Page 15 of Whistle
Annie glanced in the rearview mirror, caught a look at him. She thought he’d been sleeping. “Nothing, honey. Just talking to myself.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. You getting hungry?”
They had been on the road for coming up on two hours and even though they’d had a late breakfast, they were due for a lunch break. When Annie had proposed making sandwiches to eat along the way, Charlie had made the face of a child who’d just been told theywere having worms for dinner and asked if they could they stop at a McDonald’s somewhere.
Back in the day, she and John had been organic this, organic that, wheat germ shakes, protein bars. But having a kid changed all that, and before long her child’s tastes became her own, to the point that there were times when she would kill for a Chicken McNugget.
Charlie said he was, indeed, hungry, and so Annie hit the voice command button and asked Sherpa if there was a McDonald’s coming up. The very next exit, she informed Annie. They got off the highway, had something to eat, used the bathrooms, and, after topping up the SUV’s gas tank, were back on the road.
According to Sherpa, they would reach their destination in another two hours.
When Annie turned off a state-maintained road onto a narrower county artery, Sherpa informed her that her destination was less than a mile away. Before reaching it, the car rolled gently over a railroad crossing. The fading round yellow sign, the lettersrandrseparated by a blackx, was acned with what looked like BB-gun shots. She looked in the rearview mirror to see what Charlie was up to, whether he was comatose. She hadn’t heard much out of him the last hour, not since she had turned off the interstate and passed through Castle Creek, which really was little more than a gas station with a convenience store and a couple of churches. Sure enough, he was in dreamland.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, Charlie. Wake up. We’re almost there.”
Slowly he opened his eyes, took a moment to orient himself, and looked out his window. “Where?”
“Soon.”
She was reading names and numbers off mailboxes. The house she was looking for was 11318 Scoutland Road, and there remained the faded name of one of the previous occupants:smitherton.
She said the numbers out loud as she passed them. “Eleven-two-fifty-eight... eleven-two-eighty-six... eleven-three-twelve... hang on. I think this is it.”
“Why are there boxes beside the road?” Charlie asked.
“Those are mailboxes. You’ve seen those before. In Cape Cod.”
The things you’d assume everyone, even a kid, would know, but when they’d grown up in the city, the country turned out to be full of surprises, even totally mundane ones.
She slowed the car to a crawl and put on her right blinker, spotted a mailbox with 11318, and turned into the driveway.
The house sat back a good hundred feet from the road on a slight rise, making it look taller than its two stories. It was, in fact, imposing, like something off a postcard. It was everything Finnegan had promised. Stately, but also charming, with its dormer windows, wraparound porch, a forest backdrop, painted in a shade of blue that matched the sky. Annie felt a hopeful swelling in her heart, that this was everything she had hoped it would be.
The driveway was circular, allowing Annie to bring the car right up in front of the house, at the base of the steps up to the porch. Charlie was trying to disconnect the seat belt that held him and his booster seat in place but couldn’t reach it.
“Let me out! Let me out!”
“Hold on, pal.”
She put the car in park, killed the engine, got out, and came around the other side to free Charlie. He leapt out and ran up the three steps to the porch, wide-eyed.
“How much of it is ours?” he asked.
That made Annie laugh. Another city-vs.-country perception. InNew York, you got part or, in their case, maybe most of a building. But even they rented out the basement, which was a totally self-contained unit.
“All of it,” she said.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I mean, we don’townit, we’re just renting, but we can use every single room if we want to.” Annie couldn’t imagine that they would. There was probably twice the square footage of their home. It had three floors, and this house had but two, but the brownstone was narrow, tall and skinny, and this house spread out, like it was trying to use up as much of the land as it could.
Annie said, “See if there’s a key under the mat.”
That was equally mystifying to Charlie. He knew about keys, even though their brownstone was accessed via a keypad, but he was not familiar with the notion of leaving a key where anybody could find it. But he did as he was told, lifted up the corner of the mat, and shrieked, “It’s here!”
Annie reached the porch, took the key from Charlie, unlocked the door, and let it open into the house.
