Starter House A Novel Read Online Free

a small wind walked around her, plucking at her hair with teasing fingers. A darker, nearer shadow fell over her. She became aware of presence, the sound of breath, a weight in the air. How vulnerable she had made herself, lying on her back, half asleep, in a place where she knew nobody. She opened her eyes.
    Harry Rakoczy from next door, whom she had last seen in Eric’s uncle’s office during the closing, loomed over her like a mild-mannered predatory bird, dangerous only to the fish in his shadow. Most people loomed over Lacey, but Harry was at least a foot taller than she, though he couldn’t weigh a pound more—probably five pounds less.
    She felt she was seeing him for the first time. Before this, she’d looked at him through the house, her desire for the house; he was the owner, the opponent, the obstacle, her ally when Eric got cold feet; his was the signature that made the house hers. Now she looked at him as if she meant to draw him. He had the habitual stoop of the unusually tall. The length of his strong narrow hands and the height of his thin face rising to the black widow’s peak of hair made him seem even taller. She gathered herself out of the grass, brushing the dry bits of thatch off her clothes, hating to be caught like this, sweaty and scruffy, waiting for Eric to come home.
    “Are you okay out here?” Harry said.
    “Eric took the van and he forgot to leave the key.” She was appalled to feel herself on the verge of weeping. “And I left my phone in the van, so I can’t call him. It’s just the whole day, I don’t know. Moving. And then we got stuck in traffic forever.”
    “Moving is hard,” Harry said. “Come inside and have some tea.”
    In five minutes, Lacey was in Harry’s kitchen with a glass of sweet tea. His house was everything she hoped hers might someday be. The maple floors shone, and every piece of furniture had its own light, from the red sun shining off the polished tabletop to the rainbows flaring from the beveled edges in the china cabinet’s doors.
    He seemed restless in the beautiful room, putting down his glass and picking it up again, fidgeting with a dishcloth. “Come to the front room and see where I teach,” he said. She thought he’d been about to say something else and had changed his mind at the last moment.
    In the front room, she found the same glossy oak floors, two wooden music stands, a framed five-by-six-foot charcoal drawing of a young woman playing the violin in a whirl of long hair, and a collection of amethyst carnival glass on the mantel. Harry raised his glass of tea to the drawing. “My sister, Dora. When she was very young.”
    “It’s beautiful. Who drew it?”
    Harry’s face smoothed to a deliberate flatness, a public face, neutral as the image on a coin. “Her husband. They lived next door, in your house.”
    Lacey nodded, abashed, unable to fathom what she had done wrong. She bounced on her toes and wished she could find a way to leave without seeming rude. She followed Harry to the kitchen and accepted more tea. “Did the painters do a good job?” he said.
    “I can’t get in.” Eric could at least have left the key. She forced her mind away from the house, still withholding itself from her after all those weeks, the forms they’d signed, the down payment, and she couldn’t even get inside. A thought came to her. “The little boy on the bike. Who’s he?”
    She didn’t like the way he’d turned at the property line and kept himself so exactly in front of her house, as if he had a right to be there. It made her uneasy. Harry looked like the neighbor who knew everyone’s business, the plant waterer for friends on vacation, the third name on everyone’s emergency contact list. Lacey’s mother depended on people like this to hold her mail when she was vagrant. Lacey hoped the boy was someone’s grandson visiting, or the child of renters who were leaving in a month. Someone she wouldn’t have to worry about.
    Harry set his