Moving Gingerly

The house neared completion, and one summer day there was a knock on my door. My mother was a social worker, now employed full time in the city. I was 12, home alone and teaching myself to cook. I had tried to fry chicken while wearing a bathing suit. It was unpleasant. It involved pain, smoke, black flies on the screens. I opened the door to a sandy-haired man with a friendly smile. "I'm Jim Buttner," I recall him saying. "My family is moving in across the street. Do you have a hose I could borrow?"

I was eager to please people then, especially fathers; anyone's would do. I probably said yes and moved to get it. But at some point I must have asked, "Do you have any kids?" Or perhaps I said "children."

He smiled and said, "Yes, I have a 9-year-old son and" -- please, please, please-- "a daughter who looks about your age."

Sally Buttner became my best friend throughout high school and college. She filled the sorrow I couldn't identify in the manner that air fills our lungs, effortlessly, in a way that sustains. Scrapbooks, skipping school, our normalcy filled the hollow I would carry into my marriage -- the emptiness I would still need to fill on my own.

Eventually Sally introduced me to the boy I would marry, the father of my three children, the man who became my home; the one who burst into the bookstore with me on a blustery January afternoon beneath the soaring trumpets of Mendelssohn's "Wedding March." Last month I asked the mystic what we would do without need binding us, but how can she predict the future we have yet to choose?

I try to process Anna's news. Her bid might not be accepted on this house, but it is only a matter of time. I get that now, just as I understand that relationships evolve on the energy we put into them, while happiness will always be an inside job.

"You should remodel," I tell Anna with sudden inspiration. "Build something new. Strip what you have down to the original frame."

I like this idea and think about it on the walk home. My footsteps pound out single-beat syllables. What I hear is my husband's name.