It was, in fact, a bare-bones kind of house, its small rooms furnished sparsely with pieces that seemed to have led full lives in other houses long before this one. The only two pictures in the living room were a framed print of a van Gogh Sunflowers and a Ramones poster. The only books in the bookcase were children’s books—some of them for very young children and others (mostly having to do with horses) for older children. Willa should have felt pity for the meagerness of it all, but in fact her main emotion was envy. She drifted idly through the rooms, relishing the hollow sound of her heels on the worn wooden floors. She gazed out a rear window at the scrubby backyard, where Peter sat with his laptop at a wrought-iron table scabbed with rust. She eavesdropped on Cheryl’s phone conversation in the foyer—a call from her mother, the third one this afternoon. “Yes, Mama, we’re fine. Me and Peter and Willa went to the Giant and bought all these groceries. For supper we’re having pork chops.” Denise had told them not to bother making a second visit today, but now Willa wondered if maybe they should have gone anyhow. Evidently Denise was just lying there fretting in her hospital bed.
In the front yard, which was also scrubby and no more than a dozen feet deep, Willa caught sight of a teenage boy clipping the low boxwood hedge that bordered the walk leading to the street. Even from here, it was obvious that he was not your standard gardener. For one thing, he looked like an elf. He was thin as a green bean, and he wore stovepipe jeans and a blue-and-white-striped jersey and a pointy red-and-white-striped knit hat from which a tangle of golden corkscrews exploded almost horizontally, long enough to touch his shoulders if his hair hadn’t been so gravity-defying. Also, he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was clumsily gripping a large pair of hedge shears and snipping a tiny sprig here, a tiny sprig there, with lengthy pauses in between. Snip, think a while; snip, think a while. From time to time he glanced toward the house as if he were hoping to be noticed.
Willa opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. “Hello?” she said.
“Oh, hi!” he told her. His perky tone sounded artificial.
“So, are you…you’re doing some pruning, are you?” Willa asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. His chin was as pointy as his hat, which made his whole head a sort of diamond shape. He couldn’t be more than fifteen or so, in Willa’s estimation. “I just wanted to help Denise out, you know?” he said. “I live next door.” And he cocked a thumb toward the house on Willa’s right.
“That’s very kind of you,” Willa said.
It was true, she saw, that the hedge needed trimming—it was sending off random shoots in all directions—although she didn’t have much confidence in his landscaping skills. “I’ll have to tell Denise,” she said. “She’ll be grateful.”
“Is she coming home soon?”
“Maybe in a couple of days.”
“First I was thinking I would mow her grass, but it’s like she doesn’t have any grass. Not so’s you would notice.”
“No, I guess that won’t be—”
“Erland?” Cheryl called. She came bursting out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind her. “What’re you up to?”
“I’m cutting your hedge; what’s it look like?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to help out.”
She hurtled down the porch steps, bypassing Willa, and came to stand in front of him, both hands on her hips. “What have you two been talking about?” she demanded.
“Nothing! I was just telling her I wanted to do something for your mom.”
“Who says she needs anything done?”
Willa said, “I think she’ll be very pleased.”
“We don’t know that! Maybe she’s trying to grow the hedge taller,” Cheryl said.
She sounded like some jealous little sister, Willa thought; but before she could come to the boy’s defense, someone called, “Hello, everybody!”
They all turned toward the yard on Willa’s left, where a stooped old woman in a housecoat was hanging on to a walker. A basset hound stood next to her, its leash looped around the walker’s crossbar. “Erland Erikson, aren’t you the sweetest thing,” she said. “Denise is going to be thrilled!”
“I just thought I should help out,” Erland said.
“And people claim teenagers are self-centered!” the woman told Willa. “I’m Lucinda Minton, by the way.”
“I’m Willa Brendan,” Willa said. “I’m staying with Cheryl while her mother’s in the hospital.”
“See? Everyone’s being so nice,” Mrs. Minton told Cheryl. “Aren’t you blessed! I would have offered myself, you know, except I don’t get around well enough.”
“We’re okay,” Cheryl said. Then she said to Erland, “We’re okay. Really.”
“Well, if that’s how you want it,” he said. He lowered his hedge shears. He looked disappointed.
“When is Denise getting out?” Mrs. Minton asked Willa.
“We’re not sure yet. Maybe in a couple of days.”
“I was standing right here, you know, with my dog. I saw the whole thing happen. Well, not literally—I mean, not a one of us saw the gunman—but I was standing right here in this yard and I saw that poor girl drop to the ground. ‘I’m shot!’ she says.”
“She didn’t say ‘I’m shot,’ ” Cheryl told her.
“She didn’t?”
“She didn’t say a thing. She didn’t know she was shot, at the start.”
“I could have sworn she said ‘I’m shot.’ ”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“In any case,” Willa said. “I guess it’s time to start working on supper, Cheryl.”
“Oh, okay,” Cheryl said. “We’re having pork chops,” she told Mrs. Minton.
“Lucky!” Mrs. Minton said.
