She had lived on Sixty-Third Street. Now, in this town of no account, she was employed by her first dead husband’s dead sister’s son. During the past decades he’d grown from a rangy quiet boy into a tall taciturn man with thighs as strong as the trunks of pecan trees. Now she engaged in not-quite-confidential conversations with his underweight wife, Lynne. Lynne was exactly the age — thirty-six — of Ingrid’s own daughter, a photographer out in Seattle with a wife who was also a photographer. Strung with equipment, the two women came to New York every so often. Eager, bold greyhounds — next to them Lynne could be taken for a rabbit. Now Ingrid played Sorry! with her nephew’s five-year-old daughter, Chloe, exactly the age that her own son had been when disease snatched him from her…well, wouldn’t that be synchronous. In fact, her little boy had been only four.
Ingrid missed her favorite lunch place on Broadway. She missed those interesting friends; they would do anything for each other, see each other through sicknesses and crises and losses, supply a word that had fallen through a crevice in the brain and try to patch the other cracks of their shared aging. They wanted her to come home; so said their letters (she had taken a vacation from e-mail). Also she missed her dressmaker, a genius whose designs did not attempt to conceal Ingrid’s long, long neck with collars or scarves but instead advertised it with long, long necklines, making it seem something that you might want for yourself.
Here she was, and not a dressmaker for miles.
The house was at the end of a dirt road. Its gray stones glinted, and a fecund trumpet vine ran all over the walls. There was a gable roof of slate and a chimney and a pale garden tended by Lynne. The dense woods pressed on the backyard; it seemed as if the two apple trees in front had pushed themselves forward without permission. The house had an old black stove in its kitchen — an inconvenient appliance you had to light with a sparker. Someday, Chris swore, he would provide his family with a house of his own making — wooden, of course, for wood was his business; porched, the better to admire the flowers outside; a second floor as wide as the first; and, in back, a shed for his tools, now rammed behind the furnace. And a real downstairs bathroom, not just a toilet on the other side of the little room off the kitchen, a room called Useless. Useless had a single high window and a sink in one corner. You could wash one handkerchief in that useless sink. Someday, yes, a new house. Meanwhile, Ingrid thought, the small deep-set windows with their lashes of vines gave the old house a knowing air, as if it heard your thoughts.
Ingrid’s living there — it had happened in an accidental way. She had been visiting last June — she came every season for exactly four days. Chris was then completing the arrangements to enlarge his carpentry and woodworking business to include the manufacture of wood pellets. He was converting a small plant a few miles away from the shop. The lining up of suppliers and distributors and the hiring of staff — that work would soon take almost all his time. He needed someone to keep the business itself running. Ingrid and his uncle had run a small leather-brokerage company. And so, seemingly out of the blue, he invited her to be the temporary manager; to join his staff and his household as well. “For about three months, I’d say.”
“Me? Why on earth me?”
“You are…wise.”
She shook her head so violently that her glasses flew off — very smart narrow ones, she hoped they hadn’t broken — and her hair shook too, hair that had once been the color of an autumn maple leaf but had now faded to wood shavings. Here and there her expert hairdresser had striped it with the old maple color. “Wise,” Chris repeated, with one of his rare smiles. “Worldly.”
Did he mean old? She sucked in her stomach, and her bosom swelled slightly. She was wearing a V-necked jersey blouse. It had captivated a number of elderly suitors, but paired with these jeans she’d bought yesterday, it probably looked ridiculous. When Chris had first seen the blouse, he turned his face briefly away…Did he think she was too noticeably available? She was still interested in men at seventy-two; perhaps that offended him.
“And warm,” he finished, pulled by alliteration. “Can I have you?”
“Oh, good Lord.” And she produced an exaggerated and somewhat tactless groan. “I don’t think so.”
He picked up the fallen glasses and folded the earpieces inward without touching the lenses. Holding the bridge between thumb and third finger, like a ring, he handed them to her. Almost handed them to her, that is — she’d been told that her eyes without glasses gleamed like warning lights. And so, warned, he paused, and pressed his well-defined lips together into a grimace of disappointment — no, it wasn’t a grimace, he was preventing himself from saying please. Then he gave her the spectacles. “Maybe?” he said.
Of course not, she thought. And then: Why not? A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo…
“Maybe?” he repeated.
“Maybe,” she echoed. But it turned out she meant yes.
To slip away from her New York life…it was as easy as stepping on an escalator. Board members would hardly notice her absence; real decisions were made by three or four people who met in a broom closet. She leased her apartment immediately — one of her friends had a cousin from New Jersey eager to spend a season in the city. She gave herself a farewell party on Labor Day.
The following morning, she visited Allegra. Allegra was not bedridden yet, but soon.
“Don’t look mournful, Ingrid. You’ve seen me through a long illness. There are plenty left to help me die.”
“I…should be one of them.”
“Perhaps I’ll hold on.” They wetly embraced.
And just like that, Ingrid returned offhandedly to her relatives, as if the visit would be the usual strict four days, not a lax three months. She took a plane from New York to a southern hub with a moving walkway that kept falsely warning her it was about to stop, a mini-plane to an airport thirty-five miles from the town, a bus. At the depot, the driver pulled her single large scuffed suitcase from the bus’s belly. “What an item!” Allegra had once said.
“Fido? My second-best friend.”
Lynne had wanted to give Ingrid the guest room she occupied during her quarterly visits, one of the three charmed rooms under the slanted roof — she’d been able to hear Chloe cry when the child was an infant, she could hear Chloe’s parents’ soft lovemaking now. The room would have been perfect for a second child, but Lynne’s hysterectomy precluded another child. Ingrid didn’t want that room. “I am no longer a guest,” she said. “I am an employee.” And indeed she was; Chris was paying her a salary; she was quietly depositing it in the trusts she’d set up for her daughter and for Chloe. “An employee of the woodworks, with household and child-care duties at home. I will sleep in Useless. Let’s find a bed, a bookcase, a dresser. Secondhand, please.” The four of them went right out and bought those items. What more did she need? Well, a mirror would be nice. Chris supplied one he had made himself, probably intended to sell, could sell, after she left. It was oval, framed in cherry.