Perfect Match Read Free

it into halves and thirds. We come to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. “Nathaniel,” I whisper, just loud enough to be heard over the hum of the engine. When he glances up, I cross my eyes and stick o ut my tongue.
    Slowly, slow as his father, he smiles at me.
    On the dashboard, I see that it is 7:56. Four minutes ahead of schedule. We are doing even better than I thought.
    The way Caleb Frost sees it, you build a wall to keep something unwanted out ... or to hold something precious in. He considers this often when he builds , fitting sparkling granite and craggy limestone into niches, a three-dimens ional puzzle drawn thick and straight across the edge of a lawn. He likes to think of the families inside these baileys he constructs: insulated, safe, protected. Of course, this is ridiculous. His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and gra pe arbors. And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting, as if literal fo undations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.
    He stands at the edge of the Warren property with Fred, their contractor, as they all wait for Caleb to put on a show. Right now, the land is thick with birches and maples, some tagged to show the potential location of the house and the septic system. Mr. and Mrs. Warren stand so close they are touching . She is pregnant; her belly brushes her husband's hip.
    “Well,” Caleb begins. His job is to convince these people that they need a st one wall surrounding their property, instead of the six-foot fence they are a lso considering. But words are not his specialty; that's for Nina. Beside him , Fred clears his throat, prompting.
    Caleb cannot sweet-talk this couple; he can only see what lies ahead for them : a white Colonial, with a screened porch. A Labrador, leaping to catch monar ch butterflies in his mouth. A row of bulbs that will, next year, be tulips. A little girl riding a tricycle, with streamers flying from the handlebars do wn the length of the drive, until she reaches the barrier Caleb has crafted-t he limit, she has been told, of where she is safe.
    He imagines himself bent over this spot, creating something solid in a space where there had been nothing before. He imagines this family, three of them by then, tucked within these walls. “Mrs. Warren,” Caleb asks with a smile, the right words finally coming. “When are you due?” In one corner of the playground, Lettie Wiggs is crying. She does this all t he time, pretends that Danny socked her when the truth is she just wants to see if she can get Miss Lydia to come running from whatever it is Miss Lydia 's doing. Danny knows it too, and Miss Lydia, and everyone, except for Letti e, who cries and cries as if it's going to get her somewhere. He walks past her. Walks past Danny, too, who isn't Danny anymore, but a pira te, clinging to a barrel after a shipwreck. “Hey, Nathaniel,” says Brianna. “ Check this out.” She is crouched behind the shed that holds soccer balls as s oft as ripe melons, and the ride-on bulldozer that you can only ride on for f ive minutes before it's someone else's turn. A silver spider has stretched a web from the wood to the fence behind it, zagged like a shoelace. At one spot a knot the size of a dime is tangled in the silk.
    “That's a fly.” Cole pushes his glasses up on his nose. “The spider, she wrapp ed it up for her dinner.”
    “That's so gross,” Brianna says, but she leans closer. Nathaniel stands with his hands in his pockets. He thinks about the fly, how it stepped onto the web and got stuck, like the time Nathaniel walked into a snowdrift last winter and lost his boot in the muck at the bottom. He wond ers if the fly was just as scared as Nathaniel had been of coming in barefoo t through the snow, of what his mother would say.