Audio: Fiona McFarlane reads.
“The Biga house is coming down,” Gerald said. “Finally.” He took the tray from Eva’s lap.
“That lovely house,” Eva said.
With a finger, Gerald lifted one slat of the horizontal blinds. He held the tray in his other hand and peered out the window. “What’s lovely about it?” he said, and the tray tilted.
“Gerald!” Eva called, and he righted the tray without looking at her. “The Japanese maple with the crimson leaves.”
“They dug it up already,” Gerald said. “Worth a fortune, a tree like that.”
Eva wheeled herself to the window.
“I’ll pull the blinds,” Gerald said, but he went away first, into the kitchen with the tray, and, until he came back, she studied the dust on the edges of the blinds—the very thin rim of it. But who could fault Gerald, who was tremendous with the housework and had said, “What’s wrong with curtains? Blinds’ll only catch the dust,” and still let her have them installed? Now he came back and leaned over the couch the way you had to and fiddled with the strings until the blinds were open just enough for Eva to see the Biga house.
“So many cars,” she said, and Gerald snorted.
A man approached the Biga house and stopped at the front gate. He said something to the workmen inside the fence, and, when they answered him, he turned to the letter box—an ordinary metal letter box—and, with one sure movement, wrenched it off its post. Then he cradled it against his stomach the way you might a heavy watermelon and carried it to a car parked down the street.
“Souvenir,” Gerald said. “Sickos.”
But he stayed at the window to watch for the excavator. When it came around the corner, the doors of the cars parked on the street all opened up, and people rose out of them. They held cameras and camcorders, and they wore clothes in muted colors, like the ones you see on TV journalists in war zones. That was what Eva thought of. As if they wanted to hide themselves. And all there to watch that little house come down. Eva had been a girl inside that house, visiting the Laineys. And, after the Laineys moved to Sydney, she had seen tenants come and go, the shutters loosen and tighten, the maple tree’s red turn on and off each year. Some tenants had raked the leaves, and others hadn’t. Some of her students had lived there with their families, and there had been nights when the windows were lit and music came out of them, and fatty smoke from grilling lamb chops. Christmas trees in the front window. So many women standing at the gate, calling children’s names. And sometimes pets—the Bigas themselves had had a dog, and later Paul Biga had all those birds. All of that, today, would go.
The street was getting crowded now. Workers in hard hats called out for people to stay back, and along came Jim Grant, who still looked, in his police uniform, like a big, red-cheeked tenth grader. Behind him was a woman Eva thought she knew, a short woman in a navy suit, who seemed almost superstitiously not to look toward the Biga house—and, yes, it was their house, Eva and Gerald’s, that she was looking at, their gate she opened, their path she stepped onto.
“Who’s this, then?” Gerald said. He liked to get to the door before a visitor. He was so large he filled the entire doorway—Eva knew how wonderful it was to see him waiting there, with his big voice calling “Welcome!,” and how imposing he was if he withheld the welcome. She rolled back across the room to her usual place and listened to him say hello, and he was gracious as he said it; his tone was affable. So he approved of the short woman, and would admit her.
“You’ve got a visitor,” he said, coming back in from the hallway.
The woman was the type who put her head around the door before she entered a room: here was her head, light hair, sharp nose, and now here was her body. Was it to conceal her shortness? Eva understood these strategies; she didn’t like people to see her wheelchair before they saw her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Forsythe,” the woman said, bending to kiss Eva’s cheek, perhaps because Eva had lifted her face.
“This is a Miss Kate Hawkins,” Gerald said. “Says you’re old mates.”
“Oh, no!” the woman said. She wore a bag across her body—it flattened one breast. “I mean—I wonder if you remember me?”
“One of your old students, love?” Gerald said.
But Eva knew now who she was: she was the woman who’d written the book about Paul Biga. Her hair was lighter, but otherwise she looked the same.
“I might pop out,” Gerald said. “If you ladies are all right? See how old Terry’s getting on.”
Terry, Eva could see—Terry Jarrett, next-door-neighbor Terry, with whom Gerald was at war but only on Monday evening, garbage night—was standing on his lawn to watch the Biga house come down. So Gerald went and joined him, and there they stood—Gerald Forsythe and Terry Jarrett, legs apart, arms crossed high on their chests, as if they were supervising the demolition. Which could now proceed.
The short woman waited while Eva watched Gerald. Then she said, “Perhaps you don’t remember, Mrs. Forsythe. We spoke some years ago, here in this room, about Paul Biga.”
