The Probable Future

“Hey, there!” Liza had opened her window so she could shout at the man on the ladder. There was a big, rusted truck parked across the street. “Think I can put in an order for some of that oak for firewood? I just love that tree. It kills me that it’s being chopped down.”

The man nodded and waved. He was tall, with fair hair and broad shoulders; he wore earmuffs to cut down on the sound of the saw. Watching him, Jenny felt something lurch inside of her; perhaps it was seeing him up on that ladder, for she had a fear of falling. Or it might be the way he was looking at her, as if he had already fallen. He hung on to one of the dying branches and watched them drive away.

“Who is that?” Jenny asked as they headed toward the dirt road everyone in town called Dead Horse Lane.

Liza was the one to laugh now. “You don’t know?”

“Should I?”

Maybe she felt queasy because of the ruts in the road and the way the SUV lurched over ditches, past the swamp cabbage and the wild peach trees. Or maybe it was because she could now see Cake House through the trees, its many architectural details thrown together to form a whitewashed wedding cake, one that was tilted on its foundation and covered with vines.

“It’s Matt Avery.” Some people didn’t see what was right there in front of them, even if they had twenty-twenty vision. Some people needed to be led by the hand or they’d miss the most important facts of their own lives. Liza shook her head as they turned into the driveway. “That’s the man who’s in love with you,” she informed Jenny Sparrow.

THE GIFT

I.

THREE WOMEN IN THE SAME FAMILY FIXING A meal in one kitchen could only mean trouble. Even at breakfast, problems were sure to arise. Someone was bound to prefer hard-boiled eggs to fried. Someone was certain to resent a comment that veered too close to criticism. Someone could be counted on to slam out the door, insisting she was no longer hungry or that she never ate breakfast anyway, and hadn’t for years. In the Sparrow household, there was the sort of civility that was far worse than yelling and screaming. It was a cold curtain of mistrust. When people related by blood were so careful with each other, when they were so very polite, there was soon nothing left to say. Only niceties that meant so little they might as well have been spoken to a complete stranger. Pass the butter, open the door, see you after school, there’s rain again, it’s sunny, it’s cold. Has the dog eaten? Has the window been shut? Where are you going? Why is it I don’t know you at all?

Such statements did not add up to anything like a family, and yet Elinor Sparrow had hope. True, she and Jenny had spoken less than a mouthful of words to each other since Jenny’s arrival; they had sat down together at the dinner table on a single occasion, and then only because Stella forced them to do so—an attempt which, having been met with nothing but awkward silence and lukewarm asparagus quiche, had not been repeated. Still, you never could tell. Especially when it came to family. You thought you were done with someone, and they’d reappear when you least expected to see them. Who, after all, would have ever imagined Jenny Sparrow would be living at Cake House again? No one in the town of Unity, that was certain. No one in the entire Commonwealth, Elinor was willing to wager. And yet here was Jenny, sleeping on the best linens, hand-stitched and presented to Amelia Sparrow from Margaret Hathaway eighty years earlier, in gratitude for easing the birth of her newborn son, Eli, a gentleman now so old patrons had to repeat themselves twice whenever they got into his taxi, and, even so, they still had a good chance of winding up at the wrong address.

Elinor had used the best of everything to make up Jenny’s room. She’d swept the floor herself, so there were no spiderwebs or mouse droppings; she’d opened the windows, to ensure fresh air. On the bureau, she’d left a vase of branches from one of the peach trees on the hill, well aware that Jenny would not have wanted anything that grew in her mother’s garden. It was a good choice; when the forced blossoms opened, the room smelled like peaches and had filled with the dense heat of summertime.

Luck came in threes, or so Elinor’s grandmother had always said. First there had been Stella’s arrival, then Jenny’s, wouldn’t it make sense for something equally impossible to follow? Of course, Elinor could not expect a reversal of her medical condition—she found herself weakening more each day, needing more sleep and less food—but perhaps the rose in the north corner of the garden would indeed be blue. It was no less unlikely an event than her daughter’s return. And there was Jenny, in the flesh, washing her face with cold water in the mornings, for the hot tap never quite worked at Cake House, fixing herself a cup of strong coffee, the beans hand-ground, for the electric grinder was on the fritz, before she headed down the lane to the tea house, where she’d taken a job.