They May Not Mean To, But They Do(71)

“Is this really all yours? All that stuff?”

Danny gave her a look, a warning look, as he dragged her black garbage bags into the house.

“Matching luggage,” Joy said to the girls.

They barely acknowledged her. “Gatto! Gatto!” they cried, running out the door, this time followed by the clatter of the dog. They ran in circles around the maple tree, then the girls rolled down the hill, getting themselves dizzy, the dog chasing after them. Joy remembered doing that. Now she got dizzy without any rolling.

“Goodbye!” she called to Mr. Bailey as he backed out of the driveway. “Goodbye, Mother!”

Joy wondered what she had packed in all those bags. They looked so anonymous and lumpy. Each July, she would take the bloated garbage bags to the house, and each September she would drag them back, most of them undisturbed since their arrival.

“Upstate is perfect,” she said, running her hand along the back of the sagging sofa. “It never changes.”

“Everything changes,” Danny began in his environmental voice.

Please don’t start with climate change, Joy thought. She felt as if the house had taken her hand and said, Welcome home. “Welcome home,” she said. “That doesn’t change.”

She sat on the porch swing and listened to the stream that ran behind the house. Sunlight floated through the maple leaves above. The sounds of decades of summers surrounded her—the robins, the peepers.

She wondered what her life would have been like if she’d married Karl instead of Aaron. She probably would never have had the career she’d had. It would not have been necessary. That would have been a loss. On the other hand, there would have been enough money for them to survive without her scrabbling for work. What a luxury, not to worry about money. She wondered if anyone really had that luxury.

“I’ll miss you,” she had said to Karl before leaving. She touched his old hand with her old hand. And when she’d said it, she didn’t realize how true it was. She missed him already. She could see his earnest eyes, his face opening up into a smile. She could feel his close-shaved cheek as she gave him a kiss goodbye. His cheek was soft, old, but it was new, too, unfamiliar, exciting. Maybe his poor dead wife was right, maybe it was better to let sleeping dogs, dead dogs, lie. It was enough to lose Aaron, to miss Aaron. She didn’t need to miss Karl, too. She was too old. She was too tired.

And now at least she was not alone. She was surrounded by the ones she loved. Although they made so much noise. Coco was already banging pots and pans around. Daniel was bumping suitcases up the stairs. The girls were screaming, and Molly was somehow talking to Freddie on the computer she’d brought with her.

But this was the place Joy knew best. She had grown up in the city and lived her entire adult life in the city, but this was where she belonged. The air was her air, as if it had been made for her, air that revived her and soothed her. The light was her light, changing in ways she knew and anticipated and loved. There was nowhere on earth in which she felt more at home. Even the sounds seemed to welcome her, to know her, to greet her. There had been rain and the stream was high and rushed noisily by. A finch sang its chortling musical song. She listened for the cows from the pasture across the road. She heard something low and rumbling, not cows. A tractor plowing a far-off field.

But it was not a tractor, and it was not far off. The sudden crash of rocks reached her, the beeping of heavy machinery backing up, muffled shouts, a jackhammer.

“What are they doing, Grandma?” Cora asked. She climbed onto the roof of the car and looked across the street. “They’re digging up rocks with a steam shovel.”

Gatto jumped into Joy’s arms.

Molly stormed out of the house. “What the hell is going on?” she said, and stomped down the hill, yelling, “Hey! Hey!”

“Well, we’re not building this swimming pool for the cows,” the foreman said cheerfully when they had all followed Molly to the field.

Joy heard herself say with what she knew was irrelevant conviction, “I am a widow.”

The foreman was named Bill. He reached over to pet Gatto and Joy felt the growl building in the dog’s chest, but to her disappointment it quickly shifted into a friendly whimper and he licked the foreman’s hand.

“How long will you be doing this?” Molly said.

“And what exactly are you doing?” Daniel asked.

“Well, let’s see, building a road, of course, and houses. Nine. So yeah, we’ll be here awhile, I guess. Beautiful houses, pretty high-end. Pools, too. Hey, little puppy, what’s your name?”

There was an unpleasant discussion that night. Daniel said, “With this development going up, someone might actually want to buy our house.”

“This is my ancestral home,” Joy said. “And yours.”

He explained again that Joy was running out of money. “Anyway, our ancestors lived in shtetls.”

Molly told him he was morbid. Joy said perhaps she would die and solve everyone’s money worries. All of this had to be conducted in whispers, because the girls were asleep.

“Let it go,” Coco said to Daniel in bed that night. “Give your mother a summer off.”

“I’m just trying to be responsible.”

“Let it go.”

*

“Where’s Aunt Freddie, anyway?” Cora asked at breakfast.