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  As Sylvia’s hind leg scratched the air in response to the attention, Annie’s mind wandered back to her meeting with Ben Wilder. He’s not fat, but he’s not happy, either. Annie’s calves protested the hunkered position. She rose to her feet and shivered, her air-drying skin registering a welcome sensation of chill. It didn’t last long. By the time she dropped her sweat-dampened jeans into the washer and donned a fresh pair she felt beads of perspiration reforming above her long upper lip.

  You look more Gallic than Gaelic, a long-ago lover had told her. She toweled her thick short hair, brushed it up and away, and then allowed it to fall into a dark nimbus around her face. “A good no-fuss haircut is worth every penny,” her sister-in-law had assured her. Not worth the two-and-a-half-hour trip to the Boston salon Mary Beth had recommended, but the grapevine-touted stylist removed by marriage from Manhattan to the main street in a nearby town had come through like gangbusters.

  “Gangbusters,” Annie muttered under her breath as she negotiated the steep staircase. “If that doesn’t date me . . .”

  She walked through the shadowed, sparsely furnished living room. She usually spent an hour or two after dinner working either at the drawing board or the computer set up in one corner, but she preferred to idle away her few free hours in her bedroom, reading propped up against down cushions on the queen-size bed—another indulgence—or watching reruns of old TV favorites.

  As she passed the big fireplace, she caught a whiff of smoke from the blackened bricks. Sometimes she fancied she could still smell the cheap perfume of the whores her father had brought here to his weekend hideaway. The wide chestnut floors, stripped of their baby-blue acrylic carpeting on her first visit after recording her deed, had long since been sanded and waxed; the peach paint on the old plaster was sealed away under three flat coats of ivory—Jesus, Annie, three ?—yet on a warm, humid evening like this, she could swear a trace of musk still lingered.

  Annie hurried through to the kitchen. She heard Sylvia’s nails clicking close behind her, but the ensuing poor-old-starving-dog routine was given short shrift.

  “Kibble. Period.”

  The dry offering, briefly nosed, was abandoned for a favored station under the scrubbed pine kitchen table, making it impossible for Annie to sit there without the dog’s huddled black hulk nudging her toes as an ongoing reminder of her hard-heartedness.

  Annie took an oversized goblet from the natural-finished, glass-windowed pine cupboard above the long butcher-block counter. The cupboard’s simple, straightforward design, adapted from the old pie safe that stood against the opposite wall, had presented no problems; the bubbled glass panes were another story.

  “It has to be special-ordered,” Rob had told her. “There’s not much demand for glass you can’t hardly see out of, you know.”

  She knew, but she didn’t care. The house had suffered enough indignities at the hands of her father. Then Harry Chapman had recalled the old windows he’d helped his cousin replace with insulated storms and sash. The fragile panes had been stacked out in his barn; his cousin’s widow, glad to get them out of reach of her grandchildren, had relinquished them to Annie with her blessing. Their iridescence more than repaid the hours Annie had spent fitting their slightly varying dimensions to the door frames she had constructed and whose edges Harry had beaded with his usual precision.

  Nominally retired. Harry had come on board with the understanding that the hours he worked would be limited by the amount of earnings his Social Security allowed him without penalty. By the end of his second month he was working regular shifts alongside his younger companions.

  His pace was slower, but Annie knew his skills—as mentor as well as with the mahogany-handled, brass-fitted planes inherited from his father—had contributed significantly to her growing reputation for distinguished renovations. Knowing, too, that one of these days he would retire in fact, she had started a savings account in Harry’s name to receive the portion of wages he refused.

  Annie filled her goblet from the jug of Gallo’s Chenin Blanc that she kept in her refrigerator. Eyeing the level—she wanted to relax, not get zonked—she poured half back into the jug and added water from the tap. What was it they called it? a spritzer? She grinned—sounds a helluva lot classier than watered wine—plopped in a couple of ice cubes, filled a basket with white corn chips, and returned to her chair in the spruce grove.

  A car drove by and Annie responded automatically to the honk and wave from the unseen driver. Across the road, beyond the willow-edged brook that sheltered trout under its grassy undercut banks, a tractor moved across the lush meadow, ejecting bales of hay in its stubbled wake. She eyed her lawn, overdue for a mowing, and sighed. There was so much to do. Too much to allow for loneliness, but . . .

  She took a gulp of the icy wine-and-water mixture and skittered her attention away from herself to the swallows swooping for insects thrown up during the tractor’s cruel passage. A classic example of catch-as-catch-can.

  She took another sip and wondered how soon Ben Wilder would get around to sending her the plans. Given his timetable, it had better be damn soon. But please, God, not this weekend.

  Annie was still new enough to small-town life to relish the Fourth of July celebration Zion went all out for. She helped with the homemade floats that trundled down the main street; she applauded the local dignitaries who waved, red-faced, from their perches on the folded tops of convertibles commandeered for the occasion. She even enjoyed the long wait, fueled by charred hot dogs, for the fireworks whose expense was shared with the neighboring town and whose ooh-and-ahh-provoking effect was doubled by the brilliant reflections from the lake both towns fronted.

  Annie plucked another chip from the basket. Her hand paused, halfway to her mouth, as she suddenly recalled that Ben hadn’t asked for references. She stared at the chip in her fingers. “I’ll clip them to my bid,” she told it, “which, if necessary, I’ll spend the whole damn holiday figuring.”

  Oh sure, and how do you plan to get the subcontractors’ estimates and the cost of special materials on the biggest weekend of the entire summer?

  She waved the chip in the air, its shape blurring in the shortened focus. “Catch as catch can,” she muttered aloud, turning it into a chant like the mantras taught to her at the commune all those years ago.

