From the deck, the dog resting at his feet, William surveyed his domain. The railing was lined with special lanterns he had bought in Chicago, wrought-iron pieces silhouetted with icons of the American West: cactus, cowboy, stagecoach. In the corner of the yard there was a Wiffle ball that had been hit too hard by a kid in a neighboring yard, or an adult acting like a kid. The house to the north had two little girls who sang sweet high-pitched nonsense songs to each other. The house to the south had a boy who spoke to his parents with chilling condescension. He was doing so now, his voice going sharply through the afternoon air. “Clearly, you don’t understand,” he said. “It’s an assignment for school, which means it’s required, which means I have to stay here and do it.” There was a pause, and then an indistinct adult murmur. “And now tell me how that changes the facts,” the boy said.
Louisa had a limit with the boy to the south, but also a fascination with him. “I don’t know why they don’t just clock him,” she had said more than once. Now William called into the house. “Your friend out here is acting up,” he said.
“On the phone,” she said. At the sound of Louisa’s voice, Blondie roused herself and trotted inside. William filled a big cooler with bottles of beer, removing the one that felt the least warm and settling down to drink it in a big wooden chair. The boy had stopped carping. The girls were not singing. There was a noise that pleased him, a spidery bass line from a car radio in the distance, and he followed it until it disappeared.
The doorbell rang. It was Eddie and Gloria Fitch, faces avid for approval. “Sorry we’re so early,” Gloria said. “I should have taken longer to get ready, as you can probably tell.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” William said. “It’s not that you’re here early. It’s that everyone else is late.”
Eddie, short and bald, piloted a bottle of wine into William’s hands.
“I could use a drink,” Gloria said. She was short, too, with round features and a sharp tongue.
“Your husband just gave away your wine.”
“That?” Gloria said. “I wouldn’t drink that.” Blondie’s collar jangled faintly on the deck. “Ooh,” Gloria said. “Must pet dog.”
William and Eddie worked for the same company, and they stayed by the door for a minute, faintly talking shop. “So they’re changing the name of the division?” Fitch said with an anxious giggle. He had a nervous constitution. William imagined him fidgeting through his sleep.
“They seem to be,” William said.
“I hope they’re not focus-grouping it to death. That costs money, and don’t they need that for our bonuses? Though we didn’t get bonuses last year. Maybe I just answered my own question.”
“I think you did,” William said. “But it could always be worse. We could have no job at all. And then how could I afford to throw this party? And how could you afford to bring wine?” He held up the bottle, turned it until it was pointed toward the deck. “Let’s go.”
On the way out, he noticed that the door to the master bedroom was shut. “Hold on,” he told Eddie. “I have to tell Louisa one thing.” But Louisa wasn’t in the bedroom. “Guess what,” William said to the closed bathroom door. “Eddie and Gloria showed up first. Big surprise, I know. I’m taking them out back.” When William made it outside, Eddie was unzipping wax from around a cheese, looking up at the overhang. “Painted the eaves and trim the other week,” William said. “Doesn’t look quite right now. Give it a few weeks of sun, though, and it’ll fade to match.”
“I know what you mean,” Eddie said, waving the cheese. “New things just remind us that most things aren’t new.” It wasn’t what William meant at all, but he nodded anyway.
The other guests were starting to arrive. Many of the men were bald and heavy. The women, with a few exceptions, fared better. Gloria Fitch was over in a corner, talking to sleek, epicene Paul Prescott, who held his thumb and finger just far enough apart to suggest he was indicating the thickness of a steak. He probably was. Graham Kenner, preceded by his aftershave, was lamenting the Congress. “Set phasers to socialism,” he said.
William served drinks, refilled bowls of nuts and olives. “Hey,” Graham said, reaching out to snag his elbow. “We missed you and Louisa the other week.”
“Missed us how?”
“We had one of these at our place. A little get-together for Cassandra’s fifty-first.”
“Oh,” William said.
“We sent real invitations and everything.”
“Huh,” William said. “I don’t remember seeing it. Maybe we had a conflict. Louisa takes care of those things and doesn’t always tell me.”
“Speaking of Louisa,” Gloria said, leaning in, “where is she?”
“She wasn’t feeling great,” William said. “Let me go check.” He went back to the bedroom. The bathroom door was still closed. He tapped on it. No answer. He pushed it open slowly; the bathroom was empty. He checked the garage, the kitchen, even the laundry room, feeling increasingly foolish. On the way back out, he noticed that the junk room door was closed. That was what they called the spare bedroom off the main hall; they had marked it for a child when they moved in, and over the years it had filled with everything but. There was no answer when he knocked, though he thought he heard the jingling of Blondie’s collar. “Hey,” he said. “You in there, girl?” He tried the knob but it was locked. He jiggled it, knocked again, gave up.
Out on the deck he started to make hamburger patties for the grill, shaping rounds with his hands and then smashing them flat. Gloria Fitch had escaped Paul Prescott and was talking to a pair of young women William didn’t know. Graham Kenner had buttonholed Helen Hull, by acclamation the prettiest woman in the neighborhood, to tell her about a study he’d read recently regarding parental favoritism. “You know how people say parents love their children equally?” he said. “That’s not true. We’re hardwired to prefer some of them to others, because we evolved from species that cull their young. You know: if you eliminate a third of the offspring, the rest have a better chance of surviving.” He popped an olive in his mouth illustratively. The party had just started, and already the talk had turned to survival.
The doorbell rang, then rang again, its own echo. It was possible that it had been ringing for a while. “Someone get that?” William said, but no one did. He wiped his hands on a towel and went himself. It was Tom, wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon bird. William knew what kind of bird it was but he couldn’t quite retrieve it: not a stork but something in that area. There was a woman behind him, a tall, voluptuous blonde in a white dress and a white hat. Her sunglasses were dark to the point of blindness.
“Billy Boy,” Tom said. He stepped heavily into the foyer, long hair falling over his forehead, and clapped a hand on William’s shoulder. The gesture wasn’t overly emphatic, but it shifted William back all the same; Tom was as tall as his sister but twice as broad, with a deep chest and powerful arms. He resembled Louisa most closely in the eyes, which had the same distant brightness, like a ship coming in at nighttime. “My man,” Tom said. The smell of alcohol rose off him like a cloud. “Good to see you. Point me toward the eats and drinks.” Unguided, he wobbled past William.
William and the woman remained in the doorway. William smiled weakly.
“I am Annika,” the woman said, extending her hand.
Tom was already deep into the house, but her voice turned him around. “Ah, yes,” Tom said. “My lovely Swedish companion. Her grandfather was the minister of finance. They have finance in Sweden. It is one of their in-dus-tries.” His finger made a spiral in the air through which the syllables of this last word passed.