“What?”
“You said it wasn’t in the budget. I’ll redo your website for free.”
“Oh, come on.” Glynne sighs out the words. “That’s silly.”
I clutch the wheel. “Yeah. It probably is.”
She says nothing for a while. I see my exit ahead, and I take it as she breathes into my Bluetooth. “Okay,” she says finally.
“Great. Great. You won’t regret it.” Duh. At the very least, this is a two-thousand-dollar job. I’m doing it for free. Obviously, she won’t regret it. “So . . . see you at two?”
“How about you just email me your ideas?”
My cheeks are hot. The parking ticket smirks at me from the dashboard. “Of course,” I tell her. “Of course, Glynne.”
IT’S NEARLY AS cold in my house as it is outside. I kept the heat on when I left for the city; I didn’t want the pipes to freeze. But it’s a very old house—built in 1800 or so—and terribly drafty. I’d seen romance in the place when we first moved up here from Manhattan in the spring of 2002, a wooden house still standing when enormous steel towers had so recently gone down. Matt and I had come up here for a weekend with our three-year-old daughter and a vague idea of moving away from the shell-shocked city—no place for a child, we had said—and we’d both fallen in love with the house at first sight. Since it was spring, we didn’t think about how treacherous the bluestone walkway could be in the winter if it wasn’t shoveled and salted, how rarely a peaceful mountain road like this one got plowed, or how expensive it was to heat a big, old wooden Colonial. We just saw budding rosebushes clinging to the side of a sunny yellow house and swooned like lovestruck teenagers. I can plant ranunculus and hyacinth over there, I had said. An English garden that can grow alongside Emily.
The draftiness was fine when Matt and I slept close together under piles of quilts, or when Emily was little and we’d play Apples to Apples in front of the wood-burning stove, sipping cups of hot cocoa, quilts thrown over our laps. Now that I’m living here alone, though, it’s just an old wreck with sucky insulation. On a typical winter day, I take two or three hot showers and I still can’t get the chill out of my bones.
That said, I have no intention of leaving. Leaving this house would mean starting over somewhere else, which is a thing I can’t imagine.
I throw some logs into the stove, take a shower that steams up the bathroom mirror, and change into sweats, replaying the conversation with Glynne in my mind, then the one with Luke, that maddening concern in his eyes. Does the whole world think I’m crazy?
My office is on the second floor, my desk situated across the room from a large window. I sit down in front of my closed laptop and stare out the window before powering up—the steady wind ruffling the skeletal trees, the sky already darkening. Interesting. Matt and I fell in love with the house in spring, spent so many hot summers entertaining friends in the small backyard where I tended my evolving English garden. On crisp fall days, we hiked to the top of this mountain—Mount Shady, it’s called, same as the town—and gazed out over acres of fiery leaves. But the past five years have been nothing but winter after winter after winter, one dead-cold January bleeding into the next, the other seasons lasting no longer than a clearing of the throat. The roses in front of the house don’t even bloom anymore. Or if they do, I don’t notice.
I power up my laptop, open the folder of designs I worked up for GlynneBarrettCreations.com—one simple and classic, gray lettering on a white background; the other a little brighter, the red letters bringing out the colors in the painting she chose for the title page. Glynne is a skilled artist, and popular in our neck of the woods—a landscape specialist, very Hudson River School. She had been a fresh talent when we first moved up here—a break from all the nature photography and album cover art that filled most of the galleries. We bought one of her paintings, of a barn at sunset. It was the first new decorative thing we purchased for this house, and it still hangs in the den. I like to sit across from it, watch the changing light play on the painted sky. Some quiet days, I’ve gotten lost in it for hours.