“I’m going to make the biscuits. Peter found a recipe on his computer and Willa wrote it out for me.”
“See? Aren’t people nice?” Mrs. Minton asked Erland.
Then they all turned and went into their separate houses.
* * *
—
Peter was the one who’d suggested pork chops, because that morning he had spotted a gas grill in the backyard and he prided himself on his grilled pork chops. “That’s a wonderful idea!” Willa had said, almost singing. (It made her happy to see him involving himself in a project.) Cheryl, it turned out, had never eaten pork chops, or at least she couldn’t remember eating them. Willa added this information to the other clues she’d gathered; she suspected Denise of specializing in SpaghettiOs and frozen fish sticks.
While Peter was tinkering with the grill, Cheryl set to work on the biscuits. First she studied the recipe with almost comical absorption, collecting each ingredient one by one as she read. Willa, reading over her shoulder, pointed out that if they added an extra quarter-cup of milk to the batter they could make drop biscuits—much easier than rolling and cutting them. But Cheryl said, “I like rolling and cutting,” and took a very professional-looking white-marble rolling pin from a drawer.
So Willa left her to it and started cleaning up after Peter. Peter believed in brining, and everything he had used for the brine was still on the kitchen counter: an uncapped bottle of vinegar, an open box of brown sugar, a container of salt…“I can’t believe she doesn’t have kosher salt!” he had fumed. “I knew I’d have to buy juniper berries, but it never occurred to me I should get kosher salt too, for God’s sake.”
The silverware—stainless steel—was stored in a wooden divider tray in a drawer, and each compartment had a thread of crumbs and grit and dried parsley flakes lining its seams. Willa felt a great urge to empty out the tray and scrub it down, but she worried that might offend Denise. Then she decided Denise would most likely not even notice, so she went ahead and did it. Cheryl, meanwhile, was efficiently chopping the b
utter into the flour. She hadn’t put an apron on, and the front of her T-shirt was dusted with white where her belly mounded out.
“How come Erland wears a knit hat on such a hot day?” Willa asked her.
Cheryl said, “Cuz he’s a dork, I guess.”
“What are his parents like?”
“He doesn’t have any parents. He just has Sir Joe.”
“Who,” Willa asked, “is Sir Joe?” She had been wondering this for a while now.
Cheryl said, “Erland’s half-brother, maybe? Or whatever you call it when the man and the woman each have a kid of their own and then they get married to each other.”
“Stepbrother,” Willa said.
“Right, and then they died somehow and Sir Joe got stuck with Erland. Sir Joe has a motorcycle,” Cheryl added. There was something worshipful in her tone. “Everything he wears is black leather, even his pants.”
“He wears leather pants in the summer? Gee, it must run in the family.”
Willa was teasing, but Cheryl sent her an unamused look and then dumped her batter onto the counter and reached for her rolling pin. Clearly Sir Joe was a whole different order from his stepbrother.
Peter came in through the back door, wiping his hands together briskly. “Does your mom own a grill brush?” he asked Cheryl.
“She did once upon a time, but I don’t know where it got to.”
“Whole thing is a mass of soot and spiderwebs,” Peter told Willa. “Must not have been used in months.”
“Sean was the one who grilled,” Cheryl said. “Mama’s scared of gas.”
Peter gave a derisive “Tch!” but Cheryl was oblivious. She had started cutting her biscuits out. The recipe had said she could use the rim of a drinking glass, but she took an actual biscuit cutter from the drawer. “You’re very well equipped,” Willa said admiringly.
“I’ve got muffin tins too, and mini-muffin tins.”
“My goodness!”
“I always ask for baking equipment for Christmases and birthdays.”
Peter had been rummaging through the clutter under the sink, no doubt still hoping to find a grill brush, but now he sat back on his heels and stared at Cheryl. “Don’t you have any friends?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said, unruffled. “Lots of them, when school is in session.”
“I mean, here in the neighborhood?”
“Well, not on Dorcas Road. But Patty and Laurie Dumont, over on Briscoe, we hang out all the time, except they’re away at their cousins’ right now.”
She was setting the biscuits on a cookie sheet, each spaced a precise half-inch from the last in a perfectly straight line.
“Dorcas Road is all grownups, except for me and Erland,” she said. “But I’m not that much of a kid. I’m way more grown-up than I seem.”
“So you think now,” Peter told her. “Just wait till you look back on this time.”
But Willa knew what she meant. She had felt that way during her own childhood; she’d felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl’s body.
And yet nowadays, paradoxically, it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world.
* * *
—
The neighbor who lived on the other side of Mrs. Minton’s house stopped by after supper, while Willa and Cheryl and Airplane were watching Space Junk. Peter was supposedly watching too—“Please?” Cheryl had begged him, and Willa had said, “Oh, try it, Peter”—but his heart wasn’t in it, you could tell; he kept checking his phone. So when the doorbell rang he said, “I’ll get it!,” and stood up from the couch looking relieved. Cheryl pressed the Hold button, and two aliens froze in mid-conversation while Peter went out to the foyer, followed by Airplane. He returned with a man in his sixties or so, white-haired and lanky and ruddy-faced, wearing a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of loose-kneed gray pants. “Evening,” he said in a gravelly voice. “Hi there, Cheryl.”
