her grandmother alone, perhaps her entire family living in the big stone house and hanging out in the gazebo. She thought of Monica with a baby and a husband, never again to go to a dance with one boy and dump him halfway through the evening for someone better looking, and of Helen perhaps getting a part on Broadway and having strange men spend the night at her apartment. She thought of Debbie being Bridget Hearn’s best friend, or maybe thinking she was until Bridget dumped her, and she tried to think they deserved each other, but instead she got a feeling in her chest as though a rib was broken.
She thought of her mother driving her around during the winter months, while the dark outside and the dashboard lights within made a little oasis of the front seat of the car. She knew that even a week from now things would be different. School would start, and she would spend her days in her green uniform blazer and her plaid skirt, her saddle shoes raising blisters on the joints of her toes and the back of her heels after three months in sneakers and flip-flops. On Tuesday they would shop for school supplies, copy books with their spines still closed tight and pencil boxes that smelled as freshly plastic as Christmas morning. There would be no more nights in the development because she wasn’t allowed out on school nights. Soon all the windows of the new houses would be filled with yellow light and the spindly saplings they were planting along Shelley Lane and Dickens Street would grow up to be trees. And soon it would seem as if Tennyson Acres had always been there, and only the older kids would say “Do you remember before they built the development?” and would know what was inside each of those walls. Maggie wondered if someday the people in the last house by the woods would rip up their wall-to-wall carpeting and find the old Playboys beneath the floor.
The gold of her locket was warm beneath her fingers. She took a letter from the pocket of her shorts. “Dear Maggie,” she read, “I am really glad you are willing to write to me even though we are in the same place and school is starting. I have a lot of things to ask you which are easier to write in a letter than to say to your face. Your face is great but my conversation is not. (HA HA!)” Even now, after reading the letter at least six times, Maggie’s breathing felt funny when she got to that part: your face is great. She wondered if Bruce could dance. He had never asked her for anything but the silly line dances at the wedding, perhaps because his father was there. Each time she had looked at him he had looked away and cracked his knuckles. When his father told him it was time to go, he had pressed the letter into her hand, but before he moved away, he had squeezed it hard.
Inside the house she could hear her aunt and her mother laughing. She wasn’t sure whether her aunt Celeste was wrong about things changing and staying the same, or whether it was one of those differences between children and adults, like the way they were always saying that time went by so quickly when just to get from June to September seemed to take a lifetime.
Maggie walked through her own backyard to the beginning of the development. The soft ground sagged beneath her feet, and she could see in the cement of the curbs that Terence and his friends had been there, putting in hand and footprints, and leaving their initials: TSS, KAK, RVQ. The asphalt for the roads had not been laid yet, and she could feel the pebbles through the soft thin soles of her sneakers. Up ahead of her was the first house to be finished, a ranch house with sliding picture windows in almost every room. Maggie remembered that Richard and Bruce had written their names inside the doors of the kitchen cabinets the day they’d been installed.
Maggie approached soundlessly, close enough to see into the living-room window. A man and a woman sat on a couch against one wall. He was bald, with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she had a short cap of black hair, like a bathing cap, and tiny black eyes. They held round glasses, almost like bowls,