growing heavy. When she had boarded the Keystone Service 701 toward Harrisburg at 8:18 in the morning, she had been fortunate enough to get a row of seats all to herself, but that had not lasted. There were a lot of people doing the go-to-work thing, so she soon had to put her backpack at her feet to accommodate another passenger.
The trip was just over three hours, and she could have driven, but with New York City sitting in the way of the most direct road route, she had opted out of the immovable object that was rush hour traffic.
Besides, there was something magical about a train. On the far side of the broad window, she watched the landscape change, high-rise apartment buildings replacing the sprawl of suburban neighborhoods as they approached Manhattan; then the skyscrapers coming into view; then the Big Apple’s bridges rising and falling over the Hudson. After that, there was the descent underground and the slowing and stopping under the great city, with a further exchange of passengers at Penn Station. Finally, they were off again, the air in the car smelling of oil and coal as they proceeded out of the subway system’s subterranean tunnels.
Bright light again now, free of the city on the far side, the trees and grass of New Jersey always a surprise given the concrete congestion of New York.
The train pulled into the 30th Street Station on time, and Jo sat quietly for a moment before grabbing her pack and getting to her feet. There was not much of a wait to get off, and as she stepped down onto the platform, she looked around, the hot breath of the hissing engine catching a lick of her hair.
The next thing she knew, she was out of the columned, squared-off building that, with its rows of vertical supports down its glass panels, had always reminded her of a federal prison. Or maybe it was Philadelphia, itself, that made her think things of a penal nature.
Or maybe it was her family.
Using her phone, she got a Lyft to take her out to the house. When she and the driver pulled in between the stone pylons and proceeded up the lane, the guy behind the wheel glanced back at her in the rearview of the Toyota Sienna.
“I thought this was a residence?” He shook his head. “I mean, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter to me—”
“No, it’s a family—well, a couple lives here.”
“Huh. You don’t say.” He looked out to the side, at the specimen trees that were as yet still without buds, and the statuary that remained unchanging through the seasons. “You applying for some kind of a job here or something?”
Jo thought about the role she had played in the household as she had grown up. “I was already hired.”
“Oh, congrats. The pay must be good.”
Well, it had gotten her through college without any debt. But only because she’d gone to Williams, which was her father’s alma mater. She had often wondered how the finances of her bachelor’s degree would have gone if she’d only been able to get into a state school. When she’d been accepted into the Yale master’s program for English, they’d indicated she’d have to pay for that herself.
So naturally, she’d ended up looking for work at that point.
“Holy crap, look at that house.”
“Yeah, it’s a big one.”
The grand mansion loomed at the top of the rise, although she had a feeling it was the pit in her stomach that turned the place into something threatening, rather than anything behind its leaded glass windows or under the eaves of its regal roofline.
Paying the guy, she got out and waited until the minivan had drifted down the hill. She had a feeling that if there was a car anywhere in view, it would increase the likelihood she would be turned away.
When the Lyft was gone, she took a moment to look around. Everything was in its place, all the bushes draped with hemmed-up burlap cloth to protect them from the cold, the grounds cleared of any debris, the flagstone walkway glowing blue and gray as it cut around the flower beds to the front entrance.
As she stepped up to the gleaming door, she expected some kind of warning bell to go off, the inhabitants alerted that the daughter was on the premises—not that she had been officially kicked out or anything. It had been more a case of tacit agreement that the Early’s compulsion into parenting hadn’t really resulted in