gangly eldest son—who’s a spitting image of Gregory, my own older brother, in body and personality, but seems to have inherited nothing from Rick’s genetic line—leaving the family nest. The problem is, in Rick’s mind, Jed is a lump of stone waiting to be shaped into a man, and Rick is the sculptor. Everything that doesn’t fit his idea of what a man should be, he tries to chisel away. The traits he wants to get rid of, though, are the ones Jed values the most. And frankly, he’s right.
But then, Rick has never much cared for Gregory either.
“Where is Jed, anyway?” I ask.
Rick shrugs. “Probably on his computer. Want me to call him downstairs?”
“I’ll do it.”
It takes a few tries, but Jed finally appears at the top of the stairs, holding his hand-me-down laptop in the crook of his arm, the screen casting a blue haze over his features. When he hears we have company coming over, he says he’ll eat upstairs in his room.
“But it’s the Shaws. You remember them. Kathie will want to see you, hon. When they left, you barely came up to here. Now you’re all grown up.”
“I’ve got some stuff to do.”
“Like what?”
“Just stuff,” he says. “Anyway, if Eli doesn’t have to . . .”
“Fine, it’s your loss.”
I turn to go back to the kitchen. His footsteps thunder down the stairs behind me.
“You’re not mad, are you?”
He’s stopped just inside the kitchen, the laptop still balanced on his forearm. The fact is, I am mad, but I don’t know why. There’s still so much to do, and it’s not like Jed knows any better than Rick or Eli how to cook. He’ll only be in the way.
“I’m just . . .” I pause to brush a lock of damp hair out of my eyes. Then I notice the back door is ajar. Through the window above the sink, I can see the light on inside Rick’s shed. “Never mind. You can stay upstairs if you want.”
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m just a little stressed out, that’s all.”
He takes this onboard with a nod. We understand each other, me and Jed. Not always, and not always well, but if you were going to draw a line through the family, we both know we’d be on one side with Rick and Eli on the other. “All right, then,” he says, and disappears up the stairs.
I run the water and watch Rick’s shadow moving across the window of his shed. It’s more than a shed, really. It’s a freestanding man cave, a permanent retreat from the white noise of domestic life. Originally our home was just a kind of carriage house on the grounds of the mansion next door, and the shed was an outbuilding. By late-nineteenth-century standards, I’m sure it was quite meager, but the leaded glass windows and broad-planked wooden floors make the shed rather cozy—certainly too nice for anything like a tool to be stored within. According to the neighbors, some kind of handyman used to live there, back in the days when every well-to-do household employed a couple of servants.
There’s even a tiny wood-burning fireplace.
When I first saw the property, I imagined that little shed with flower boxes under the windows, a fire in the grate.
But Rick peered through the window and said, “I’ve got dibs on this.”
I was disappointed, but still, I love my little home. Storybook style, with an arched front door complete with quaint round windows. We have three small bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace, an eat-in kitchen, and a quarter-acre lot.
The shed sits near the edge of the yard, on the paved path leading through the English garden to the big house next door. (Confession: I’m not sure what an English garden is meant to look like, but in this case it means unruly hedges and scrappy clumps of wildflowers and weeds.) Margaret and Deedee Smythe live there, a mother-and-daughter pair, the last of the family line since Margaret has been a widow for ages and Deedee never married.
Walking the block now, you wouldn’t think that all the property at our end of the street had once been part of the same compound. The houses and outbuildings, erected by the Smythe family over a period of more than fifty years, reflect a variety of styles. There’s a giveaway, though: our house, the big mansion, and the bungalow next door are all perched on the same swell of high ground. Standing on the sidewalk,