“I’ll just go look at the house,” she said. “I ... I suppose I’ll probably stay overnight. Thank you for the tea.”
“Hang on, then,” said Grandma. “I’ve still got the sheets for the bed and a couple of Amelia’s old things. No sense roughing it if you don’t have to.”
“Thank you,” said Selena, who wanted nothing more than to bolt back to town. But the postmistress would still be there, and she was bound to ask what Selena had thought and she had to have something to say.
A minute later, her arms were full of bedding, with a pillow balanced precariously on top. She held it all awkwardly with one hand and dragged her suitcase with the other, while Copper’s leash slid down her arm to her elbow, the way you were never ever supposed to hold leashes. But she couldn’t very well turn down the bedding.
“If you decide you’re staying, I’ll bring over some of Amelia’s old stuff. You’ll need silverware and fry pans and whatnot.”
“That’s very kind,” said Selena, because it was kind, even if it wasn’t going to happen.
Grandma Billy saw her to the edge of the road and leaned on the stone wall. “When you turn the water on, it’ll spit. Let it run for a few minutes. The pump’s nearly new, but it ain’t been on for a while.”
Everyone thinks I’m staying. I’m not staying. Why are they talking as if I am?“Thank you for the tea,” she said again.
“Glad to do it. You take care.”
She followed the road around the curve of the hill, past the trees, until Grandma Billy was lost from sight.
She came around the corner, and there was the house, tucked up in scruffy green shrubs. An impressively multiarmed saguaro grew directly across the road, and an impressively dead one lay slumped beside it. Another low stone wall, like the one at Grandma Billy’s, ran along the road here, then curved around both sides of the house, though this one was devoid of peacocks.
It was a small house.Well, the postmistress said it would be.
It might be two rooms, possibly three. Certainly no more than that. It was tea-colored adobe with two windows in the front, and a wraparound porch that sagged in the middle. Some aggressive vine had eaten two of the porch posts and was making threatening gestures toward a third. There was a rocking chair on the porch that had been cobwebbed into place and glazed in pale-white dust. Solar panels covered the roof, none of them new.
There was a dirt path up to the house. White stones like blocky skulls picked out the edges of ... well, you couldn’t call them flower beds.Scrubbeds, maybe. Whatever the difference was between bare dirt and dirt with gray-green spiky things in it.
This is it. This is where Aunt Amelia lived, until a year ago.
A year ago. A year ago. A year too late.
She set that thought aside, for all the good it did her.
Once upon a time, Selena would have gone up to the house, walked around it, looking in the windows.
Once upon a time, she could talk without worrying about it, and didn’t run every sentence through her head a dozen times first. Once upon a time had come and gone and there were no happily ever afters.She let go of her suitcase, untangled Copper’s leash, and put her hand on the stone wall.
It was hard under her fingers, the stones rough, the edges sharp. She closed her eyes. She could believe that the peacock and Grandma Billy were part of a dream, but the stone wall was too clearly a real thing. If the wall was real, then everything else was real. All right. Not a dream, then. It was all really happening and her aunt was really dead and she was really broke and stranded in a town called Quartz Creek and the dead woman’s house was really in front of her.
It looked . . . friendly.
If the two windows were eyes, then the left one was half closed into a wink by the rioting vine. The porch sagged into a smile. The desert was enormous and the house was very small, but it looked brave and rather hopeful.
It reminded her of Copper when she was a puppy, deeply convinced that the world was full of kind giants who loved her, and if she only waited long enough, one would come and play.
I am losing my mind. I mean, I already lost it, I know, but now I am getting maudlin and reading things into a falling-down porch. It’s probably heatstroke. I should sit down.
If I go up to the house, I could sit down on the porch. I could even open up the door and go inside. It might be cooler in there.
Selena stood by the wall and didn’t move.
It was a nice house. She could see why her aunt might have lived there. But it wasn’t hers.
If I go in, I might start to like it and if I do, somebody will take it away from me. You can’t just walk up and lay claim to a house. That’s not how it works.
She remembered the empty houses in the middle of town, with the boarded-up windows.The postmistress told me—she said they can’t keep people in them—but it can’t be like that, notreally...
It was too easy, too unearned. You did not get things handed to you. It was a central tenet of Selena’s mother’s philosophy, that you did not just get things handed to you. Everything had to be earned.
