I went back inside and grabbed my purse and, after a moment’s hesitation, one of my grandmother’s notebooks. My father, a devoted bookworm, had carried The Wall Street Journal with him everywhere he went, and had more than once been nabbed by my mother hiding out at a party (and occasionally during the symphony) behind its pages. “Never be caught without something to read,” he had admonished me from the time I was a child. And so I toted books with me everywhere, especially places where I learned I might need a little distraction: The Story of Ferdinand to Christmas Eve services at church, Nancy Drew to the doctor’s office, novels to cotillion teas, where I learned to hide the paperbacks carefully under the edge of the tablecloth so I could read and pretend to be paying attention at the same time. That skill had served me well all through high school and at the Junior Ladies Association functions, where the other girls tried to imitate their mothers’ bizarre fascination with committee meetings and I worked my way through Jane Austen, sneezing to cover up my snickering. For years, everyone thought I had a severe allergy problem.
Despite my mother’s newfound romanticization of them as the apogee of neighbors, the Schulers hadn’t taken great care of the house. For years, she had tutted over the wood in need of repainting, the yard that was never kept to her satisfaction, the brick front walk that could have used a good acquaintance with a mason. Now I could see, as I walked over the path by the new parking lot, that Henry had changed all that. The house had been repainted, the hedges and grass were neatly clipped, the bricks on the walk had been removed and replaced with smooth, even flagstones. A subtle sign hung above the front porch steps, painted in elegant script: The Kitchen. The front porch, now empty, was filled with small clusters of wicker furniture, where people could wait for a table. I opened the front door, which had been repainted an inviting red, and stepped inside.
“Whoa, are you here for dinner?” A young man stood behind the host desk, though I thought he might have felt more at home on a surfboard. His hair was gelled into crisp spikes and he had wide, round eyes that made him look as though life were handing him a series of unbelievable surprises.
“Erm, yes?” I said, unsure how to respond to such a greeting.
“It’s kind of late,” he said doubtfully.
“I’m aware of that. Are you still serving dinner?”
“Yeah!” He brightened. “Would you like a table?”
“I would.”
“For two?” he asked, peering around me as though someone might be hiding behind me, ready to engage him in a game of peekaboo.
“No,” I said slowly, because I was beginning to guess that’s the speed at which he best operated. “Just the one.”
As he processed this new information, a waitress walked by carrying a tray full of food, including a cheeseburger piled so high with fixings that it wore the top half of its bun like a jaunty beret. The smell of it exploded as she moved, the food held high in the air like an offering, and it smelled so rich and delicious I would have fallen to my knees and begged for it if it would have made a difference.
Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary. “Follow me,” he said, picking up a menu and turning toward a side room.
I remembered the layout of the Schulers’ house immediately—over there would have been the dining room, and we were passing through the hallway toward the back, where the living room had been. A bar, made of dark wood gone shiny from use, had been built in the front room, where there were a couple of small tables looking over the front porch, and as we passed by the staircase, a server came running down with an empty tray. Had the Schulers known, I wondered, what was going to happen to their house when they sold it? Or, like my mother, had they pictured another happy family taking over, another line of generations stretching into the future, raised between these walls, playing in the yard, family dinners on the back porch during summer as night fell and the fireflies gave chase around the grass? I wondered if anyone had told them the house had become The Kitchen. Antique photos marched along the walls, other people’s lives now designated as decoration for ours.
As we passed by the kitchen, the door swung open and Henry came out. Distracted by looking at the fresh paint and the photographs of someone’s abandoned ancestors on the wall, I walked right into him.
“Oof,” I said.
“Oof,” he said, and then in recognition, after we had bounced off each other like human pinballs, “Hey! How are you?”
“Hungry.”
“She’s kind of late for dinner,” the host said. It had taken him a half-dozen steps to realize I wasn’t following him, and he was already standing beyond the archway leading to the living room on one side and what had been the study on the other.
“Austin, we serve until eleven. People can eat whenever they want,” Henry said. He strode over and gently took the menu from the boy’s hands. “Would you please go back to the host stand and check to see if anyone’s waiting, and then finish bringing up the glasses?”
“Hey, okay!” Austin said, as though this were a brilliant idea, and trotted back past us toward the front of the house.
“I’m sorry about him. I had a couple of servers call in sick, so we’re a little short-handed. He’s actually a bar-back, and a good one, but as a host, he’s . . . problematic.”
“Give me a cheeseburger and all will be forgiven. I’ve been painting for hours.”
“You’ve got a little paint right here,” Henry said, tapping his thumb on his cheek and I reached up, embarrassed, to scrape it away with my fingernails. “Are you painting to get the house ready?”