ben had fun at first, and he really did like me. But I don’t think I ever rose past the rank of accessory. I always used to shake my head when I heard about people getting divorced after less than a year. That was for teenagers or celebrities. Or teenage celebrities. Now it’s me.”
“Best almost-year of his life, the son of a bitch,” Laura Jean grumbled supportively. She nodded toward an old man playing fetch with a big white husky in the backyard of the next home. “Next up, we have Roland Gerber. He’s our resident expatriate from Switzerland, and that’s Ajax, his dog.”
The house could have been the cover of a fairy tale book: a brown and white Tudor cottage nestled into an abundance of spruce trees, cardinals fluttering from one branch to the other like living Christmas ornaments.
“I met Mr. Gerber,” Francine recalled. “Super nice.”
“Sweet as pie. Him and the dog. Roland practically built the neighborhood back in the fifties. Eighty-two years old and still comes to all the parties, how do you like that? I hope I’m still moving that well at sixty.”
Francine watched a blue jay swoop out of an oak overhead and soar between the modest split-level homes across the street, adding a nice brushstroke to the living Norman Rockwell painting. All around, garage doors and windows were open, letting in the warm air and sunshine. Children, already on their first popsicle of the day, sprinted across expansive gradients of green grass littered with the colorful plastic of Fisher-Price. Three pigtailed girls singing Madonna songs in the rear-facing backseat of a station wagon squealed as their father sprayed the window with a hose.
Despite a rocky start, it was safe to say Hawthorn Woods held all the sentimental junk Francine had hoped to find during her stay, and even on her second cigarette she breathed a little easier.
“I can’t get over how gorgeous this place is,” she said. “I keep waiting for the Keebler Elves to pop out of one of the trees and chuck a Fudge Stripe cookie at me.”
“It’s cute, right? Oh hell.” Laura Jean looked ahead to the first house on the other side of the block. “I wish we didn’t have to go by this next one.”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
The single-story ranch showed signs of disrepair all around, gutters sagging above siding the color of scrambled eggs. A sun-bleached lawnmower sat next to a shed in knee-high grass like an ironic art installation.
In the gravel driveway, a scrawny and shirtless teenage boy leaned across a lime green dirt bike, using a wrench on the engine. He straightened up and pushed his greasy orange hair out of his face, then started the bike up. It coughed bluish smoke out of its tailpipe for a few moments, then sputtered and died. The teen cursed and leaned back across the bike to try something different.
Laura Jean sighed. “Okay, I might have to get a little gossipy here, and I hate that, so let me just gossip on myself real quick. I got pregnant with the twins before I got married, I cheated on every single math test in eighth grade, and my mother-in-law still thinks Mark and I go to church every week but I’m pretty sure the last time we went was two Popes ago.”
Francine gave Laura Jean the sign of the cross with her cigarette. “I absolve you of all your sins.”
“Thank you. This is the Banderwalt family, they moved in last year. The place was a fixer-upper when they bought it and, well, they didn’t fix it up. The mother’s nice enough, a bit checked out, to be honest. She’s technically an invalid, I suppose. Father’s out of the picture. I think they split right before the move. There’s a little girl, Diana, but she’s a rare sight outside the house.”