With his bag full of greens, Chap quickened his step as he walked toward the house. He saw that a wasp nest had begun to form next to the drainpipe. Inside, he heard the coffee machine perking. He had always had keen hearing. Passing the open window, he looked through the screen and saw Fran searching through a kitchen drawer. Even at home, she always misplaced the corkscrew, scissors, and apple slicer. Fran had a circular implement that could be placed over an apple and pushed down to core it and separate the apple into sections. She believed in eating an apple a day. Whatever else she believed in these days was a mystery. In saving the rain forest — that was what she believed. In banning pesticides. She also believed in cotton sheets and linen pants, even though they wrinkled.
He opened the door, knowing he was doing her an injustice. She was a very intelligent woman, gifted in more ways than she liked to admit. And, in fact, she was usually the one who took Marshall’s calls. She also wrote polite notes when he sent books depicting the archangels.
“Maybe in the daylight,” she muttered, still riffling through the drawer. He smiled; it had become a standing joke between them that everything in the house, and by extension everything, period, would come clear in the light of day.
On their third day in the house daylight had revealed one of Anthony’s jokes: a piece of rubber shaped and painted to look like a melted chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. Chap had peeked at blueprints rolled up on Lou’s drafting table. Fran had put fresh flowers throughout the house. She was reading War and Peace and listening to the Brunettis’ collection of classical CDs, though earlier in the morning she had been leafing through a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and listening to an old Lou Reed record. The elderly woman whose picture was on the refrigerator turned out to be a neighbor who cleaned house for the Brunettis once a week. She took an instant liking to Fran, once she saw the flowers set out in vases. She said the photograph on the refrigerator had been taken by Anthony during the strawberry festival the year before. He had wanted to catch her with a beard of whipped cream, but she had licked it away too fast. Chap had seen her — Mrs. Brikel — the other time he visited, and this time he had held his breath, hoping she would not remember their meeting. From the way her eyes flickered, he had thought she was going to say something, then decided against it.
Fran said, as if she had tuned in to his thoughts: “Mrs. Brikel called and said she wants to give us half an apple pie. Wasn’t that nice of her? We’ll have to think of something to do for her before we leave.”
The Brunettis’ pictures and postcards on the refrigerator had been joined by two postcards forwarded from Fran and Chap’s: a detail of a stained-glass window at the Matisse chapel, sent by a friend of Fran’s who was traveling through France, and a picture of her niece’s new baby, propped up in her mother’s arm, eyes closed.
“Would you mind going over to Mrs. Brikel’s?” Fran said. “I said the least we could do would be to walk over and get our share of pie.”
He put the bag on the counter. “Drop all this in the sink and splatter it with water,” he said. “I’ll be back in a flash.” He had gone out the door and closed it before he thought to open it again and ask whether Mrs. Brikel lived to the left or the right.
“Right,” Fran said, pointing.
He closed the door again. Two or three mosquitoes trailed him, hovering near the center of his body as he cut across the grass. He tried to swat them away, quickening his step. A jogger went by on the road, a big black Lab keeping time with him as he ran. A car honked when it passed, for no reason. He looked after the dog, who reminded him of Romulus, and wondered briefly whether it might be nice to have a dog.
“Could you smell it baking?” Mrs. Brikel asked, opening the door. She was smiling a bright smile. Her eyes were not particularly bright, though, and the smile began to fade when he did not answer instantly.
“There’s no breeze,” he said. “Isn’t there always supposed to be a breeze in Vermont? If we had some wind, those mosquitoes couldn’t land the way they do.” He flicked one off his elbow. He entered the house quickly, smiling to make up for his lack of cheerfulness a few seconds before.
“I thought I’d bake a pie, and I would have made blueberry, but I came down this morning and saw my son had eaten every one for breakfast,” she said. “I usually don’t make apple pies except for fall, but your wife said apples were a favorite of hers.”
In the gloom of Mrs. Brikel’s back room, he saw another person: a tall boy, watching television. The shades were dropped. His feet were propped up on a footstool. Guns exploded. Then he changed the channel. Someone was singing, “What happened to the fire in your voice?” Someone laughed uproariously on a quiz show. The sound of a buzzer obliterated more gunfire.
“What’s your favorite pie?” Mrs. Brikel said. She had turned. He followed her into the kitchen. There was a wooden crucifix on the wood panel separating the windows over the sink. There were two rag rugs on the floor. A little fan circulated air. “All the screens are out being repaired,” Mrs. Brikel said. “I sure wouldn’t open the windows with these mosquitoes.”
In the kitchen, the aroma was strong. Chap could actually feel his mouth water as Mrs. Brikel cut into the pie.
“I’d give it all to you, but that it upsets him,” Mrs. Brikel said, nodding over her shoulder. Chap turned and looked. There was no one in the doorway. She was referring to the person watching television.
“I was all set to make two, but I ran out of flour,” Mrs. Brikel said. “That’s always the way: you remember to buy the little things, but you’re always running out of the big things like milk and flour.”
There were stickers of dancing dinosaurs on the window ledge. He looked at the refrigerator. Long strips of stickers hung there, taped at the top: stickers of birthday cakes and little animals holding umbrellas, pinwheels of color, multicolored star stickers.
“He knows you’re taking half the pie,” Mrs. Brikel said, tilting the dish. Half the pie slid free, landing perfectly on a plate. “That’s what he knows,” she said, talking to herself. She opened a drawer, pulled off a length of Saran Wrap, and spread it over the pie, tucking it under the plate.
“This is very kind of you, Mrs. Brikel,” he said. Without her saying anything directly, he assumed that the person in the living room was her son and that there was something wrong with him. The TV changed from muffled rifle shots to girls singing.
“I love to bake in the winter,” Mrs. Brikel said, “but come summer I don’t often think of it, except that we have to have our homemade bread. Yes we do,” she said, her voice floating off a little. He looked at the half pie. He knew he should thank her again and leave, but instead he leaned against the kitchen counter. “Mrs. Brikel,” he said, “do you remember me?”
“Do I what?” she said.
“We met, briefly. It was during the winter. Lou and I were backing out of the driveway and you and your son — or I guess it was your son, walking in front of you — were coming up the driveway …”