would never be able to buy another ounce of food: hams and beef roasts, cellophane packages of hot dogs, bags of potato chips, cases of Pepsi. He was standing behind Connie, affectionately resting his chin on the top of her head as she flipped through a Ladies’ Home Journal, stopping at a two-page spread on gardens for small yards. “What do you think?” she asked. “We could do a variation of this in the back.” The photograph showed a yard in Wisconsin where the owners had replaced most of the back lawn with an English-style garden, a white rose vine climbing an arbor, two Adirondack chairs in the shade of a flowering dogwood, a folded newspaper resting in the seat of one of them as if the occupant had just gone into the house for a glass of tea.
More than the photograph, however, what struck Edward Everett was Connie’s use of the word “we,” as if he already had moved into her home and had enough ownership to say, “I’d prefer pink roses over white,” one of the Adirondack chairs his chair, where he’d sit on Sundays, reading the financial pages. With his increasing income on top of her modest one as a schoolteacher, it struck him, they could renovate the house. Standing with her in the grocery line, waiting to pay for their ground beef and cold cuts and macaroni salad, her house transformed in his head as if he were watching a time-lapse movie like those he’d seen in high school, showing a caterpillar’s evolution to butterfly: the stained living room carpeting replaced with hardwood; the cracked linoleum in the kitchen replaced with tile like his uncle had; the mildewed asbestos shingles replaced with vinyl siding.
They began spending even more time together, doing what they called “everyday life” instead of merely dating. He kept his small apartment over the newspaper but, aside from going there to pick up his mail and fresh clothing, he was, for all intents and purposes, living with Connie and her son. In the evenings, as she washed dishes and quizzed her son on spelling words and state capitals, he spread his purchase orders across the kitchen table and made entries into his account ledger. After they finished their work, they watched television, Edward Everett and Connie on the couch, Billy sprawled on the floor, head propped on two cushions, laughing at shows he thought he should have found inane but, in their company, enjoyed: Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter, before Connie sent Billy to bed.
At first, they made love every night—quietly because Connie didn’t want Billy to hear them. But within a week and a half, her period came and their abstinence for those days brought them to what she said was, ironically, a new sort of intimacy: the comfort of a man and woman sleeping in the same bed because it was where they slept and not because they were just there to have sex. At first, he found it odd to be beside her without making love—he’d never been in bed with a woman unless they were going to have sex. Then he, too, saw it as she did: they were becoming comfortable living side by side, sleeping side by side.
One Sunday, after a rainstorm when her gutters had overflowed, he climbed an extension ladder and hefted himself onto the roof so he could clean the gutters, scooping out foul-smelling handfuls of leaves and maple seeds, filling half a dozen lawn-and-leaf bags with the detritus. As he cleaned them, he saw that the gutters themselves were in sorry condition: bent where tree limbs had fallen onto them, riddled with holes where they had rusted. The entire roof, in fact, was in poor shape. At one point, as he shifted his weight to move so he could reach the next length of gutter, a piece of a shingle broke off, slid down the roof and sailed into the yard, where Connie was collecting branches.
“Hey,” she called, picking up the fragment. “You destroying my roof up there?”
“Just seeing if you’re paying attention,” he said.
The next week, he called a former high school teammate, Ralph Sellers, who ran a roofing company with his father, and bought Connie a new roof without telling her: eleven hundred twelve dollars and eighteen cents. A year ago, the sum would have seemed insurmountable but he had it in the bank—his account was by then close to four thousand dollars, as he had few expenses—and it stunned him