On Friday the twenty-seventh, I raced home from school to her house and found her busy in the kitchen. She’d been cooking all day. “I felt like making all of Mr. Duncan’s favorites!” she exclaimed. Afterward, I did the dishes while she sat in the living room sipping her tea. It wasn’t lost on me that after all that cooking, Mrs. Duncan had barely touched her own dinner.
I finished the dishes and came out to find her barely able to keep her lids open. “Oh, my,” she said with a chuckle when she saw me staring worriedly at her. “I must be more tired than I thought.”
I helped her up the stairs to bed and then went back down to take her teacup to the sink. There I sank to the floor and wept as softly as I could for a long, long time.
The next morning I was laying curled up into a ball on the couch when there was a soft knock on the door. I opened it to find Agent Faraday there. He looked very sad. In his hand was my notebook. “Is she gone?” he asked after taking one look at my tear-stained face.
I nodded, unable to speak. I’d found her twenty minutes earlier, after I’d woken up and gone to her room. She was lying so peacefully, with her hands folded under her head and the sweetest smile on her blue lips.
Faraday folded me into his arms while I mourned my sweet neighbor’s passing. Later, he called Uncle Donny and escorted me back over to my house to wait with me while they took Mrs. Duncan away. And then, about an hour after Donny arrived and was rocking me back and forth to comfort me, Faraday came back to the house and held out an envelope to me. “We found it on her dresser,” he said.
I took the envelope and realized it was addressed to me. Opening it up I saw that it was a copy of a letter that Mrs. Duncan had sent to the Cornell admissions office.
In the letter she told them that she and her husband had always been proud alumni supporters of the school, and that she would like them to consider very closely my application for enrollment as she found me to be an exemplary individual, and exactly the kind of student that would fit right in at Cornell. She also told them that she was enclosing a check for one hundred thousand dollars payable to the alumni fund. She hoped that the institution could find good use for it—perhaps to help support an incoming freshman—like me.
“THE MOVING VAN’S HERE, MADDIE,” Ma called.
I was upstairs going through old notebooks from school, trying to figure out which ones to keep and which ones to toss. School had let out a few days earlier, and I was sick of looking at the stack. I’d almost forgotten that a new family was due to move into Mrs. Duncan’s house.
“Maddie?” Ma called again. I smiled. She no longer called up the stairs impatiently, and we no longer had clients going into that back room. Ma had turned it into an office for herself. She’d started to take some courses to get her nursing certificate back, and she spent a lot of time in there studying.
“I see it, Ma!” I called down to her after standing up and taking a peek through the curtains.
“Why don’t you go over and introduce yourself?” Ma asked.
I realized she’d come up the stairs and was talking to me from the doorway of my room.
“Why don’t you?” I asked her playfully. These days I loved looking at her. Her skin glowed now that she was off the booze and the cigarettes. She’d even taken up yoga and had turned vegetarian. The rehab center had completely transformed her. In fact, according to the new date on her forehead, 8-16-2065, it’d actually saved her life.
She grinned. “Me?” she said, looking down at herself. ‘Oh, honey, I’ve been in the yard and I look awful!” Ma had been trying to do something with the garden in the backyard for days, but mostly all that was happening was that a lot of weeds were making their way into the garbage can. “You go over there first and tell me if they’re nice,” she urged.
I had a feeling she wasn’t going to let up until I said yes. Rolling my eyes, I gave in. “Okay, but text me in ten minutes in case I can’t get away.”
Ma laughed, and I smiled reflexively—hearing her happy never got old.
Once outside, I kept close to the house as I made my way down the drive. I was hoping to sort of scope out the neighbors before actually walking up to them. I heard the sound of a basketball bouncing off the pavement, but I couldn’t see who was playing with it through the pine trees that separated our properties.
Taking a deep breath I moved past the trees and looked up the drive. What I saw froze me to the spot. There was a boy taking aim at the basket above Mrs. Duncan’s garage. He was shirtless, and his shoulders were broad and his arms well-muscled, and he wore a halo of soft black curls.
I stood, unable to move for several seconds as he tossed the ball and it fell right through the hoop without touching the rim. “Nice shot,” I heard someone else say. A voice I recognized.
I turned my head and saw Agent Faraday coming down the back steps of Mrs. Duncan’s house. He spotted me, and his smile broadened. “Maddie!” he said happily. “I was about to come over and introduce you to my son.”
My mouth opened but no words came out. I swallowed and then said, “You live here now?”
Mac laughed and waved for the boy with the basketball to come over. “I bought it the second it went up for sale. I needed a place big enough for Aiden and me.” Turning to his son, Faraday said, “And this is my son, Aiden.”
My head swiveled again and I saw that Aiden was grinning at me, too. “I know you!” he said. “We met at the park last fall.”
Heat seared my cheeks as a thousand little pieces slid into place. Faraday at the Jupiter game, sitting in the stands—not running surveillance on me but in the bleachers to watch his son. The boots on his desk, and that memory of seeing them before—he’d bought a pair for Aiden. The conversations with his ex-wife…all of it came together in a moment of synchronicity that made me want to shiver with excitement. But then, I realized that both Aiden and his dad were staring at me curiously. “Uh…hi,” I said, trying to regain my composure.
“You two have met?” Faraday asked curiously.