The two couples met at a neighborhood block party, the third Saturday in September.
Hen hadn’t wanted to go, but Lloyd convinced her. “It’s just down the street. If you hate it, you can turn around and come straight back.”
“That’s exactly what I can’t do,” Hen said. “I need to stay at least an hour or else people will notice.”
“They really won’t.”
“They really will. I can’t just look around at my new neighbors, then turn and leave.”
“I’m not going if you don’t go.”
“Fine,” Hen said, calling his bluff, knowing that he’d go alone if pressed.
Lloyd was silent for a moment. He was in front of the living room bookshelf, rearranging. They had closed on a single-family in West Dartford at the beginning of July, during one of the worst heat waves in Massachusetts history. Two months later, the weather had cooled, and Hen was beginning to feel that the house was theirs. The furniture was all in the right rooms, paintings were hung on the wall, and Vinegar, their Maine coon, had started to occasionally come up from the basement where he’d been hiding.
“What if I ask you to come with me as a favor?”
Favor was an unacknowledged code word between them, a gambit Lloyd usually used only when Hen was unwell. In the past, it was how he sometimes roused her from the bed in the morning.
“Don’t do it for you. Do it for me. It’s a favor.”
She occasionally resented the word and the way Lloyd used it, but she also understood that it was reserved for times when Lloyd thought it was important. Important for both of them.
“Okay. I’ll come,” she said, and Lloyd turned from the bookshelf, smiling.
“I apologize in advance if it’s awful,” he said.
Saturday was sunny and blustery. Sporadic gusts of wind ripped at the plastic tablecloth, weighted down with bowls of pasta salad, chips, endless hummus and pita. Dartford was a well-heeled commuter suburb forty-five minutes from Boston, but West Dartford, separated from the rest of the town by the Scituate River, had smaller houses spaced closer together, all built for the workers from a long-defunct mill that had recently been turned into artist studios. The converted mill was one of the reasons that Lloyd and Hen had picked this location. Hen could have her own studio that was walking distance from home, and Lloyd could take the commuter rail—the station was also walking distance—into Boston for his job. They’d still need only one car, the mortgage was less than what they’d been paying in Cambridge, and they’d practically be in the country, away from it all.
But standing at the block party, dominated by young hip couples, almost all with children, it didn’t feel all that different from their previous neighborhood. A woman named Claire Murray—the same woman who had hand-delivered the block party invite—introduced Hen and Lloyd around. Invariably, conversations broke out along gender lines: Hen found herself explaining her name—“short for Henrietta”—at least three times and that she was a full-time artist another three times—and told two of the women that, no, she didn’t have any children yet. Only one, a darkly freckled redhead wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a preschool, asked Hen if she planned on having children. “We’ll see,” Hen lied.
It was a relief when, after eating some pretty delicious pasta salad and half a dry cheeseburger, Hen and Lloyd found themselves back together, conversing with what appeared to be the only other childless couple at the party, Matthew and Mira Dolamore, who turned out to live in the Dutch Colonial immediately next to theirs.
“They must have been built at the same time, don’t you think?” Lloyd asked.
“All the houses on this street were,” Matthew said, rubbing at the space between his lower lip and his chin. When he took his finger away, Hen saw that he had a scar there, like Harrison Ford. He was handsome, Hen thought, not Harrison Ford handsome, but good-looking in the sense that all his features—thick brown hair, pale blue eyes, square jawline—were the features of a good-looking man, yet they all added up to something less than their parts. He stood stiffly, a dress shirt tucked into unstylish high-waisted jeans. He reminded Hen of a mannequin, with his broad shoulders and his large, knuckly hands. Later, when they all had dinner together, she would decide that he was one of those harmless, cheery men, the type of person you’d be happy to see but would never think of when they weren’t