She had wanted the opposite of what she’d had with her own mother, but somehow it had turned out the same. The same words unspoken, the pain held on to, all tenderness invisible, like ink that has drifted off a page to leave only a blank white sheet. Just last night, Jenny had gone for a walk. It was loneliness that got her walking, and perhaps it was loneliness that drew her to the Avery house, although the path might have come naturally to her, for she’d taken this route so very often as a girl. Past Lockhart Avenue, past the old oak, the most rotten section of which was now held down by wire, like a captured giant that might take to roaming the streets if it were ever freed.
As a girl, Jenny had always felt expectation rising within her as she walked to the Averys’; now she felt it again. She crossed the common, passing the black angel that was Matt Avery’s favorite. Thinking about him, even for a moment, made it difficult to breathe. It was so silly that she tried a child’s trick to ward off whatever was happening to her and began to count to one hundred. She tried not to think about Matt. For reasons she didn’t understand, she imagined a pin, silver, shining. She imagined she was falling right through the dark, her way lit by a candle, when in fact all she was doing was treading across the town green. There was a faint breeze and the scent of the plane trees rose into the air, spicy and damp.
In town, the shops were closed except for the Pizza Palace, whose blinking neon light cast pools of blue and yellow onto the sidewalk. In Jenny’s day there had been an ice cream parlor in its place, Grandpa’s, run by the Harmon family. There had been cardboard tubs of vanilla bean and butter pecan, and Jenny had worked there for three summers, good practice, it turned out, for the manager’s job at Bailey’s when she moved to Cambridge. Before she could stop herself, she thought about Matt sitting at the counter of Baileys, watching her work, ordering sundae after sundae when he’d preferred bread and butter all along. She thought about the look on his face when he’d walked through the door of the tea house on that rainy day when the rain fell in sheets, the stone rain that filled all the gutters and the streets.
She hadn’t been back to the Averys’ for more than twenty years; it looked smaller than she’d remembered. But there was the old slate path, the white fence, the perennial boarder in which Catherine had taken such pride, a collection which Elinor Sparrow had always dismissed as the typical hodgepodge of the unsophisticated gardener, a jumble of phlox and daisies and snapdragons. Jenny stopped beside a holly tree Catherine had planted to ensure there would be green in her garden all year long. She could see inside the window; there was the exact same furniture, the love seat where she and Will had kissed until they were burning up, until they had no choice but to go further, which they finally did one summer evening when Catherine was out at her bridge club. There was the table under which they’d made love one night when there was a terrible thunderstorm. Catherine and Matt had been home, asleep in their beds, and Jenny was so terrified she and Will would be caught that she’d broken out in hives.
Now, there were dinner guests, quite a large gathering. Jenny stepped closer to the window, edging through the straggly phlox. Matt and Will were at dinner with a red-haired woman and two girls. Jenny had her nose pressed against the glass before she realized it was Stella and that horrible friend of hers, Juliet Aronson. Will was at the table, offering up a toast. He’d had a haircut and he’d shaved, but he still looked tired and far too thin. He looked nothing like the boy she used to wait for in this very place. She would remain here, hidden, until at last he appeared and they could sneak out to Rebecca Sparrow’s shed, or, when the weather was fine, to the cool, flat rock formation called the Table and Chairs, which they rested upon in order to look up at the stars, kissing until the stone beneath them grew so hot mosquitoes lighting on the granite burst into flame in an instant.
The red-haired woman in the dining room at the Averys’ was Liza Hull, although she looked quite changed. She looked pretty in the candlelight; prettier still when she threw back her head to laugh. Maybe it was the vantage point which altered things, or perhaps the night air, the dark, the scent of phlox, the aroma of something old and new twisted together. Liza had brought a cake, and there was a bottle of white wine. Even the girls had splashes of wine in their glasses. They were most likely toasting Will and his return; they were actually applauding him. Only Matt stood in the background, leaning against the hutch that had belonged to his grandmother. It was here that Catherine displayed her prized Minton pottery. There was a dish which resembled stalks of asparagus, a plate which appeared to be made out of starfish and mollusks, a pitcher that seemed to be lily pad after lily pad, with a frog for a handle. Matt looked up, past the dining table, past the celebration, out into the yard where Jenny stood beside the holly.