She grabbed the nearest box, which gave a glassy jingle. She balanced it on her belly bump long enough to get her right hand under it, turned toward the house, and tripped over the curb. As she stepped high to get over it she could not see, a bell rang. Surprise made her stumble, and she caught her balance, the box chiming in her arms; she hoped nothing had broken. A child rode a bicycle along the sidewalk. She hadn’t heard him coming until he rang his bell, though the ticking of the wheels was loud enough. He had sprung out of the grass in the tree’s shadow. Her heart closed and opened. She took a breath and talked sense to herself: Just a kid on the street, settle down.
Her teacher’s eye said Nine, but small for his age: a boy with fair, wavy hair and a gray T-shirt stained with long rusty streaks. Trouble at home. Something about the way he stared straight ahead, something about the grip of his small fingers on the handlebars. She hoped he didn’t live too close. He rode his bike along the sidewalk to the edge of Eric and Lacey’s new property, still marked with a row of orange survey flags—he rang the bike’s round bell once, ting, and then turned and rode to the row of flags on the other border. He braked by jamming his heels into the sidewalk and rang the bell again. Ting.
Lacey started across the sidewalk and there he was again, suddenly, pedaling in front of her. His shoulder brushed the box, and she dropped it. Salad plates and dinner plates, bowls and coffee mugs, hit one another in one great shout of destruction. “Do you have to do that?” Lacey cried. “Right here? Do you have to?”
The boy stared at her, a look of challenge, like a dog too long chained: Come closer and see if I bite. “Who asked you to come here talking to me?” he said. The strange ferocity of his response made her step back and raise her hands.
Eric ran to the box. “I said leave it alone!” He opened the box to a mass of splinters and shards, with one intact dinner plate on top from the stoneware set they had bought at the Dollar King last June, on sale for nine dollars (marked down from fifteen). “These were good plates. They could have lasted us for years. Look at this, all this waste.” He laid the pieces out to match the bigger parts together and see if some of them could be saved. White ceramic dust drifted in the bottom of the box.
Lacey could hardly believe how a single impact destroyed the dishes so completely. “We can get another set,” she offered. “They were cheap.”
“Nothing’s cheap when you’re living on borrowed money. You don’t know,” Eric said. So angry, like it was her fault, the traffic eating up the day—like she’d dropped the plates on purpose. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “Just this. Just everything. But if it’s what you want, fine, we’ll do what you want, like we always do. Buy new plates. Buy new silverware while you’re at it. New tablecloths, why not. Spend a hundred dollars. Five hundred. Whatever, what difference does it make, I don’t care.” He pulled the accordion door down in its slot so hard it bounced, and he had to catch it and force it down again.
“Wait,” Lacey said. The day had been just as hard on him as on her—harder, because he’d been driving. “We can finish. We’re almost done.”
He got into the driver’s seat, and the slamming door was his only answer. At the corner, he stopped and signaled before turning left. His carefulness so exasperated Lacey that she had to chew on her knuckles to keep from shouting after him.
She sat on the grass, holding her knees and rocking, with a dozen fragmented conversations rattling in her mind. You should have known—you think you know so much—I could have told you—why don’t you ever listen to me? Another stupid argument, their fourth this week. He said she spent too much, they had no money, why couldn’t she understand—which was good, coming from a guy who’d grown up with all the money in the world, a two-million-dollar trust fund and a vacation home on the Isle of Palms, until it all disappeared. And he was telling her what poverty was like, as if he knew. This wasn’t poverty; this was just a temporary low point between her job ending and his beginning. They were building up some debt, but it would all be gone in two months, except the student loans. If they couldn’t handle the stress of moving, what kind of parents were they going to be?
She breathed quietly and listened to the maple. Eric always left when they fought. When he came back, he would be all love and sweetness, and neither of them would mention this fight again.
She lay back. After a while, she began to hear the sounds of the grass. When the wind brushed her face, the blades rubbed against each other, sharing friendly news. Bees worked the blossoms of the tall purple clover and the short white clover, the small sweet buttercups. A wood dove called, “You-u. You-u.” Children’s voices rang, far off. The ticking of wheels gathered in the rustling stillness. And the little boy rode his bicycle up and down the sidewalk, turning at the property line.