me she had a house she thought we might like, an old Victorian with three fireplaces and a big wraparound porch. I did like it. I’d liked it when Steven fixed it up and sold it to those two guys for a weekend house, although I didn’t tell Donald that. Steven left before we came back to Miller’s Valley. He’d made enough money to go somewhere in the big-money burbs farther south, but then I heard from Fred that he got overextended and lost most of what he’d made, then later on that he was climbing back up again. I’d bet on Steven bouncing back for sure, and then maybe going bust again, and so on and so forth. When we bought that old Victorian I had a cabinetmaker come in to build some bookshelves, and he had to redraw his plans because the one new wall had studs that were too far apart, two feet instead of eighteen inches. I wonder how much Steven saved on lumber with just that one small change. But that was him all over, cutting corners. I guess he was just cutting a corner that day I walked in on him and that girl, whoever she was. One day a couple of years ago I looked him up on the computer. There he was, Steven Sawicki, posed next to a convertible in the desert with a pretty blond woman in a red dress who could have been his daughter but was probably his wife, given the two little boys in polo shirts standing between them. She looked like she’d been built from spare parts in a plastic surgeon’s office, and Steven looked like maybe he’d had some run-ins with that same surgeon, too, his face as smooth and unmarked as a freshly plastered wall. He runs a business in Las Vegas that rents luxury cars to tourists. You can have a Lamborghini or a Bentley for the day and roar around town pretending you’re somebody you’re not. “Living la Vida Loca,” it says on his website. Sometimes things turn out exactly the way you imagine.
He looked happy in that picture, contented with the woman, the children, and the car, and I bet he is. He was always a glass-half-full guy, Steven. He was never mean, or dark, or hard-hearted. He just wasn’t ever really real. I don’t regret him. I don’t regret any of that, except for that one bus trip into New York City, and I only think of that every once in a while, not as something I’m sorry I did but something I had to do and wish I hadn’t. He was getting me ready for something else, Steven was. I understand that now. Our daughter, Nora, had a boyfriend in high school, my Lord, you could practically feel the sex coming off the two of them, Donald was in a rage. But I knew what it was, and what was coming. Later, when she met Eric in college, and married him, I knew it would last.
When our son, Ian, met and married Devon, I knew it wouldn’t. But I smiled in the pictures, and danced at the wedding, and later I listened to him call her nasty names but I wouldn’t let him do it in front of their son. I make sure my grandson knows I’m his grandmother even if his mother doesn’t like me much. Everything follows patterns I’ve seen before.
We were happy here, Donald and I. He was one of the most beloved guys in town for years, whether the team won or lost. If he went to the hardware store to get duct tape it would be two hours before he got home, so many people stopped and talked to him, the kids he coached, their parents, his fellow teachers, the old-timers who wanted to reminisce about his grandparents. “There’s a man who’s found his niche,” my mother said one evening when we watched him moving slowly around a potluck supper at the firehouse.
Most of my own friends are what the natives call the new people, meaning people who have been in Miller’s Valley less than a hundred years. Some of them are only here on weekends. They’re lawyers and bankers and doctors in the cities, Philadelphia and New York and even Washington. That’s how it is with Nora. I’m happy for that much, my daughter and her husband and their little boys here most weekends and holidays. Ian lives in Ohio now and he’s likely