from which all this was visible, Lincoln’s first thought was, Nope. Only an idiot would ever sell this. Setting down his two bags of provisions on the warped picnic table, he took a seat on the top step and soaked up the view for a long moment, then called Anita. “We can’t sell this,” he told her when she picked up.
“Okay,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘okay’? We have to.” After all, it wasn’t just a question of them getting back on their feet after the recession. Their children had also needed assistance getting back on theirs. He and Anita had been glad to help, but doing so had made their own finances precarious. They’d probably be okay unless something else went wrong, but something else might. “We agreed.”
“And now I’m agreeing again.”
Which made him grumpy. “Where are you?” Because there was shouting in the background.
“At the courthouse. Cooling my heels. I may have to hang up in a hurry.”
“You think we should risk it and not sell? Just hope the worst won’t happen?”
“Wasn’t that exactly what we were doing when the worst happened?”
“True,” he admitted.
“How’s the weather?”
“Sunny. Seventy-two degrees. We’re supposed to have a full week of it. You should come join me for a few days.”
“I wish I could.”
“Weren’t we supposed to retire, both of us, like, two years ago?”
“Days like today, I’m ready.”
“Martin says that’s what we should do. Retire here, in this very house. If the kids want to see us, they can jump on a plane. Time for us to start thinking about ourselves, Martin says.”
“Who’s Martin?”
“Our realtor. A wise man.”
“And would I be correct in assuming that Martin said exactly none of that?”
“Not exactly. Was that a gunshot?”
“Somebody knocked over a stanchion. I have to go, Lincoln.”
The sound of his name on his wife’s lips was, as always, something to savor. Like most married couples, they spoke to each other mostly in diminutives. Anita seemed to save his actual name for small but intimate moments. Its curated use seemed to imply that, in her view at least, he was still the same man he was when she said, “I, Anita, take you, Lincoln.” White hair, acid reflux and a stiff lower back notwithstanding.
“Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”
“We don’t have to sell, but we probably should.”
“I know.”
And yet, hanging up, he couldn’t help but think about his mother, how she’d loved summers here as a girl. There was drinking and laughter and fun…We went barefoot all summer long…The floors got sandy and nobody minded…We didn’t go to church all summer.
Would selling it be a betrayal? She certainly wouldn’t want him to lose his company or put his loved ones—that large and still-growing brood—at risk. But wasn’t it also possible she’d meant the inheritance as a test? She’d no doubt observed, as Anita had, that with each passing year he was, goddammit, becoming more like his father. Not so much that they agreed on everything, but rather in terms of temperament and instinct. What if the house was intended as a reminder that he was her son, too, not just a clone of Wolfgang Amadeus Moser? That he was not entirely unrelated to a woman who’d moved about the world like a breeze you couldn’t be sure was there, barely strong enough to sound the wind chimes? This thought, he realized, sitting on the steps of the house she’d refused to part with, was probably occasioned by the fact that wind chimes were actually hanging from the eaves here, stirring in the gentle breeze. As a rule Lincoln was not a fanciful man, but he couldn’t help wondering—had his mother just spoken to him?
In the distance a screen door screeched open on an unoiled hinge. Farther down the slope and off to the right sat Mason Troyer’s huge, gray-shingled “cottage,” its deck easily double what it had been back in 1971. His parents were nice, modest and decent people who never would’ve approved of their son’s ostentatious renovation. But that was the thing. The elder Troyers were dead and gone, and whether they’d been nice people or not was beside the point. They’d left the house to Mason, presumably to do with as he pleased.
A naked woman—too far away for him to tell her age, but probably in her forties—had come out onto the deck with a tall glass of something and stretched out on a chaise lounge. A moment later a large, older man—Troyer himself, Lincoln was certain—emerged, also naked, the door