June Read Free Page B

was the doorbell she was hearing, it occurred to her that it might be someone from the bank who was ringing it. Anxiety swooped over her as she thought of all that mail she’d watched the blue-suited mailman stuff through the slot in the front door day after day: past-due notices, letters from the bank, from the legal firm that had handled the transfer of the estate. She marveled at her own irresponsibility. The broken furnace, the leaky roof, the cracked foundation. To be the person who lost, or destroyed, the family home after more than a hundred years seemed inevitable and tragic. But then, she was an orphan, her grandmother was dead, and she had no siblings; could she really be faulted for being a screwup if everyone had abandoned her?
    Cassie’s ankles were briefly patchworked in a rosy bit of light from the stained glass as she stepped down toward her fate. The bank, the bank. Fourteen thousand dollars had sounded like enough money back in November, when she’d gotten the check and the deed, but she hadn’t opened any of the cellophane-paned notices, and the phone had been ringing off the hook since yesterday. Shit. It had to be the bank.
    By the time Cassie descended the stately home’s quarter-hewn oak staircase, slippery from a century of floor wax despite the grime, the bell—it was laughable to call it a bell, really, but there was no such word as
doorblast
—had shut up. Wrapped in the old bedspread she’d pulled from the bottom of the four-poster, Cassie squinted down the ample foyer—dark no matter how sunny the day—and out the front door. She saw movement, but it was far away, and hard to make sense of through the lace curtain that sat against the thick, leaded glass. In between her and the door lay a great heap of envelopes, delivered in manageable daily bits by the whistling mailman, whose face she’d never managed to see; she usually spied on him from the second-story window.
    She hesitated for a moment. Thought of going back to bed. But then the phone started up, relentless and desperate as it had been since yesterday morning. The touch of outside—first the doorbell, then the phone—unsettled her in the way little had since she’d moved to St. Jude. Maybe they were repossessing the house. Maybe she hadn’t paid enough taxes. Maybe maybe maybe, and as Cassie’s mind swirled with the day she feared she’d be having—sweaty palms, dry mouth, pulse scurrying away from her—the anxiety charged up and changed, like quicksilver, into bold anger. Cassie strode through the foyer, kicking the tangle of envelopes out of her way. Screw the bank. Screw whatever they, or anyone else, thought they could take from her. Her grandmother had left this house to Cassie and Cassie alone, and Cassie was allowed to do whatever she wanted here, even sleep until noon in order to spend more time with imaginary people.
    Cassie’s footsteps sent the crystal chandelier rattling above her. The framed watercolor still lifes quaked as she strode to the heavy oak door. She threw it open.
    Summer buzzed.
    It hit her like a hammer, a day like this, too much light and color, too many wild roses with too many insects drinking from their hearts. Jogging away from her, down the front walk, was a man in a gray suit, smartphone to his ear. The faint dulling of wind chimes, a tractor roaring up the road, wisps of clouds across the sky like lace netting over a blue dress. Her first impulse, even after six months, was to reach for her camera, to think aperture and focus and light, which way to shoot, what to place at the center of the frame. Her palms itched, her mouth watered; it would be a good picture, or at least the chance to make one. But no; she pushed that desire away. She didn’t do that, didn’t believe in it, anymore.
    To distract herself, she focused on the stranger moving away from her. He was compact. His shoulder blades stretched against the slate gabardine, as though advertising how a jacket was supposed to fit a