“Hey, Ben!” Cheryl said.
He walked over to offer Willa his hand, and she stood up to shake it. “I’m Ben Gold,” he told her. “And you’re the woman who came all the way from Arizona to tend this young lady here.”
“Willa,” she said. Ben Gold had narrow, saggy-lidded blue eyes that almost disappeared when he smiled at her, and his glasses were the type that certain boys in her grade school used to wear, with transparent pinkish frames and smudged lenses.
“I’ve been visiting Denise,” he said, “and I promised her I’d look in on you all and see how you’re doing.”
“We’re doing fine, thanks. How was Denise?”
“Good, good…she’s in good hands. I went to medical school with her surgeon, about a million years ago. He’s got no bedside manner but he does know what he’s up to.”
“You’re a doctor?” Willa asked. She would have said he didn’t look like one, except that all at once she saw that he did. He had that humorously resigned air about him.
“In my humble way,” he said, and Cheryl chimed in with, “His house has got this teeny doctor office added on to the back.”
“So I’m the one to come to if Denise has any problems once she’s home,” he told Willa. “Not that I expect her to.”
“Can I offer you a drink?” Peter asked him suddenly.
Willa wasn’t sure what he planned to offer, since Denise’s liquor supply seemed limited to a cardboard box of chardonnay in the fridge, but Ben said, “No, thanks, I’d better get back and fix myself some supper. I seem to be running late all day, as usual.”
“We had pork chops!” Cheryl told him.
“Well, I’m having a can of chili,” he said, and then he told Willa, “I’m just over at three-oh-six; call on me any time.”
“Thank you, that’s good to know,” Willa said.
Peter was the one who saw him out—Peter and Airplane—while Willa and Cheryl sat back down on the couch and Cheryl restarted Space Junk. One of the aliens was telling another that earthlings appeared strangely averse to engaging with the opposite sex. “We put the white-haired female wearing tall-heeled shoes and the pink-faced male wearing an apron in a room together for a week, and they did not once mate,” he said. This struck Cheryl as hilarious; she was squawking with laughter, although by her own admission she had seen the episode half a dozen times. “You missed it!” she told Peter when he came back into the room. “You missed the best part!”
“I’ll try to contain my disappointment,” he said.
Airplane jumped onto the couch next to Cheryl, but Peter didn’t sit back down. “You want me to play it again?” Cheryl asked him.
“No, that’s okay.”
Then his cell phone gave a tweet-tweet, and he took it from his pocket and walked over to the lamp to read his message.
“He’s never going to get the point of this if he keeps doing other things,” Cheryl told Willa.
“Oh, I bet he can catch up,” Willa said.
“This one’s finished, though! That was the end of the episode.”
Cheryl slumped back in her seat and let the remote drop into her lap. The TV screen rolled the credits and then offered the next episode—how many were there?—but Cheryl made no move to start it. “I hate when people get texts,” she told Willa.
“Me too,” Willa said. She barely knew how to text, herself; she didn’t even e-mail people unless she had something specific to say.
“Mama gets texts all the time,” Cheryl said. “Only hers make a dinging sound.”
“I kind of like Peter’s tweet-tweet,” Willa said. “It reminds me of how my father used to wake me in the mornings. He’d whistle those same two notes—these cheerful, birdy notes. Like the first two notes of ‘Dixie,’ I always thought.”
Cheryl considered for a moment. “Or o
f ‘Hey Jude,’ ” she suggested.
“Oh, you’re right. Except ‘Hey Jude’ hadn’t been invented yet.”
“Texting hadn’t, either,” Cheryl said.
“Well, that’s for sure,” Willa said.
And subtly, she leaned closer to take a deep, pleasurable breath of the buttered-popcorn smell of Cheryl’s hair.
* * *
—
It must have been the mention of her father’s wake-up whistle that made her think of him that night when she was trying to get to sleep. Tweet-tweet! she heard again, and there he was: his dear, mild face and his kindly smile and the way he’d stand at her bedroom door with his knees slightly bent and his head at a tilt like some awkward, long-legged shore bird.
For the whole of her childhood his death had been what she’d feared most, but now that it had finally happened she had trouble wrapping her mind around it. (He had collapsed in his driveway while getting out of his car—not alone in his basement, thank heaven.) In fact, his death had been more of a shock than Derek’s, in some ways. It used to be that the world had rested entirely on her father’s shoulders. He was the steady one, the safe one—the person she could depend on when her mother was in a state.
But even the thought of her mother, now, gave her a tugging feeling of loss, and she often found herself missing that shy look her mother used to send from under her eyebrows when she hoped to be forgiven for something, and her lighthearted, girlish laugh, and her floating soprano voice singing “Write me a letter, send it by mail…”