“Yes, I remember,” Eva said. “But was that years ago?”
“It was 1995. November.”
“Well, goodness, years!” Eva said.
“I was writing a book. Did you ever receive a copy? I gave the publisher your address.”
“You know, I think we did.” Eva gestured at the bookshelf and Kate Hawkins, unexpectedly, walked toward it, and there, as if by magic, was the book. Kate pulled it off the shelf and handed it to Eva: a black jacket, red letters. Eva held it out, away from her face, until she could read it. “Hunter on the Highway: The True Story of a Monster Among Us.” The cover was a closeup of Paul’s adult face.
Kate Hawkins said, “It’s all right if you never read it. I wouldn’t blame you.” She seemed uncertain, standing there in stripes of light—the blinds—with the Biga house behind her. “And now I’m working on an article—five years later, looking back, and the house coming down. How have people coped? How has the town changed? Or not? Where are we now? That type of thing. Because it was all so raw back then.”
Eva remembered, now, how much this woman had talked at first—how tentative it made her seem, how rueful, until, in putting her at ease, you found that you had talked too much yourself. Eva recognized this trick because she’d used it many times—not so much on her students as on their parents.
“How about some tea?” Eva said, moving toward the kitchen so that Kate Hawkins couldn’t ask or make some gesture that would mean “Can you manage?” or “Let me do that for you.” Eva was handy in the kitchen; she could make a pot of tea and set some biscuits on a plate. Gerald put everything she needed in the lower cupboards.
“What have you been up to since I saw you last?” Eva asked, deliberately chatty among the mugs and tea bags.
“Oh, this and that,” Kate Hawkins said. “A lot of articles, another book.”
“More murders?” Still in her brisk, deliberately oblivious voice.
“Yes, a matricide,” Kate said, quite casual, and then, “It’s pretty awful, really, that murder pays my bills.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘awful.’ Could you carry the tray, dear?”
Kate Hawkins, with the tray, followed Eva back into the lounge room. She set the tray on the coffee table and perched on the edge of the couch, exactly as she had five years ago. “What I wanted first of all,” she said, “was to apologize for coming so soon after Paul’s arrest.”
“You did come rather quickly,” Eva said.
“I only had a month. It had to be the first book out—payment was double if I was first.”
“And was it quite a lot?”
“It was,” Kate said. She didn’t, now, seem ashamed. “Down payment on a house.”
“Good,” Eva said. And it was good—to turn a murderer into a house. What a clever thing. She picked up Kate’s book, with Paul’s face on it.
Kate blew at the steam above her tea. “Journalists get so used to barging in. To be perfectly honest, I saw you simply as an opportunity—neighbor, school principal, employer. Your garden’s looking lovely, by the way.”
“That’s all Gerald, now that he’s retired,” Eva said. “No need to pay anyone to do it for us.”
“I wanted to say—I wanted to apologize, but also to say what an impression you made on me when we spoke, Mrs. Forsythe.”
“You must call me Eva. You did before.”
“Thank you. Perhaps you won’t remember, but I asked if you had children and you said no. A few minutes later, you wanted to change your answer. Do you remember?”
Eva shook her head. What had she said to anybody, years ago?
“You said, ‘I was a teacher and a principal. That’s how I had my children.’ ”
“I was and I did,” Eva said. She’d made this statement a number of times, to different people. Maybe it had seemed clever at first, or deeply felt, or simply dutiful—it didn’t surprise her to hear that she’d said it to this journalist. “I had all of them.”
“I wanted you to know how much that moved me,” Kate Hawkins said. “I think of it often. My daughter is in second grade.”
A fearsome noise began outside.
“Goodness, what a racket,” Eva said. She noticed that she was rubbing her thumb against Paul’s shiny face on the book jacket.
“What does it mean to you that the Biga house is finally being demolished?”
“Are we onto the official interview now?”
Kate Hawkins laughed. “May I record our conversation?” She produced a Dictaphone from her bag.
Gerald would disapprove of this, just as he’d disapproved of “Hunter on the Highway” and of all the people who had come to gawk, even years after Paul’s arrest, at the Biga house; who’d taken photos and plant cuttings, who’d knocked on doors, who’d left tributes to the people he’d killed, and parked badly in the street. Gerald would have had the Biga house demolished just to get some peace; he’d threatened, once, to set it on fire, and been annoyed with her for crying as if he’d meant it. Gerald had called her sentimental, but Eva didn’t think she was. Maybe she would feel differently if Paul had brought his victims to the house; and maybe she wouldn’t. There was something in that house, quite aside from Paul, that should persist.
