one in a string of suburbs which had grown up around the city like a too-tight collar. The houses had been built right after the First World War, adequate houses, not grand ones, with a few flourishes—a stained-glass window on a landing here, a fanlight there. There were some center-hall Colonials, some mock Tudors, and a few boxy Cape Cods. Kenwood was no more than a dozen streets surrounding a spurious downtown: a dry cleaner; a drugstore with an attached medical-supply business with bedpans and laced corsets in the window; a real estate office with photographs of houses pinned to a cork bulletin board just inside the door; a hobby shop; and a stop on the railroad line into New York City.
Maggie’s father helped run a cement company in the Bronx. His office was underneath an elevated subway line and next to the big wholesale vegetable depot. Unlike most of the fathers, who could be found at 7:00 A.M. reading the newspaper at the train station, Tom Scanlan drove into the city every day.
The pitch of their driveway was too steep, ever since a friend of Tommy’s from high school had done an asphalt job on it, and whenever Tom backed out, his rear bumper bounced up off the street. As Maggie left the house that morning her father was just pulling out of the driveway, and she could see his mouth form the words “son of a bitch” as the back of his car hit the road and then bounced up level again.
It was hot in the June sun, and bright as a bare light bulb, but Maggie felt cool beneath the maple trees that lined the street, their leaves so green they looked almost black. Their branches hung over all but the center line of the street; in springtime the whirligigs that held their seeds floated down in tiny spirals, and they fell so thickly that the sidewalks were sticky with them, and the lawns grew untidy with seedlings. The trees were so large now, and cast such an indelible shade, that shrubs only grew in the backyards of the houses in Kenwood, except for the leggy rhododendrons that were planted on either side of the front doors of almost every home. Occasionally there would be talk about cutting down some trees to give the azaleas or forsythia a fighting chance, but most of the adults in the neighborhood had been city kids, and they found themselves incapable of cutting down trees. They tended their lawns with reverence, buying rotating sprinklers and hoses with holes along their lengths so that the water made little arcs of diamonds in the sunshine.
Maggie felt at peace here, on these quiet streets. She did not think of loving Kenwood, just as it did not occur to her to think about loving her parents, or her brothers Terence and Damien and little Joseph. It was simply her place, the place where she did not have to think twice about how to get where she was going and what to do when she got there. She remembered vaguely that when she was little her house had been that sort of place, too, but it seemed a long time ago. Now her house felt too crowded, too public. Once Maggie had heard her mother say that it was impossible for two women to share the same kitchen. Connie Scanlan had been talking about living in a beach house for a month with her sister-in-law, but the words had stayed with Maggie because she thought they applied to her and her mother as well. The house belonged to Connie. Kenwood, with its scuffed baseball field and its narrow creek and its ring of tousled fields, was Maggie’s home. As she listened to the sound of the earth movers grinding away behind her, a faint shudder shook her shoulders, the feeling her aunt Celeste once told her signified someone walking over your grave.
She glanced back at her own house, but it looked empty and still, the two white pillars on either side of the doorway grubby with fingerprints. When they had first moved to Kenwood from a two-family house in the northeast Bronx that belonged to Connie’s aunt and uncle, Tommy Scanlan had repainted the pillars every six months or so. But he was tired when he got home from work these days; he worked most Saturdays during good weather, and keeping up with the dirt the children left behind now seemed futile. He was the only