“I guess we didn’t need the big car after all,” William said.
One of the girls from before was on her hands and knees in the kiddie pit. It looked like a game at first, but she was wailing to her friends. “Those are my mom’s earrings. She’ll kill me if they’re lost.”
In the car Louisa sat staring straight ahead, belt pulled partway so that the buckle bumped her shoulder. “Come to think of it, I want to check out one more place,” she said.
“Just one more?”
“I can drop you at home if you want,” she said. This was the impatient tone again, and William sensed now that it was concealing something.
Louisa backed out of the parking lot, went right on Kerrick, swung onto Francis, took a left at Harrow. She drove past one appliance store and then another. “Look,” William said. “Dishwashers.” But she said nothing, only drove, until there were no more buildings lining the roadside, just trees and scrub, and they went ten minutes beyond that, to a part of town he was not sure he had ever been to. She pulled over to the side of the road, switched the engine off, and got out to stand next to the car.
William joined her.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he said. “What are we looking at?”
“What do you think?” she said.
William tilted his chin up and tried to piece it together, but the land didn’t look like anything: grass held down by sky.
“It’s nice,” he said.
“It’s ours,” she said.
“Ours?” William said. He didn’t even flinch, which made him proud. “When did this happen?”
“A while ago,” she said. “When my dad died, he left me some money in a trust. It matured. At some point, it was clear that it wasn’t going to make any more money where it was, so I put it here instead. The rest is still in an account.”
“The rest?” He tipped an invisible hat. “Nicely done,” he said. “Really. Wow.”
“It almost didn’t happen. Yesterday they called me and said there was a problem with the sale.”
“What kind of problem?”
“It turned out the bank had processed something incorrectly. That’s why I didn’t come out. I didn’t want to face everyone while I was still reeling. It would have been just another thing I tried to do and failed.”
The squint that came was from confusion. “But you didn’t fail, right?” he said. “You said this is ours.”
“We went through the paper trail and found it, and they remedied their error before I got off the phone with them.” She’d been speaking slowly, but excitement was hurrying her along now. He stared down at the grass between his feet. His left shoe was coming undone at the toe, where Blondie had put her teeth into it.
He looked back up at the land. “It’s big,” he said.
“An acre,” she said. “Is that big?” Louisa pointed to the end of the property line and back. It was mostly featureless, save for a tall elm at rear left and a browning knoll at front right. Fish-scale clouds roofed the afternoon and what was left of William’s shadow lay down on the hill.
Suddenly she sprinted into the middle of the lot. “Land,” she said, her voice bright and young. “Land, land, land.” A crack in the clouds showed enameled blue sky. Then she was back at his side, up on her toes as if she were greeting him after a long time away. “I just wanted to show this to you.” An artful pause followed. “Thanks for coming out.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I like to know about every new investment.”
“Is that what it is?” she said. She packed back into the car, fully proud now, face prim in profile. “I like thinking about the actual land. It’s like a new country, but miniaturized. We don’t know what will happen here.”
William nodded, but not because he agreed. Mystery was for people whose desire to make life better outweighed their fear that it might become worse. William, for his part, had brokered a tentative peace with the flat line. It held its ground. And measured against the gravity of time, wasn’t that a form of getting better, really?
She went on brightly through dinner, her conversation ventilating the kitchen, but then whatever motor was spinning inside her began to wind down. “I’m going to go watch TV,” he said, and she just nodded.
A movie he didn’t recognize was on one of the channels he paid extra for. It was about an older actor whose stardom in Westerns was built on the backs of his long-suffering family. He was trying to make peace with his grown daughter. The scene William came in on was played out over swelling strings. “I thought your cowboy hat was so big,” the daughter was saying. “But the other day I tried it on and it almost fit me.”
Louisa appeared at the door and knocked vertically along the frame. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he said. He muted the TV.
“So,” she said. “What do you think of it? The land, I mean.”
“A lot,” he said, but when she didn’t answer right away he wondered if he’d been too glib.
The cowboy was alone now with a bottle of whiskey. He lifted it. He lowered it. He tipped it until the golden liquid was at an incline.
“I’ve been thinking about the things we have,” she said, “and the things we don’t have.” Her sentence, split by the pause, fell open in two halves. “All of this,” she said, casting her hands upward into the room.
“And all of the other, too,” William said. “Land, land, land.”
“I drove by there last week,” she said. “It wasn’t real yet, but I wanted to see how it felt. A few lots over, there’s a construction site. Someone’s putting up a house. The workmen were just driving away, and I walked up to the front where the doorway’s going to be.”
“Was it safe?”
“I even poked my head in. It had that distinctive smell, sawdust over earth, some faint electrical haze. The plans were tacked up near the front: they’re going to have a sunken living room and a big island in the kitchen and a nursery with a little porch off the back.”
“The best-tacked plans,” William said.
Louisa eyes flashed out at him, but only for a second; then the anger was gone, like an arrow taken away by the wind. There were tears instead. “That girl’s dress was so beautiful,” she said. “And Tom ruined everything.”
William watched a college basketball game, played along with an old game show whose answers he already knew, failed to laugh at a stand-up comedy special. The dog lounged beside a knife of lamplight on the rug. He kept flipping channels, high in the spectrum now: cooking class, home-design competition, travel documentary. He put his hand on his stomach in what he imagined was a Napoleonic manner. He crouched on the floor next to the dog and locked his ankles under the couch for sit-ups. They weren’t hard until twenty, and then they were too hard. He went back through channels in descending order, the pictures washing over him in a rinse.
He had a brief idea that he might play some guitar, and he went into the garage and turned on the lights. When he was younger, he had learned the rudiments, mostly to impress a girl at college. He was mediocre at best, but when he moved to the house he had set up a guitar and an amp in a corner of the garage. Louisa called it his rehearsal space, which pleased him until he considered the possibility that she was mocking him.
In the corner by his guitar there was another plastic bag, tied up like a hobo’s kerchief. He opened it to find even more mail, mostly advertising circulars and catalogs, along with a postcard from a distant cousin of Louisa’s who had moved to Australia. This mail was dated earlier than the batch he had found in the junk room. He left the bag where it was, shut off the garage light, and wondered what it meant, if it meant anything at all.