“Yes,” Eva said. “You can record. What was the question?”
“How do you feel about the Biga house being demolished?”
Eva placed “Hunter on the Highway” face down on the coffee table beside her mug of tea. There was a photo of Kate on the back, looking softly pretty in a pink shirt.
“Well, first of all,” Eva said, “it isn’t the Biga house. It’s the Lainey house.”
“Lainey?”
“The Lainey family. L-a-i-n-e-y. Mr. Lainey built it in the early twenties, a year before my father built this place. They’ve rented it out for years and years—since, let me think, 1946. Yes, I was sixteen. The Bigas were the Laineys’ longest tenants—more than twenty years. You know, this isn’t a tenant kind of town. It’s a town where people die and then their children live in their houses. So people were funny about that house, about everyone who lived there, though by the end most people forgot that the Bigas didn’t own. They took good care of it, the Lainey house.”
Maybe no one else in town still referred to it as the Lainey house; Gerald certainly didn’t. But when Jan Biga and his wife, Lucinda, and their boy, Paul, had moved in, it was to the Lainey house. “I hear there’s a Pole moved in to the Laineys’,” Gerald said, and Eva thought at first he meant a pole, a post. He meant, of course, a Polish man. How literal she was about the Lainey house. It was as if she couldn’t absorb the changes that had taken place there: the Laineys leaving, Josie Lainey waving goodbye from the back window of their car; the tenants moving in and out; the Japanese maple turning its intricate red; the Bigas arriving, and teen-age Paul crossing the road to work in the Forsythes’ garden for seven dollars an hour. Last time Kate Hawkins had come, just after Paul’s arrest, she’d asked about those gardening days. Had Eva ever noticed anything unusual about him—anything that might have given an indication of the monster he turned out to be? Oh, no, Eva said, a quiet boy, and so polite you’d never dream—that kind of thing. She remembered later that, when Paul had come to do the garden the first time, she’d noticed the length of his fingernails. He used to pinch caterpillars out of the gardenias with those long nails. Was that a sign of anything? But Paul was only ever a sign of himself.
“It’s hard to think of it as a family home,” Kate said.
“Not for me,” Eva said.
Mrs. Lainey at the gate calling, “Josie! Josie!,” her hands caught up in her apron; ham on the Lainey table; hands swatting at flies all through the saying of grace, the laziness of lunchtime flies, the slowness of hands during grace, and Josie’s foot pressing Eva’s under the table; the organ in the front room with its odd, resisting pedals, Mr. Lainey playing it with a bottle of beer beside him on the stool and Josie turning the pages of the music; Eva holding the baby while Mrs. Lainey hung the washing, thick white drool staining Eva’s arm and her never minding, Josie sulking at how much Eva loved the baby; Josie asking, “Would you save Harry Cox if his house was on fire? Would you save Norman Monk?,” running through all the boys in their class, “Would you save John McInnes, Gerald Forsythe? Would you save Michael Byrne?”; Josie walking the brick fence wearing a yellow dress and red lipstick; Josie, Josie, Josie.
Kate waited for a particularly loud burst of noise to pass. Then she said, “And how do the Laineys feel about having had Paul Biga as a tenant?”
Josie Lainey throwing a cricket ball at her brother, missing, laughing, dodging when he threw it back.
“I don’t know,” Eva said. “We lost touch. I can’t imagine they like it. Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Lainey were gone well before—well, everything.”
“When did they die?”
“In the late seventies, I believe, or early eighties.”
Mrs. Lainey and Josie in the front room—the formal room, which no one ever used—sitting on the stuffy sofa, holding hands, their faces very white. Mr. Lainey saying, “All right, Evelyn, you’d better go on home now,” and closing the door very softly.
And Eva in the hallway, sobbing without making any sound.
Kate Hawkins asked, “How many children in the Lainey family?”
“Three.”
“Their names?”
Josephine, Michael, Margaret.
“Oh,” Eva said, “I wouldn’t be comfortable. They won’t want their names associated.”
“I understand,” Kate said, and wrote a few words in her notebook. I suppose, Eva thought, she’ll simply look it up or ask someone else. If she were my student, I’d want her to be canny and resourceful.
