Now, though, she wasn’t entirely sure how the choosing had happened.
It was ten in the morning on Wednesday, two days after Joanna and Charles went to Sylvie’s for dessert. There had been no more talk about Scott since then, and although Joanna wanted to bring up what she’d heard Charles and his mother talking about in the kitchen, she didn’t know how. What was this fight Charles had referred to at his high-school graduation? Why hadn’t he ever told her about it, and what did Bronwyn have to do with it? How much did he think about Bronwyn, anyway? Charles had said he hadn’t spoken to Bronwyn in twelve years, but he’d never explained why they’d broken up. Joanna suspected that Charles had not been the one who had cut it off. She couldn’t exactly say why she felt this way—perhaps because of the faraway look Charles got on his face when he spoke of her. Or how when Joanna had made a snippy, jealous comment about Bronwyn one of the first times Charles had mentioned her name, Charles had immediately become defensive, as though Bronwyn was someone to protect, as though he felt unresolved about how they’d left things. Perhaps the strongest case was that Charles hadn’t dated seriously after Bronwyn until Joanna had come along. But she tried not to think about that.
She lay in bed now, staring up at the clean, smoothly plastered ceiling, willing herself to get up. Out the window, she saw the rest of the houses lined up along the streets. Their development was called Centennial. There was a stone sign at its entrance, crowing the name in curly “We the People” font. The streets’ names had something to do with American ideals. There was the cluster named after great American leaders: Washington, Franklin, Hancock; there was Valor Drive, Integrity Circle, and Freedom Court. Joanna and Charles lived on Democracy, just past the dog park and the jogging path and the playground.
It was nothing like Joanna’s old neighborhood in Lionville, with its hodgepodge of houses linked together by a gate at either end, her own house slightly on the bedraggled, lower-class side. Each house in Centennial was big, beautiful, and perfectly maintained in exactly the same way. The only flaw was the line of houses on Spirit, two streets down. They were originally models, but the developers had decided to try to sell them off. Charles had put a down payment on this plot before he and Joanna had seriously begun dating—a fact that he’d announced only after they’d gotten engaged and a fact that had disappointed Joanna a little, knowing that they wouldn’t be choosing a house together. But no matter. By the time the construction on their house had been completed, the market had taken a steep downturn, and the developer hadn’t started any new projects since. All the houses on Spirit were still empty. Quite a few of the “for sale” signs in the yards—LOW FINANCING! UPGRADES! REDUCTION!—had fallen over. One was missing entirely. A tree in front of one of the houses had become so overgrown it looked as if it was doing damage to the siding. There was a rumor teenagers had broken into one of the homes and were using the closets to grow pot. Maybe it was naive, but Joanna had thought life in the suburbs—suburbs like this—would be untouched by the recession. More than that, Spirit houses seemed so expendable. Without people inside them, they were without identity, mere structures of concrete and siding and faux stone.