Hannah was in the back bedrooms, unpacking, and didn’t hear my knock at the door, so I went inside, walking between cartons, and called her name. The walls were a pale color between green and gray, which looked nice with the black casement windows, which, I happened to know from Margot, were all new, replaced last year.
“Be right out,” she yelled.
I handed her a small plate of frosted brownies, one of Miles’s favorites, and she brushed her dusty hands off before taking it from me.
“Shall I wipe down some cupboards, unpack china, lay a fire, make myself useful?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m almost ready to stop. Long day.”
She asked me if I wanted tea, and I said no.
“Where’s Miles?”
“He ran down to look at the creek,” she said. “I couldn’t keep him cooped up any longer after all this rain.”
“Had to go skip some stones?”
“Probably.”
Every surface, chair, and sofa had a box on it, and although it wasn’t even eight o’clock, my daughter seemed tired, so I didn’t linger. I told her I’d come by in a couple of days and to call if she needed me. She hugged me goodbye, thanked me for the brownies, but didn’t walk me to my car. She went back into her bedroom, and I went out alone.
And that’s why she didn’t see what I saw as I sat in my car and buckled my seat belt.
A tiny girl carrying a fishing net much taller than she was, waving goodbye to Miles as he crossed the street. Here one day, and already he had a little friend.
Three
Hannah
Hannah woke up Saturday before six, obsessing a bit over the work she had to do. Finalize the edit of the Peace Corps memoir. Article prep for Boxt, one last newsletter for an online printing company, memoir timeline for the woman with five names she called the Philanthropist. Three given names and a hyphenated last name. She’d broadly proclaimed to Hannah that she was honoring her Catholic father, her feminist mother, and her Jewish husband, as if this sentence would make a great memoir all on its own.
She got up and walked through the boxes. Terrible habit, working early in the morning. She was so tired by 10:00 p.m., right when Miles started staying up too late and pushing limits. This schedule was not going to work in high school. She opened her computer on the dining table and started on the newsletter, but in a few minutes, a shaft of light broke through the front window at an angle that was too orange and insistently beautiful to ignore.
She unlocked the door and grabbed the broom, swept a few dewy blades of grass off the porch in the pale orange light. If it was this pretty every morning, she might have trouble settling in to work. The sun rose across Brindle Lane, illuminating the landscaped property directly across the street, the driveway sloping down to a barely visible house, shrouded in ivy, shaded by maple trees, mature oaks, a Japanese cherry closer to the house. The heavy rains had made everything almost too green, overly lush, the leaves grown wide and tall, like giant hands on a child. She could only see glimpses of the sprawling stone house behind it, a piece of the gray shutters, the triangle top of a copper-roofed cupola rising above. Only a slice of a door painted a dark color, not bright like some in the neighborhood, showing off like bold lipstick. The balloons from the walk-through long gone now, but a short piece of red ribbon had been missed at the back, waving slightly in the wind.
Soon enough, in winter, trees stripped bare, she’d be able to sit on her porch and see more of the house and its owners. Now the only thing clearing the trees was a verdigris weather vane spinning above the cupola. She squinted. A fox? No, a rabbit.
She ignored the dew and her bare feet and stepped out onto her lawn, stretched, grateful. Work could wait a minute or two.
She had plenty to explore. Lanes and paths to hike, trails to run, up into the woods that ringed the Tamsen farm off Gotham Road. Hillary said everyone ran or walked on the trails; it was sometimes annoying how many people and dogs and kids you ran into.
Hannah stood on her lawn, stretching in her pajamas, enjoying the faint scent of what looked like Hillary’s new plantings near her mailbox. Beds of moss, ringing what had to be pale yellow witch hazel, her mother’s favorite flower. Shit, Hannah thought. She had to remember to call her mother. She’d been a little distracted when she’d stopped by.
“Did you camp out? Kinda wet for that.”
Ben stood halfway down his driveway, smiling, dressed in jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, holding a fat Sunday paper. Still had it delivered once a week, though he read everything else online. Old school in a few ways, but she knew the trendy leather headphones around his neck had probably cost thousands of dollars.
She smiled back. “Maybe these are my regular clothes,” she said.
“Business casual?”
“Writer casual. The most casual of all the casuals.”
“I guess your sister didn’t warn you about the strict neighborhood dress code,” he laughed. “I’m supposed to come get you guys for breakfast, but I was waiting until maybe dawn broke? And until my headache cleared?”
“She’s not cooking already.”
“Of course she is,” he said and smiled.
Hannah loved how deeply Ben understood her sister, how he always seemed to marvel at her even while he shook his head at what she was doing.
“Are you hungover, Uncle Ben?”
“Maybe a tad.”
“Okay, go take some Advil and give me a minute.”
Hannah went inside, changed into leggings, a tank top, and a flannel shirt, which wasn’t much different from her pajamas, but at least she had a bra on. She left a quick note for Miles and started across the lawn, imagining some delicious egg dish or something drizzled like scones. Hillary had more cookbooks than Hannah had books. But then, Hannah’s carriage house, the former estate’s servants’ quarters, didn’t have room for them anyway. It had been somewhat expensive considering it only had one bathroom, but it also had a fireplace and a porch and her sister next door, and when Hillary had called her and told her the owners were selling directly, Hannah didn’t hesitate. She had just enough from the divorce settlement for a down payment. Miles needed a new school, and she and her sister had talked about living in the same neighborhood since they were kids. When had they played house, they’d imagined it this way, always. Of course they hadn’t figured on the disparities in career, husbands, income. Hadn’t imagined that what looked like home to one of them wouldn’t necessarily look like home to the other.
When Hannah reached the driveway, her email alert pinged in her shirt pocket. She took her phone out, glanced at it. From Boxt Pharma but not her project’s manager—a name she didn’t recognize. Probably a confirmation of her direct deposit or something. She rapped her knuckles three times on the front door and then stepped back and opened the email, just to check. Just to see what this new person had to say.