Kate took a sip of her tea. “So, they built the house in the early twenties, and they left in—when did you say? 1946? Just after the war. They’d lived there for at least twenty years. Why did they move?”
There had never been a face, or lips, or arms more beautiful to Eva than Josie Lainey’s. Not even Gerald, whom she had loved and desired for years, had ever lain like Josie in a bed, as if there were no clear distinction between her body and the warmth, the softness, the sweetness of the sheets.
“Mr. Lainey got a job in Sydney.”
“What kind of work did he do?”
The noise of the demolition increased—that was the front door opening—and was muffled again. Gerald arrived in the lounge room, rubbing his hands.
“Might take a photo or two,” he said.
“Is it already down?” Eva asked. Her heart was beating very fast.
“Front rooms are down,” Gerald said, hurrying through to his study. “Bedrooms to go. They certainly know how to get the job done, once they’ve put their minds to it.”
Josie Lainey’s bedroom, done all in pink (Josie eventually too old for this, rolling her eyes, not a baby anymore), had become Paul’s. And Eva wondered, sometimes, if there had been some residue left in that room, some trace of Eva and Josie. It wasn’t the kind of thing she ordinarily considered. But it would be one way to explain, wouldn’t it, the letter Paul had sent?
“Are you tired, Eva?” Kate asked. Her face was creased with concern; Eva didn’t trust it.
“Not at all,” Eva said. But she was tired. “What was your last question?”
“What kind of job did Mr. Lainey move to Sydney for?”
Gerald erupted from his study carrying his chunky little camera. “He didn’t move for a job, did he?” he said. “Wasn’t it some kind of family drama? That’s what I heard. They certainly left pretty quick smart.”
“A drama?” Kate said, sitting up straighter on the edge of the couch.
“It was definitely a job,” Eva said. “He worked in insurance. He’d been a salesman, and he was promoted to head office.”
Gerald tilted his head from side to side. “Evie would know,” he said, then launched into the hallway and out the front door. The sound of the demolition rose with the opened door, then receded again.
“You were close to the Laineys?” Kate asked.
Eva said, “The older daughter was in my class at school.”
“The same school you went on to become principal of?”
“The high school, yes, but we started kindergarten together.”
“The same school Paul Biga attended,” Kate said.
“The high school, yes,” Eva said. “Eventually.”
“Paul was at the school for years eleven and twelve,” Kate said, and Eva nodded. “Did you often hire your students to work for you?”
Eva looked at the photo of younger Kate on the back of “Hunter on the Highway.” Her chin was resting on her left hand, and she wore a wedding ring. She wasn’t wearing one now. Eva hadn’t read the book, but she’d flipped through it to see if her name came up. She occupied three sentences; the implication had been that she, in her provincial naïveté, had been hoodwinked by Paul’s calculated charm. To spend twenty years living opposite a monster without recognizing his evil might, Eva supposed, require a special kind of delusion. Others in town had been very quick to say that there was always something off about him.
“My students? No,” Eva said. “We hired Paul as a neighbor, more than as a student. A neighborhood boy.”
“He was seventeen when he started,” Kate said, as if riffling through mental files. “And he came every day?”
“I thought we were talking about the Lainey house,” Eva said. She wanted Gerald to come back now, to fill the door frame, and to drive the woman from the house with his forceful conviviality.
“We are,” Kate said. “Did Paul work in his parents’ garden, too?”
“He spent a lot of time out at the aviary,” Eva said. “The Laineys built the aviary.”
Josie with a cockatoo on her head, the cockatoo screaming, “Give us a kiss! Give us a kiss!”
“The Laineys kept birds?”
“Yes. A sulfur-crested cockatoo.”
“Just the one? Did they take it with them when they moved?”
“To Sydney? No,” Eva said. “They set it free. It lived in the garden for months, then eventually it was gone.”
“And did any of the other tenants keep birds in the aviary?”
“No,” Eva said. “Only Paul.”
Paul bringing her, shyly, a glossy offering of magpie feathers; Eva saying, “Oh, my mother would have used these to trim a hat,” and then not knowing what to do with them, so they lived in a mug beside the telephone for more than a year. Little black-and-white pennants.
“It was still in good shape, then?” Kate asked. “The aviary? If the Bigas came in ’75, it hadn’t been used for nearly thirty years.”
“Paul repaired it,” Eva said. Gerald had helped him. Gerald had always been handy. He’d wanted children.
“So, gardening at your house, but birds at home,” Kate said. “Did he come every day?”
