She was combing her fingers through the grass, on her hands and knees now. “Wasn’t there a second key? To this lock?”
“I only saw one.”
“I could have sworn there were two.”
He crossed the yard and dropped to his knees outside the gate, patting around on the other side of the fence. “It’s not as if they’re small,” he said. “Only in Yellow Springs does a lock sized for fairies come with a key sized for giants.”
She laughed. “One of the few benefits of being single is that I get to pick out my own stuff. Don’t ruin it for me!”
She poked her head around the corner, and pain clouded her vision in a way that made her realize where the expression seeing stars came from. Paul moaned from the force of their head butt, and they lay curled on the grass, like football players downed on a field.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she groaned, hands to her head. “I don’t know how goats do it.”
“They eat sweaters too,” he mumbled. “Dumb animals.”
He crawled to where she was still in the fetal position and swiped her hair out of her face. “Let me get a look at that forehead,” he said softly. She looked up into his eyes—she’d thought they were hazel, but up close, she could see flecks of deep green. She’d read that it was the rarest eye color, the hardest to find.
“You’re handy to have around, aren’t you, Doctor?” The thumping pain was subsiding a bit. She tried to smile. He ran a fingertip across the throbbing spot on her forehead, and for a fleeting second she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he touched his own.
“We’re going to have matching goose eggs,” he said.
“What will the neighbors think?” she joked.
His eyes clouded, and she realized her mistake. She’d broken the spell. One wrong joke, and he was no longer a back-on-the-market man helping a single new neighbor in her garden. He was an estranged husband, a hurting father, a subject of neighborhood speculation, with an empty shell of a house filling the space where his home used to be just across the street.
She supposed she should let the awkward silence descend, send him on his way.
But it felt oddly safe being in the presence of someone who was even more unavailable than she was.
23
For Father’s Day, we hope you’ll enjoy this questionnaire where the children’s responses to oral prompts were recorded verbatim. “1. My daddy is good at: Fixing things (but only our things, because when he lets other people borrow his tools they mess them up).”
—Laminated list from the Circle of Living, hanging on the door of Benny’s workshop (to remind him to stop being such a softie about lending people things)
The dog seemed to sense he was auditioning for a part he hadn’t gotten yet, the way he pranced in circles, barking happily, as Thomas raced him to his tennis ball, launched it across the yard, and gave chase all over again. Clara imagined that she saw a gleam of mischief in the animal’s otherwise soulful eyes, as if he knew he was going to win her over, and when he did, he’d have a few surprises under his collar. The mischievous air should have pitted her against him, but somehow it only endeared him to her more as she and Maddie giggled and clapped from their spot sprawled on a picnic blanket in the center of the action. Today was Thursday, marking a week since Thomas had been asked to leave school, and it was a relief to see him smiling as if he had not a care in the world—which, at his age, was exactly as many as he should have.
“Where’d you get him?” a voice called out. Clara turned to see Hallie cutting through the side yard, her backpack slung over her shoulder, and registered the rumbling of the school bus as it pulled away. Without awaiting a response, Hallie tossed her bag into the grass and jogged to join Thomas, matching his squeals of delight at the dog as if all had been forgotten. Clara sneaked a look at Natalie’s back porch, expecting her to burst out the door and call her daughter home at any moment. But until that moment came, she wasn’t about to send the girl away. Torn though Clara was between a knee-jerk dread and a genuine happiness to see Hallie, it didn’t matter which emotion would win out, because being the one to back away was akin to admitting wrongdoing—something she would not do.
“We got him yesterday at the farmers’ market,” Thomas told her proudly. “Can you believe it? We only went for corn on the cob!”
Hallie raised a disbelieving eyebrow at Clara, but crazy as it sounded, he spoke the truth. She hadn’t given serious, immediate thought to adopting so much as a goldfish until they’d come upon the rescue shelter booth. Clara should have turned on her heels when she saw it; the volunteers had a knack for trotting out the cutest contenders, and she and the kids had been instantly, overwhelmingly smitten. The tricolored mutt was shades of blond, medium sized and medium haired except for his head, which was disproportionately large and covered with what amounted to overgrown bangs. She’d had a stuffed animal that looked just like him when she was a kid.
“I don’t know…” she’d told the adoption liaison, a kind-looking man whose tie-dye shirt and neat cornrows exuded an aura of calm. “Even if he’s as good with kids as you say, my daughter is only a year old. This probably isn’t the best time to introduce a pet. She might test his limits.”
He’d waved a hand in the air. “Try him out for a few days,” he’d said. “On loan. He’s young, but he isn’t a puppy. I wouldn’t offer him to you if I thought he was more than your family could handle.” And thus Clara had found herself standing in the kitchen that night explaining the “loaner dog” to Benny.
“Does this have something to do with how much easier animals are to rescue than people?” he had asked once the kids were out of earshot. She’d denied it, of course, though that might have had something to do with it. The rest had a lot to do with the fact that Thomas seemed to have found himself a new best friend.
Hallie flopped onto the blanket and smiled up at her almost bashfully, a look she’d never seen from Hallie before. “I have some notes to show you,” she said. “For my next edition.” She started riffling through her backpack, and Clara stiffened, her eyes again flitting to Natalie’s house and back.
“I’m not sure another edition is a good idea, Hal,” she said carefully. The first had brought the police storming her living room not two weeks ago—could nothing discourage the girl? Clara wasn’t sure if the emotion collecting in her chest was anger, admiration, or a little of both.
“If I don’t do another one, it’s like admitting I did something wrong,” she said, jutting her chin out. “If that’s, like, my only edition, people are going to think I did the paper just to get that one story out. I think it’s actually better if I keep going, don’t you?”
It was an uncomfortably sound argument, but even so, another edition was the last thing Clara wanted. No, what she wanted was to be off of her neighbors’ minds, and that meant being out of their mailboxes.
“That might be so, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be involved,” she said.
“Last time I didn’t run it by you and got us both into trouble. This time I’m trying to stay out of trouble. Please.”
Clara had to hand it to her: If she was old enough for the debate team, she should definitely join. Hallie placed a notebook in Clara’s lap, and Clara sat staring at it, as if an alarm bell might ring if she touched it.
Thomas plopped down next to them, dragging the dog by his collar. “Gentle,” Clara told him, noting that the animal did seem remarkably unfazed. She reached out to pet his head, and he licked her hand happily and panted softly.
“Can you do reporting on our new dog, Hallie?” Thomas asked her. “He doesn’t have a name.”
“That’s because he’s only visiting,” Clara reminded him.