I noticed her before I noticed him.
I noticed him on a Tuesday.
I'd poured a glass of the wine my mother had left in the cabinet four years ago, which had somehow survived. I called Moose and went out to the porch.
The bungalow across the street had its lights on.
Someone moved past the front window.
I meant to look once and look away. But he came out the front door, a man in a Hartsdale Fire Department T-shirt and basketball shorts. He was big through the shoulders. He bent down and rubbed the ears of a golden retriever who'd come to meet him at the door, and even from across the street, I could see his face soften.
Whatever he murmured to the dog didn't carry across to me. The dog leaned into his hand how dogs lean into the people who belong to them.
He straightened.
The porch light caught him from above and pulled his face out of the dusk.
The wineglass had gone still in my hand. The cricket in the bushes was still going, but I couldn't hear it the way I'd been hearing it a second ago. There was just the bungalow across the street, the man on the porch, and the strange, sliding sensation of recognition arriving before my brain could catch up to it.
I knew him.
I knew him the way you know someone you haven't thought about in fourteen years and could still draw from memory. The jaw. The hair that fell across his forehead. The shape of him at eighteen, filled in now with the body of a grown man.
Easton Ford.
Mrs. Ford's grandson. Who used to come every summer. Who I'd watched from this same porch the summer I was fifteen, because he'd been eighteen and easy-going, laughing at whatever the older boys he ran with were saying. I'd had a fifteen-year-old's crush on him for exactly one summer. Never spoken to him. He hadn't noticed me either. Three years and a foot of height between us, and that was the entirety of it.
He didn't notice me now, either.
He went into the bungalow with the dog. The door shut. The porch light stayed on against the dusk.
I stayed on my porch.
Longer than I needed to.
I came back here to be no one's, I told myself, the way I'd told myself in the car driving north. No one's wife. No one's project. No one's anything. Hartsdale, and just Hartsdale, and nothing else.
I went inside, shut the door, and left the porch light off.
I checked the window twice on the way to bed.
CHAPTER 2
Easton
My grandmother died more than a year ago.
I still hadn't packed a box.
They were stacked in the hallway where I'd set them down the day after the funeral. Flat, taped at the bottom, ready. I walked past them every morning on my way to the kitchen. Every night on my way to bed. A year and a half of stepping around the same stack of cardboard like it was a piece of furniture.
That was the part nobody told you about taking care of someone who was dying.
People talked about the part where you held her hand at the end, or the part where you slept upright in the recliner because you had to hear her if she called for water, or the funeral. People talked about those.
Nobody talked about the morning after.
The morning after, I woke up at six and had slept the whole night through. Before I was even all the way awake, before I could stop it, something in my chest unclenched. The breath went all the way down for the first time in a year.