“We couldn’t have afforded for him to come every day.”
“Your neighbors,” Kate said, “on this side”—she pointed in the direction of the Jarrett house, Terry Jarrett of the sloppy garbage bins—“remember him coming nearly every day.”
Well, yes, there had been a summer when he came most days, without asking for extra payment. You would look out a window and see him deadheading the daisies, or you’d hear a sound and it would be Paul sweeping the front path. If you opened the door and offered him a cup of tea, he always said no. There was only one task he refused, and that was killing stinkbugs. It was Eva who had picked the stinkbugs off the kumquats by hand and dropped them in a jar of methylated spirits. Gerald had offered to spray, but she didn’t want chemicals on the fruit trees, and Paul was too disgusted to touch the stinkbugs, even with gloves on (Paul, who would allow spiders on his bare palms and throw snails hard against the fence to crack their shells and keep them out of her irises). But Eva had been fascinated, had noted the frantic waving of the stinkbugs’ striped antennae, had made herself dizzy with the fumes of metho and stink that rose from the jar, had watched as valiant bugs pulled themselves to apparent safety on rafts made of other bugs until she tilted the jar, creating terrible tsunamis. The jar was full of clinging death and gave her great satisfaction. The kumquat tree, no longer under attack, had put forth fruit and blossom and been visited by bees; the marmalade Gerald had made (an excellent maker of jams, Gerald) was delicious spread on toast or on thick slices of Cheddar cheese. She had dumped the bodies of the bugs in the garden and, after the alcohol evaporated, the ants had made feasts of the softer flesh.
“Four hours a week,” Eva said. “Usually on Saturday mornings. That’s what we paid him for. But haven’t I already told you everything I can about Paul? I didn’t know him well, especially once he grew up. The Bigas moved in their own circle.”
“Of course,” Kate said. “But living across the road—” She gestured toward the window, where Eva had avoided looking. Through the half-open blinds, she saw a yellow machine clambering over the rubble that used to be the front room of the Lainey house. The windows in that room had been set with small squares of stained glass; she and Josie used to find it funny, in the afternoons, to lie on the floor so that the squares of blue and red light fell on their chests, exactly where their breasts would one day be. The tender pucker of Josie’s breasts. Looking back on that last year with Josie—1945 and into 1946—Eva marvelled at how chaste they’d been, how pure. Even their kisses, full of heat, had been wholesome. The stained-glass windows had been removed before the demolition.
What Kate meant, of course, was that you learn things about people when you live so close to them, even if you don’t spend time together. That you notice things, without meaning to—surely you notice things. Nobody wanted to believe Eva when she said that Paul Biga had seemed like a perfectly ordinary boy. And he had, although one of the things Eva had learned as a teacher and a principal was that there are no perfectly ordinary adolescents, that each of them is strange, and bewildered, and in mourning, because they’re all in exile from their childhoods, just as they always longed to be. There had been only one thing that marked Paul Biga as unusual, and Eva had never told it to anyone—not even Gerald. At the end of that summer when he’d come to the garden every day, Paul had written Eva a letter on those thin sheets of paper—so thin that if your hands were even a little damp the paper became translucent or tore, the paper that people used when they were sending letters overseas and wanted to keep the weight down. The things he said he’d planned for them: a farm, and horses, an aviary, of course, and, because he knew she loved the maple tree in his front garden, he would dig it up to bring with them, he would plant it outside their bedroom window and every night he would, and she would, and then he would, and would, and would—
How detailed he was—her cunt, her arse, her tits—how well he spelled when he spelled her body out, and how lonely that seemed, to spell “cunnilingus” right and “specific” wrong. In what film, what TV show had he seen the farm with the gentle, sexual, older wife, or learned about love letters, so that he could approximate one now, for her? What was the sign he’d wanted her to give him? A candle in the window, or something just as ludicrous—as if Gerald wouldn’t have noticed a candle! As if a candle in the window wouldn’t catch the curtains on fire and burn down the house, as if someone walking along the street wouldn’t see a candle in the Forsythe window with the lights all off and think, I’d better knock on the door. They’ve gone to bed with a candle burning. And the terror, then, lying in bed, that he would come anyway, would be a candle himself waiting at the door, coming into the house, standing over her in the bedroom. Would you save Eva Forsythe if her house was on fire?
