Lock and Key(42)

When I crouched down, the first thing I saw was Mr. Cross, standing with his hands on his hips by the pool. “All right,” he said, looking around him. “I know you’re here, I saw what you did to the garbage. Get out and show yourself. ”

Uh-oh, I thought. Sure enough, I spotted Roscoe cowering behind a potted plant. Mr. Cross clearly hadn’t yet seen him, though, as he turned, scanning the yard again. “You have to come out sometime,” he said, bending down and looking under a nearby chaise lounge. “And when you do, you’ll be sorry.”

As if in response, Roscoe yelped, and Mr. Cross spun, spotting him instantly. “Hey,” he said. “Get over here!”

Roscoe, though, was not as stupid as I thought. Rather than obeying this order, he took off like a shot, right toward the fence and me. Mr. Cross scrambled to grab him as he passed, missing once, then getting him by one back leg and slowly pulling him back.

“Not so fast,” he said, his voice low, as Roscoe struggled to free himself, his tags clanking loudly. Mr. Cross yanked him closer, his hand closing tightly over the dog’s narrow neck. “You and I, we have some—”

“Roscoe!”

I yelled so loudly, I surprised myself. But not as much as Mr. Cross, who immediately released the dog, then stood up and took a step back. Our eyes met as Roscoe darted toward me, wriggling through the fence and between my legs, and for a moment, we just looked at each other.

“Hi there,” he called out, his voice all friendly-neighbor-like, now. “Sounds like quite a party over there.”

I didn’t say anything, just stepped back from the fence, putting more space between us.

“He gets into our garbage,” he called out, shrugging in a what-can-you-do? kind of way. “Jamie and I have discussed it. It’s a problem.”

I knew I should respond in some way; I was just standing there like a zombie. But all I could see in my mind was his hand over Roscoe’s neck, those fingers stretching.

“Just tell Jamie and Cora to try to keep him on that side, all right?” Mr. Cross said. Then he flashed me that same white-toothed smile. “Good fences make good neighbors, and all that.”

Now I did nod, then stepped back, pulling the gate shut. The last glimpse I had of Mr. Cross was of him standing by the pool, hands in his pockets, smiling at me, his face rippled with the lights from beneath the water.

I turned to walk back to our yard, trying to process what I’d just seen and why exactly it had creeped me out so much. I still wasn’t sure, even as I came up on Roscoe, who was sniffing along the edge of the pond. But I scooped him up under my arm and carried him the rest of the way, anyway.

As we got closer to the house, I heard the music. At first, it was just a guitar, strumming, but then another instrument came in, more melodic. “All right,” someone said over the strumming. “Here’s an old favorite.”

I put Roscoe on the ground, then stepped closer to the assembled crowd. As a guy in a leather jacket standing in front of me shifted to the left, I saw it was Jamie who had spoken. He was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs, playing a guitar, a beer at his feet, a guy with a banjo nodding beside him as they went into an acoustic version of Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop.” His voice, I realized, was not bad, and his playing was actually pretty impressive. So strange how my brother-in-law kept surprising me: his incredible career, his passion for ponds, and now, this music. All things I might never have known had I found that gate the first night.

“Having fun?”

I turned around to see Denise, Cora’s friend, standing beside me. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a big party.”

“They always are,” she said cheerfully, taking a sip of the beer in her hand. “That’s what happens when you’re overwhelmingly social. You accumulate a lot of people.”

“Jamie does seem kind of magnetic that way.”

“Oh, I meant Cora,” she replied as the song wrapped up, the crowd breaking into spontaneous applause. “But he is, too, you’re right.”

“Cora?” I asked.

She looked at me, clearly surprised. “Well . . . yeah,” she said. “You know how she is. Total den-mother type, always taking someone under her wing. Drop her in a roomful of strangers, and she’ll know everyone in ten minutes. Or less.”

“Really,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “She’s just really good with people, you know? Empathetic. I personally couldn’t have survived my last breakup without her. Or any of my breakups, really.”

I considered this as Denise took another sip of her beer, nodding to a guy in a baseball cap as he pushed past us. “I guess I don’t really know that side of her,” I said. “I mean, we’ve been out of touch for a while.”

“I know,” she said. Then she quickly added, “I mean, she talked about you a lot in college.”

“She did?”

“Oh, yeah. Like, all the time,” she said, emphatic. “She really—”

“Denise!” someone yelled, and she turned, looking over the shoulder of the guy beside us. “I need to get that number from you, remember?”

“Right,” she said, then smiled at me apologetically. “One sec. I’ll be right back. . . .”

I nodded as she walked away, wondering what she’d been about to say. Thinking this, I scanned the crowd until I spotted Cora standing just outside the kitchen door with Charlotte. She was smiling, looking much happier than the last time I’d seen her. At some point she’d pulled her hair back, making her look even younger, and she had on a soft-looking sweater, a glass of wine in her hand. Here I’d just assumed all these people were here because of Jamie, but of course my sister could have changed in the years we’d been apart. She has her own life now, my mom had told me again and again. This was it, and I wondered what that must be like, to actually get to start again, forget the world you knew before and leave everything behind. Maybe it had even been easy.