The Rented House

The courtship was conducted mostly in parking lots, which suited both of them. He would finish at the clinic at six and drive the twenty minutes out to the orchard road, and they would sit in his Subaru with the engine running for the heat and talk about the day, and then he would say, "Are you hungry," and they would go to the diner on Route 9 where the waitress knew him and called her honey in a way that made Maren's teeth hurt. He ordered the same thing every time. He asked her about the pruning. He had no opinions about anything else, and this, in a man of thirty-two, she found restful.

His mother came to the diner once, uninvited, and sat down.

Doreen Aubrey was a small hard woman with a purse like a piece of luggage and a way of looking at Maren's hands as though taking inventory. She said she was glad to meet her. She said Wes had told her nothing. She said, "He's been unlucky in this department before," and looked at her son when she said it, and Maren understood, with the clarity of a person who has spent her life among fruit, exactly what kind of woman Doreen believed she was, and decided on the spot to be precisely that woman and nothing more, because it was easier than correcting her and because the correction would have taken years.

They were married in May in the Methodist church on Route 9, with twenty-two people present, and Maren in a dress she had altered herself. Dale gave them a check for six thousand dollars and cried at the reception, which was held in the orchard with the bins stacked behind them and the crew invited, and which Wes remembered afterward as the best day of his life and Maren remembered as the day she understood she had married a man who would never notice that she was performing.

His own house on Elm Street went on the market in June. He could not go back into it. There were sweaters in the closets and a coffee maker set up exactly as Lorraine had wanted it, and he had developed the superstition, never confessed, that if he slept there he would do something wrong. So they rented a small house on Church Street — gray, two bedrooms, owned by a woman in Albany who had inherited it and visited once a year to be disappointed — and Maren set about the business of making it into something.

She was good at this, which was the trouble. She painted the front room the color of wet sand. She found a mirror at the thrift shop on the Chatham road and hung it opposite the window so the room appeared to have two of everything. She bought a lamp. The lamp is worth dwelling on, because it was the first object that did what she wanted an object to do: it cost ninety dollars, it was made of paper, and at night it threw a light like the light in the photographs — flat, warm, without a source. She sat under it in January and felt, for perhaps twenty minutes, that she had arrived somewhere.

Then the light bulb that came with it burned out and the replacement cost nine dollars and she bought four.

The pharmacy was where she first smelled it.

She had gone in for her father's blood pressure pills, which she picked up because the orchard was on her way to everything. Stratton Family Pharmacy occupied the ground floor of a building on Main Street that had been a bank and still had the vault, now used for the controlled substances. Gil Stratton stood behind the counter in a white coat a size too small, speaking to a woman about her magnesium. The shop was half drugstore and half something else: a cooler of drinks with words like clean on them, a rack of supplements Gil compounded himself, a chalkboard offering B-12 shots on Tuesdays.

He came around the counter when he saw her. He knew who she was within four seconds — he knew who everyone was within four seconds — and he said, "The bride," and then, to the woman with the magnesium, "Gloria, I'll be right with you," and Gloria, who had been waiting eleven minutes, said nothing, because in Harrow you did not say anything to Gil Stratton.

While he counted the pills, Maren wandered toward the back, where a door stood open onto the compounding room. It was a small white space with a stainless counter and a scale under glass and a wall of amber bottles. And it had a smell. Not disinfectant — under it, sweetish and chemical and unmistakable once you had it: bitter almond, and alcohol behind it, the way a liqueur smells before you know whether you like it.

"Arbutin, mostly," Gil said behind her, delighted to be asked. "And benzaldehyde in the flavoring. People say almonds. They're usually right."

"What is it for?"

"Whatever the prescription says." He grinned. "That's the whole idea. You can't buy it at the chain. That's why they come to me."

She bought the pills. She walked out into Main Street with the white bag and stood for a moment on the sidewalk under the awning with the taste of it already in the back of her throat, though she had not tasted anything at all.

By March the account existed.

Reyes Home was a shop she had been avoiding, because on the two occasions she had gone in, she had come out having spent forty dollars on a bar of soap and a dish towel and had needed a lie to explain it to Wes, who did not ask about money but did ask about things, and always wanted to know where a thing had come from. Tobin Reyes ran the shop the way some men run a boat: with the calm of a person who has decided that the water is not his problem. He had a beard trimmed to a geometry, and a way of holding an object — turning it twice, then setting it down on the felt — that made the object seem to have agreed to something.

On the third visit she bought a vase for sixty-two dollars and could not pay for it.

"It's fine," he said, while she stood there with her card in her hand and the terminal looking at her. "We'll put it on the account."

"What account."

"The house account." He said it as though reminding her of a thing she had already agreed to. "You're going to be in here anyway. Everyone is. No interest if you clear it inside the season. I'll write it down and you'll get a statement, and if you'd rather not have the statement come to the house, I can email."

She said, "All right," and it was the easiest all right of her life. He wrote it in a ledger with a fountain pen, and she understood later that the pen was not affectation but a technology: a man with a pen is doing something slower than a computer, and slowness reads as care.

She carried the vase home in a bag with a rope handle and put it on the dining table in the rented house on Church Street with nothing in it, and sat down opposite it in the light of the paper lamp while the furnace clicked on, and felt the particular fullness of a person who has acquired a container.

The letter came the following June.

It was cream, heavy, addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Wesley Aubrey, and it said that Mr. and Mrs. Alden Sanderson requested the pleasure of their company at the marriage of Sanderson's daughter at Sanger Hill on the twentieth of June. Wes read it twice at the kitchen table with his glasses on and said, "I don't know any of these people."

"You treated one of them."

"His father. Chest pain at a party. He was fine. He was anxious, mostly." He turned the card over as though the explanation might be printed on the back. "This is a wedding. We'd have to stay over."

Maren took the card out of his hands and set it flat on the table under the lamp, and looked at the letterpress dent in the paper, and said, "Yes."

He said, "It's two hours."

She said, "Yes," again, and then, because he was looking at her as if she had answered a different question: "Wes. We are going."