She could have told someone, told Gerald or spoken to Paul or to his father, but she hadn’t. That had been irresponsible of her, she knew, but Paul had just graduated from school, his mother was very ill that summer, and the letter was so passionate, so precise, that she worried that anyone reading it would assume she’d encouraged him. She convinced Gerald that they no longer needed Paul in the garden; she pretended not to see Paul if she passed him in the supermarket, though she still waved at Jan Biga if they were both out on the street. Glancing into their windows, she saw the blue TV, the yellow wallpaper, the paintings crooked on the wall after Lucinda died. The maple tree dressed and undressed, blazing up and down again, while Paul—quiet behind the curtains—grew older, stronger, better-looking, began spending time with girls his own age, acted civil behind his father’s lawnmower on Sundays, as if there had never been a letter, as if she had imagined it. She had torn the letter into hundreds of pieces, placed those pieces in an envelope, taped the envelope shut, and concealed it in a box of cereal, which went into the bin and was collected early one Tuesday morning. She listened to the garbage truck trundle up and down the street, Gerald snoring, Terry carrying out his bin in a last-minute panic, and all the birds in Paul’s aviary greeting the pretty dawn.
Kate, on the couch, her hand still pointing to the house across the road, waited with a look of bright expectation on her face, as if she had offered an extra serving of cake and was watching to see if Eva would be greedy enough to accept it. Imagine her glee if Eva were to say, “There was one strange thing. Paul wrote me a letter.” Imagine her looking at her second-grade daughter and remembering Eva saying, “I had my children” and thinking, then, of the letter.
“I know it’s dull of me,” Eva said. “But, really, they were a very quiet family.”
Outside, the people watching the demolition began to applaud—not the way they might at the end of a football match but as they did when one of the Sydney orchestras visited on a regional tour and the townspeople felt obliged to attend the concert. There was liberation in the applause, but also deflation—as if the spectators had expected rapture and, once again, been disappointed.
“That must be the last wall down,” Kate said.
It felt to Eva as if the whole life of the Lainey house would now be on display to the world; as if everyone who had ever lived in it was still there, all at once, going about his or her intimate business, completely unaware that the walls were missing. Like in a doll’s house. And in the room that everyone knew had been Paul’s, people would see him—what? Making his plans? Dreaming his violent dreams? And they would see Josie and Eva in Josie’s little bed, loving each other, very gentle, very pure; they would see Mrs. Lainey opening the door (if there were still doors in the Lainey house) and crying out, the two girls sitting up in bed; and, oh, would they watch as the girls pulled on their summer dresses, as Mrs. Lainey took Josie’s hand and led her into the front room, as Mr. Lainey said, “All right, Evelyn, you’d better go on home now”?
“Would you like to go outside and see?” Kate asked.
“Oh, no,” Eva said.
“Are you sure?” Kate stood and adjusted the strings to open the blinds even wider. Eva looked again at the photo on the back of the book. Kate’s hand was positioned under her chin in a way that made it look as if her head had been impaled on a fleshy spike. But that was unkind.
“Reduced to rubble,” Kate said. “How does it feel to know it’s down?”
Eva regarded the actual Kate, who had propped one knee on the arm of the couch in order to get closer to the window. Her hair was pulled back into a girlish ponytail and, from behind, her creased navy jacket looked like a school blazer. “Would you be pleased? If you were me?” Eva asked, in the voice she had perfected over years of teaching: affectionately stern, lightly curious, and prepared at all times for disappointment.
“God, yes,” Kate said. Then she turned to look at Eva and gave a short, unexpected laugh. “Of course I would.”
Now a new house would be built: larger, uglier, and filled with the inexplicable lives of other people.
“You won’t have to look at it every day,” Kate said.
Josie lying in the heat under the maple tree, balancing an apple on her forehead, saying, “Never getting married, never never.” Every freckle like a small, warm sun.
“Anyone would be relieved,” Kate said. She laughed a second time and said, “But I can’t quote myself. Let me ask you again, how do you feel about the Biga house coming down?”
“The Lainey house,” Eva said.
“The Lainey house.”
“I feel,” Eva said, “completely indifferent.”
The front door opened and closed. Gerald and Terry came staggering in, each carrying a milk crate full of bricks that were the liverish-brown color of the Lainey house.
“I’m going to build you an outdoor pizza oven,” Gerald said.
Kate turned off her Dictaphone. Terry grinned above his crate, as if he could already feel the heat of the oven. Eva looked at him and thought she wouldn’t save him, Terry Jarrett—not even if his house was on fire. ♦
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