“Are you okay out here?” Harry said.
“Eric took the van and he forgot to leave the key.” She was appalled to feel herself on the verge of weeping. “And I left my phone in the van, so I can’t call him. It’s just the whole day, I don’t know. Moving. And then we got stuck in traffic forever.”
“Moving is hard,” Harry said. “Come inside and have some tea.”
In five minutes, Lacey was in Harry’s kitchen with a glass of sweet tea. His house was everything she hoped hers might someday be. The maple floors shone, and every piece of furniture had its own light, from the red sun shining off the polished tabletop to the rainbows flaring from the beveled edges in the china cabinet’s doors.
He seemed restless in the beautiful room, putting down his glass and picking it up again, fidgeting with a dishcloth. “Come to the front room and see where I teach,” he said. She thought he’d been about to say something else and had changed his mind at the last moment.
In the front room, she found the same glossy oak floors, two wooden music stands, a framed five-by-six-foot charcoal drawing of a young woman playing the violin in a whirl of long hair, and a collection of amethyst carnival glass on the mantel. Harry raised his glass of tea to the drawing. “My sister, Dora. When she was very young.”
“It’s beautiful. Who drew it?”
Harry’s face smoothed to a deliberate flatness, a public face, neutral as the image on a coin. “Her husband. They lived next door, in your house.”
Lacey nodded, abashed, unable to fathom what she had done wrong. She bounced on her toes and wished she could find a way to leave without seeming rude. She followed Harry to the kitchen and accepted more tea. “Did the painters do a good job?” he said.
“I can’t get in.” Eric could at least have left the key. She forced her mind away from the house, still withholding itself from her after all those weeks, the forms they’d signed, the down payment, and she couldn’t even get inside. A thought came to her. “The little boy on the bike. Who’s he?”
She didn’t like the way he’d turned at the property line and kept himself so exactly in front of her house, as if he had a right to be there. It made her uneasy. Harry looked like the neighbor who knew everyone’s business, the plant waterer for friends on vacation, the third name on everyone’s emergency contact list. Lacey’s mother depended on people like this to hold her mail when she was vagrant. Lacey hoped the boy was someone’s grandson visiting, or the child of renters who were leaving in a month. Someone she wouldn’t have to worry about.
Harry set his glass down hard in surprise, and tea spilled onto the bright tabletop. “You’ve seen him?” he said.
“You know the one I mean?” Lacey was disappointed; if Harry knew the child so well, he must live nearby and be a problem in the neighborhood.
“Children on bicycles, they come, they go. . . .” He busied himself with a napkin and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She leaned forward across the table. “Does he live on the street?”
Long after the table was dry, Harry kept rubbing the napkin in circles, staring at his hands. At last, he looked across the table, but his eyes were fixed on Lacey’s glass, not her face. “No. He’s never shown himself to me.”
Lacey had seen this kind of evasion when she asked other teachers about certain children. If the child’s first-grade teacher said, I didn’t know him well or he’s probably changed since then, she knew she had trouble. Refusal to answer was the answer. “Thanks for the tea,” she said. She’d watch for this neighbor boy and get to know him; trouble was her specialty. “I’d better get back. Eric will be home soon.” Maybe—she hoped.
“I’m thinking, CarolAnna changed the locks, but did she get the back door?” He opened a drawer next to his sink. “Key, key. Let’s see if this works.”
She followed him out the back door, looking over her shoulder for one last glimpse of his sister, Dora, with her violin in the front room, her predecessor in the house. They walked between the two Cape Cods, underneath the maple where no grass grew. New mulch left a sulfured scent in the evening air. The back lawn was mowed in diagonals down to the row of cypresses, and around the brick patio the sentry boxwoods stood neat and tight. Lacey knew that Harry had been maintaining the Miszlaks’ yard along with his own. She hoped she and Eric would be able to keep it this nice.
Harry offered her the brass key. “Give it a try.”
Lacey wriggled the key into the lock. She pressed it hard, and something pushed back. Her hand jerked with a reflexive shock, as if she’d touched a centipede. She hated the touch of many-legged things, so wrong, unnatural. The key dropped to the doorstep. When she picked it up, it was warm in her hand, and it wouldn’t enter the lock at all.