Sabine closed her eyes suddenly and bowed her head.
“Are you praying?” Greta asked after several seconds.
Her eyes flew open. “I’m fifty-five, Greta. I’m exhausted.”
Greta sniffed. “Is something baking?”
“Weed,” Sabine said. “I’m making sugar for pixies and gummies. I sell edibles, which you’ll find around the house. Help yourself.”
“Eating weed makes me cry uncontrollably,” Greta said.
“I hear you,” Sabine said. “Anyhow, I’ll move some of the furniture out of this room so you can put a bed in here.”
A figure emerged from what looked like the closet, a young, shirtless man with ropey arms. He seemed sleepy and didn’t acknowledge them. In Greta’s confusion, she knocked over a standing lamp, which was caught by the couch, luckily, and didn’t break. The young man righted the lamp and looked at them.
“This is Mateo,” Sabine said proudly. “He’s been staying in the little cave we call the Vermeer Room, but now that you’re here, he’ll move upstairs. Right, Mateo?”
He brushed past them without a word and headed for the door.
“Go mow the field before it gets dark,” Sabine called after him. “If the mower runs out of gas, there’s a can under the porch!”
“Your gardener lives with you?” Greta whispered.
“That’s my son,” Sabine said. “The one I adopted from Nicaragua.”
Greta had forgotten about him. There were two others: one from Chile, the other from Honduras.
“He’s only here for a week, unfortunately,” Sabine explained. “He’s building a shed for the donkeys and cutting down some trees. I’m heading to the city later today, so you’ll be glad to have him around. Trust me, it gets lonely in this house at night.”
“Because it’s haunted?”
“It’s cursed,” Sabine said. “Which is slightly different.”
“Cool. Does that mean I’ll die here?”
“No,” Sabine said. “I’m having the curse… canceled.”
“How?”
“A lot of women around here call themselves witches,” Sabine said, and gave Greta a guilty look.
“You’re a witch?”
“Afraid so,” said Sabine.
“Since when?”
“Jesus,” said Sabine, and punched Greta’s arm. “You’re still really gullible.”
* * *
WHILE SABINE WAS IN THE CITY, Greta spent a few lazy afternoons in the yard with Mateo, drinking wine and talking. She sat in an old iron chair and he lay on a blanket near her feet. He was twenty, unable to grow a beard—cute, refreshing—had been a virgin until a month ago, and had already had his heart broken twice. As he talked, she thought of all the things he probably didn’t know how to do in bed, as he didn’t seem like someone with a porn habit. He had a poem habit, however—unfortunately—and had recited his favorite lines by Rilke while she focused on the strip of skin she sometimes glimpsed between his T-shirt and jeans.
“You know any poetry?” he asked.
“？‘Yes is a pleasant country,’？” she said.
It was the first line of the only poem she knew by heart. According to its author, Yes was a country one could travel to if one felt strongly enough, a place where violets appeared, where love was a deeper season than reason. Yes was a place Greta had never visited, though she longed to retire there. She couldn’t seem to get out of Maybe.
Mateo waited for her to recite the rest.
“That’s all I got,” Greta said.
“e. e. cummings,” he said.
“Who’s a smart guy?”
Her bad habit was to talk to him like a dog. “Come,” she’d said, more than once, and “Stay” and “Go lay down and I’ll bring you a treat.”
“You blush a lot,” he said. “I mean—never mind.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
He shrugged. “I was going to say, ‘for someone your age,’ but I don’t know how old you are. Around my mom’s age?”
“Not quite,” said Greta. “Subtract seventeen years, add eight, subtract eleven, add nine, subtract three.”
“Forty-one?”
“Forty-five,” she said.
“Your math was wrong.” He lifted his head and pointed at something behind her. “Some weird creature is walking toward us.”
Greta looked over her shoulder. “That’s a rooster,” she said. “His name is Walter. He only comes over on weekends.”
Walter was walking completely upright, for some reason, looking like he’d just climbed off a horse.
“Why’s he walking like John Wayne?”
“He’s practicing his mating dance,” Greta said. “For future hens.”
When Mateo asked what Greta did, she admitted to being a transcriber with writing aspirations. She wrote flash fiction, she said. On her phone. With one finger. But the truth was she only wrote notes to her mother. Nine hundred eighty-two notes, to be exact, appropriately located in the cloud.
“You should write a story from a donkey’s point of view,” he advised. “And the donkeys should talk. I mean, they should have dialogue.”
“What should they talk about—their birth charts?”
“Their anxiety,” he said. “About being the only donkeys around, or about living here with my crazy mom and a million bees.”
The bees had been very much alive at that point, swarming the entrance to the hive, a small hole in the house’s brick exterior. From where Greta sat, the hole resembled a fuzzy mouth; the bees, a long, tangled Rip Van Winkle beard.
“But the donkeys aren’t here yet,” Greta said. “And I’m not Orwell. Although, I should probably learn how to police my thoughts.”
“Who’s that again?” he asked.
“Animal Farm,” she said.
He yawned and sprawled out suggestively on the blanket. She felt an overwhelming urge to rest her hand on his lower abdomen, but then Walter moved closer and gawked at Greta with one eye. Since his eyes moved independently of one another, it seemed like he could see things Greta could not. Where do you imagine you are, Greta? Walter seemed to ask. The Italian countryside? Who do you think you are, Diane Lane?
The only creature more disheveled than Walter was Sabine’s eighty-six-year-old father, Seymour. His rusty Fiat pulled into the driveway, as it did every afternoon without fail. Since Seymour seemed made of a combination of wax and papier-m?ché, it was always unsettling to see him behind the wheel. On a good day, he bore a strong resemblance to Gene Hackman. On an average day, a wax sculpture of Gene Hackman from Madame Tussauds. On a bad day, a ghoulish funeral effigy of Gene Hackman from an underground chamber of horrors.
He stepped out of the tiny car and began ambling toward Greta. Mateo disappeared into the field. Seymour had shaved his chin and slicked his thinning hair with pomade. He was smiling winsomely, as if he were the most eligible bachelor in town.
“Sabine’s not around,” Greta said, just as she had yesterday, the day before, and the day before that.