"How does it look from where you are?"
"Dust on everything."
"I bet."
I ran my thumb along a chip in the railing paint where the white had worn down to something gray underneath. The yard was already starting to lose the day, the light gone copper at the edges. "The grass is mowed, though."
"Your dad pays for a service." I could hear her smile through the phone, the way I always could. "I told him not to bother, but he wouldn't hear it."
I smiled at the porch railing. Somewhere two doors down, a sprinkler clicked on and started its slow rotation against a fence.
"Are you eating?" she said.
"I'm about to."
"Astrid."
"I'm about to, Mom." A breeze moved through the maple at the corner of the lot and shook a few early leaves loose onto the grass.
A small breath on her end, the kind she made when she was choosing what to say next. "Audrey there?"
"Tomorrow at ten."
"Good." A beat. "Are you okay, honey?"
Moose had come to find me when the phone rang, the way he always did, and was leaning his whole weight against my hip. I dropped my hand into his fur and rubbed the soft place behind his ear where he liked it best.
"I will be."
"Yes," my mother said. "You will."
In the background, I could hear my father calling her to something. The clatter of a screen door on their end, too, all the way down in Florida, and the low murmur of his voice through a kitchen I'd never been inside, but could picture anyway.
"I have to go. Your dad's burning something."
"Go save him."
"I love you, sweetheart."
"Love you, Mom."
I sat with the phone face down on my knee for a minute before I moved.
Moose pushed his head harder into my hand, the way he did when he was asking for more, and I gave it to him. The late-September sun was hitting the side of my face at the angle it only hits in early fall, low and gold and not in any hurry. A cricketstarted up somewhere in the bushes. I'd forgotten what quiet sounded like.
I picked the box up and went inside.
It was a little past seven by the time the kitchen was assembled. The coffee maker sat on the counter. My mother's pie plate had been there the whole time, in the spot it had always been in. I'd worked through dinner without noticing.
There was nothing in the refrigerator. I made a list. Groceries. Propane. A new bird feeder. Call about the empty storefront on Main that Audrey had texted me about three weeks ago.
The list felt like a life.
A small one. But mine.
The two weeks after I got back went the way the first weeks after anything went. I unpacked one box at a time. I called Howie about the storefront on Main that Audrey had texted me about, and left two voicemails he hadn't returned. I walked Moose along the river in the mornings, the air going a degree cooler each time, the maples starting to turn at the tips.
The bungalow across from my parents' place had its lights on most evenings now. A truck I didn't recognize in the driveway by six most nights, gone again by six the next morning. Sometimes a golden retriever on the porch in the late light, white at the muzzle, watching the yard the way old dogs watched yards.
