Main Street

The house on Elm sold in August, to a couple from Brooklyn who wanted the porch and did not ask about anything else, and Wes came home from the closing with a check in his jacket pocket that he put on the kitchen table and then kept touching, as though it might evaporate if left unwatched.

"I don't want a bigger house," he said.

"It isn't bigger," Maren said. "It's a different house."

It was bigger. It stood on Main Street two doors from the pharmacy, a square white thing with a bay window and a side porch and a mortgage that Wes, who had never borrowed money for anything but his schooling, described to her in the dark that night with the words it's fine, it's really fine, they stress-tested me at four and a half, and she had kissed him and said, "I trust you," and he had believed her, because why would he not.

She had nine months to do it before the baby came, and she did it.

This is the part of the story nobody in Harrow ever held against her, and it is worth saying plainly: she was good. The bay window took a bench with a cushion she sewed. The front room went the color of wet sand again, because that color had worked and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise. She found a set of six cane chairs at an estate sale in Chatham, paid eighty dollars for all of them, and spent three evenings with a bucket of water and a screwdriver bringing them back. She learned the word patina from a website and used it twice, both times correctly. By October the house on Main Street was the kind of house people in Harrow drove past slowly.

Doreen came to see it and stood in the front room with her coat on.

"You've got money in this," she said.

"We've got a mortgage," Maren said. "Everyone has a mortgage."

"Lorraine had opinions about mortgages."

"Lorraine is dead," Maren said, and Doreen looked at her for a moment with something that might have been respect, and then took off her coat and asked to see the kitchen.

The baby came in May, three days late, at Columbia Memorial, and Wes delivered her himself in the sense that he stood at the end of the bed and held a leg and did not once look at anything else. The child was called Willa. Maren held her and felt the thing she had been promised she would feel, which was love, and then, underneath it, like a floor under a rug, the thing nobody mentions, which was that the love did not touch the other thing at all.

She had expected motherhood to be a door. It was a room. The two are not the same.

The town organized itself around her over that year in a way she had not predicted, and which she resented slightly, because it had happened without her consent. Cheryl Dunne at The Copper Kettle began automatically bringing a glass of water with lemon and no ice when Maren came in with the stroller. Gil Stratton put a jar of lollipops at the pharmacy counter at Willa's height and explained to anyone who would listen that he had done it for the child's palate development. Pastor Errol Nix, at the community church on the hill, shook her hand every Sunday and said, "And how is our girl," meaning Willa, and never once asked how Maren was.

The pharmacy tech was a boy of nineteen called Cody Rusk, with a neck that had not caught up to the rest of him and a way of holding a prescription bottle by the very top, as though it might bite. He delivered things to the house sometimes — Gil did deliveries, which the chains did not, and which Gil described as service — and on these occasions Cody would stand in the front hall and not leave, and say things like, "So, you got the bench done," and wait.

He was in love with her in the way a person is in love with the only beautiful thing in a building where he spends nine hours a day. She was kind to him. Being kind to him cost her nothing and she could afford it.

Nate Farrow came in October.

He rented the apartment over the pharmacy — one room, a hot plate, a window that looked down at the awning — and he worked in Hudson at the county courthouse, where he was a law clerk, which meant he carried files and wrote memos and was twenty-five and had been to the city and come back, which in Harrow is a biography.

Maren met him at The Copper Kettle on a Thursday in the slow hour between lunch and the after-school rush. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a book and a bowl of chili. Gil was there, and Cheryl, and the conversation was about a house on Route 9 that had been bought by someone from away who had put up a fence. Nate said, from the end of the bar, that the fence was probably fine, because the deed was from 1911 and nobody had ever surveyed the line, and Gil, who had been holding forth, said, "Who asked the lawyer," and Nate said, "Nobody, I'm just reading," and went back to his book.

She asked him what he was reading. He showed her the cover as though apologizing. It was a novel, in paperback, with a cover she did not like. She said, "I've read that one," which was not true, and he said, "Then I'll tell you the ending," and she said, "Please don't," and that was the whole of it, and she thought about it on the walk home with the stroller: the fact that a man had been sitting at the end of a bar reading a book, and that she had spoken to him, and that he had not asked her one question about the baby.

They became, over the winter, two people who nodded.

That was all, and it was a great deal. There is a kind of hunger that is fed by almost nothing, and Maren's was that kind: it ran on glimpses. A nod from a man reading a book at the end of a bar. A shoe on a lawn. A table setting with a peony laid flat. She went home and fed Willa and put her down and sat under the paper lamp in the front room of the house on Main Street, with the mortgage in the drawer and the bench in the bay window and the cane chairs brought back from Chatham, and she was not unhappy, and she was not anything, and the absence of feeling was the thing she could not forgive.

In February she went online and enrolled.

The program was at the New School, a continuing-education certificate in interior design, twelve Thursday evenings from September, six to nine, with a studio session on three Saturdays. The page showed a photograph of a woman in a black turtleneck holding a roll of drawings. The tuition was two thousand four hundred dollars. She put it in the cart. She took it out. She put it back in on a Tuesday when Wes had been called out at two in the morning for a man on Route 22 who had stopped breathing, and had come home at five with his shirt inside out, and had slept through the breakfast and the baby's bath and half of the morning.

She paid with the card, not the account. It felt like a distinction at the time.

The confirmation came by email in nine seconds: You're in. See you in September. She read it twice and then deleted it, and then went into the front room and stood at the bay window looking out at Main Street, where Gil Stratton was across the road fitting a new chalkboard into the frame of his window, and Pastor Errol was two doors down unlocking his church, and everything was exactly as it had been, and everything had changed by the width of a Thursday.