“I do,” Brendan said. His voice was firm and carried the force of an order. Henry, who had already bent his day toward his uncle’s wishes in such an unexpected fashion, bowed and bent a little more.
He paid the toll and turned left on the narrow road that led to Coreopsis. They were forty miles from Rochester and hardly more than that from Syracuse; an easy hour’s commute from either city. He had made the trip a hundred times and it puzzled him, still, that his potential customers had found it too long. He drove past Kriner’s farm, past the fenced fields dotted with cows and the ring where Cory Kriner taught pigtailed girls how to ride. He drove past the van Normans’ dairy farm, past the fields of turnips and corn, into the village of Coreopsis with its red-brick Presbyterian church and the white town hall and the beauty parlor and the string of failing stores, and then he drove out the other side and turned left onto a smaller road and left again onto one still smaller. He stopped at the huge red-and-white sign announcing the failure of his pride.
“Coreopsis Heights,” read the sign. “An Exclusive Community of Executive Homes.” It pained him like a knife in his ribs. Before him lay the curves of his elegant roads and the lots marked off by orange-flagged stakes. Green lawns surrounded the two finished models, with their thermal glass and Jacuzzis and white-finished kitchens, their tall stone fireplaces and airy stairs. Beyond them lay the shells of the others, dotted across the acres of corrugated mud.
Henry’s eyes registered the roofs that hadn’t been finished, the holes waiting for windows and doors, the empty foundations and piles of lumber and shingles, but these were not what he saw. His mind added all that was missing, and he saw the sewer pipes, the electric cables, the phone wires buried underground. The homes, each different and handsome, the streetlamps with their shapely globes, the driveways lined with green shrubs, the tubs of flowers paired on the steps and the children playing in backyards — the picture was so clear that he couldn’t understand how it had failed to materialize.
Anyone might have done it, he thought, surveying the wreckage of his dream. The site had been so promising and the economics had seemed foolproof. The land cost nothing — he and Wiloma had inherited it from their grandparents. The taxes were low, and it had cost so little to tear down the house and the barns, remove the fences, uproot the trees. The survey had gone so smoothly, the design had been so distinctive, the planning board had been so obliging when he’d proposed the subdivision — who could blame him for signing that promissory note? He’d been so sure the project would fly that he’d signed his life away.
The builder had bled him dry and everything had cost too much: road bonds, utilities, building permits, taxes. Still, if he’d sold just a few of the houses, he could have stayed afloat. But the buyers had refused to come. He’d imagined executives from Kodak and Xerox, well-fed men in new cars who’d be willing to drive just a little bit farther to live in this unspoiled countryside and raise their children in this fresh air. He’d thought those men would see how the crumbling village and the ramshackle schools would be transformed. New schools would spring up from the flood of new property taxes; charming shops would open to satisfy the new owners’ needs — surely those men could understand that services followed money, money fertilized growth. A little faith, a little vision, and Coreopsis would have been a new place.
But the men hadn’t come. Instead, during those bleak Sundays when Henry had paced his model homes, local families had driven up in rusted cars and trucks held together with baling wire. Men whom Henry remembered as boys, the boys with whom he’d gone to school before he fled, had driven up with their wives and children and gawked at Henry’s project as if it had been an amusement park.
“How much do you want for these?” they’d asked. “How much?”
When he’d told them — a hundred and a half for the smallest, two twenty for the four-bedroom with two and a half baths; a bargain, a steal, compared with similar houses in the suburbs closer in — they’d laughed. The friendly ones had laughed; the others, the older ones who remembered Henry’s grandparents and the farm that had been there for generations, had cursed him and called him names. Those same people had bought everything that was not nailed down at the auction after Da’s death.
They had felt sorry for him and Wiloma then. “It’s a terrible thing,” they’d murmured, fingering drapes and roasting pans and wooden-handled tools. “Losing both of them so quickly.” As if they’d forgotten that Da and Gran were not Henry and Wiloma’s parents; as if they’d forgotten that Henry and Wiloma had already lost their parents and had come to Coreopsis against their will. Those neighbors had sat on the lawn in the cool, bright air and munched sandwiches and cookies while the auctioneer gabbled on the front porch. Vultures, Henry remembered thinking. The men hoarded tools and the women clutched at gravy boats and silverware, driven, as far as Henry could tell, half by lust for a good bargain and half by a sudden, sentimental pity for the two young people they suddenly saw as orphans.
Wiloma had just finished high school that year; Henry had recently married. The neighbors who had never asked how Henry and Wiloma were doing, trapped on a farm with their ancient grandparents; who had looked on placidly while their own children teased the newcomers — suddenly they’d been full of concern. Four different families had offered to buy the farm outright: “Get you out from under those taxes,” they’d said. “Give you a little capital to get started somewhere else.” Even then, Henry had had enough sense to hold on to the land. But those neighbors had proved useful in their own way; the proceeds from the auction had helped set him and Wiloma on their feet.
The place looked hellish now, bulldozed and littered, no longer farm but not yet neighborhood. The fault lay, he thought, with the narrow-minded people who’d failed to recognize his vision. With the bank, which had declined to extend his payments; with the lawyers and accountants who’d persecuted him so relentlessly; with the other developers who’d overbuilt the land nearer the city and caused the market to sag. The idea had been sound — in a few years, someone else would make a killing here. Someone, but not him. The bank owned the land now, as well as the buildings; Wiloma’s share as well as his. Wiloma was furious with him.
All this passed through his mind before Brendan said a word. Henry hovered at the sign with his foot on the brake, unable to make himself drive down the roads the bank had stolen. He turned and saw Brendan peering through the windows, one hand flapping and the other on Bongo’s neck.
“But where’s the house?” Brendan said.
There were houses, or shadows of houses, all around them, but Henry knew what his uncle meant. “We tore it down,” he said. “The house, the barns — everything.”
“It’s gone?”
“Gone,” Henry said, and when he saw the expression on Brendan’s face, he felt his loss — not the loss of his project, but the loss of his old home — for the first time. The cool green porch where he and Wiloma had sat, polite and frozen, when Da and Gran had first brought them here; the shadowy dining room, where they’d gagged on unfamiliar food and absorbed Da’s bitterness; the barns where they’d done their chores. The pastures where the cows had grazed, the sheds where the tractors and balers loomed, the orchard and the grove of willows by the creek where he’d kissed Sally Kiernan and ground his pelvis against her thighs; the bedrooms in which he and Wiloma had lain, never talking about their dead parents, never sharing their dreams of escape; the parlor off the dining room, where Henry had first met Brendan. And the meadow crowning the small hill, where, long after he and Wiloma had grown and left and married, they’d gathered with their children and spouses a few times each summer, for picnics overlooking the abandoned house. Wendy and Win and Delia and Lise had run through the grass catching fireflies, and he and Kitty and Wiloma and Waldo — this was years ago, before things had gone sour for any of them, and before he’d even thought of Coreopsis Heights — had chattered aimlessly over grilling meat.