  As she did so, Ben Wilder slid back into her mind’s eye. The rumpled chinos, sweat-streaked shirt, and tired sag of his shoulders had failed to hide the essential dynamism evident in his hands’ thrusting gestures and the keen intelligence animating his sky-blue eyes.

  Annie brought the chip to her mouth and crunched it resolutely between her even white teeth.

  “Yes indeedy,” she said aloud. “I’ll sure catch you if I can.”

  Chapter Two

  The Federal Express van pulled up in front of Annie’s house on Friday just before quitting time. The Tyvek-enclosed packet the driver gave her was as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory.

  “Damn it all to hell,” she muttered, shifting the bulk in her hands to free her fingers for signing the receipt.

  The driver handed her a copy. “There’s more,” he said. He returned to the van for seven cardboard tubes, which he piled on the low stone wall that stretched along the road frontage on either side of the wide granite steps. “Happy Fourth!” he threw over his shoulder.

  Annie glared at his retreating back. Yeah, sure.

  Rob ambled down beside her. He flicked a corner of the package in her hands with his thumb and forefinger and tapped the tubes with the dusty toe of his boot. “What’s he planning to build, a cathedral? Football stadium? Never saw so much paper for one rinky-dink house.”

  Annie grinned at him. “What do you say we see just how rinky-dink it is?” Her crew, their tools already cleaned and stored for the long holiday weekend, loitered nearby, obviously curious but unsure of their welcome. “Teddy? Mario? How about bringing the table into the sun where we can see. And Harry, I could use your knife to op
en this.”

  The two younger men eagerly complied, and then Harry slit open the white glassy envelope with a practiced swoop of his sharp blade, spilling the contents out onto the weathered redwood table. On top of the bound copies of specifications lay a black-and-white sketch of a structure barnlike in general appearance, but with design refinements a dairy farmer would be unlikely to find necessary for cows.

  Teddy mopped his red face. “Wow. It’s big.”

  Rob traced the strong, sure lines with his finger. “Nice. Nicest I’ve seen in a long time.”

  Harry wiped the dust from the lenses of his eyeglasses and peered closer. “You say this fellow’s from the city?” Annie nodded.

  “Well, he’s got a feel for the country up here, I’ll say that for him. Not like that yahoo what dreamed up the White Elephant.”

  They all laughed at the name given to the white-painted concrete-and-glass blockhouse built in town the year before, inspired both by its size and the similarly named table of jumbled items sold each year at the Zion Church Fair.

  Annie opened one of the tubes and unrolled the big sheets of plans across the length of the table.

  “No elevations?” Teddy asked.

  She smiled at his plaintive tone. She knew Teddy, the newest and youngest member of her crew, still had trouble visualizing a structure from plans alone.

  “He doesn’t need them, Teddy. It’s his house, remember?”

  “Well, yeah, but won’t someone else be living in it, too? I mean, a house this big ...”

  Annie frowned. Come to think of it, he hadn’t said.

  Rob looked up from one of the copies of the specifications. “Didn’t he say he wanted a contract price?” Annie nodded. “We’ve never worked with some of the stuff in here-bronze window casings, black granite kitchen counters—time and materials’d be a lot safer, Annie.”

  “At least it’s all here, Rob,” Mario said. “That big outfit I worked for in New Haven? They mostly did fast-track jobs—you know, building while the plans were still being drawn?”

  Annie laughed. “We’ve done a few like that ourselves, Mario.”

  “Not like those, Annie. Projects in the millions, with interest piling up on loans and the working guys getting the heat.” He shook his head. “My stomach’s never recovered from it.”

  “Strictly ulcerville,” Teddy said. “And he has his bottle of Tums to prove it, right, Mario?”

  After everyone had a chance to leaf through the plans Annie rolled them up and slid them back into the tube. “Go home, guys. The sooner I get to work on these, the quicker I can get estimates....”

  Her words drifted off as she looked up into four pairs of concerned, questioning eyes. Quick? On a holiday weekend?

  “Scat!” she cried brightly, putting down the tube to make shooing gestures with her hands. “I have a lot of work to do before I’ll know which jobs we’ll have to subcontract out, and I can’t do it with you hanging around looking as if the day of judgment is at hand.”

  They straggled off. Rob paused at the door of his truck. “Annie?”

  She sighed. “Go home, Rob. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Annie spread out Ben Wilder’s meticulously drawn plans—by him or an assistant? she wondered—on her drawing table and worked until midnight, wishing she could work longer but finally succumbing to the eyestrain brought on by switching back and forth from the plans to the specifications. As she plodded upstairs, with Sylvia following in her footsteps, cold nose prodding the tender skin behind her knee, she thought of what Rob had said about the house. Nice. If anyone else had said it, it would have seemed at best lukewarm, but from him . . .

  Annie recalled the discussion they’d had soon after Rob came to work for her. How defensive he’d been! Not wanting to work for a woman, but ashamed to admit it, he’d taken his frustration out on little things. Like her use of the word nice to describe a colonial door surround he’d reproduced for a renovation they were doing.

  “Nice?” he’d exclaimed, obviously affronted. “Nice ? Jesus, Calhoun, how wishy-washy can you get!”

  She’d explained to him that she meant nice in the sense of exacting. “Well-executed. Marked by great precision.”

  He’d stared at her, then grinned. “No kidding? It means all that? I thought you only used it for . . . you know, to describe ...” Suddenly at a loss, he’d given her a sheepish look.

  “Girls?” Annie guessed. He nodded, and they enjoyed a good laugh over it.

  They’d been friends ever since, although she acted more as his mentor than a pal. Rob had a quick, untutored mind eager to soak up the unrelated bits of information she threw out during any given workday. He even listened to her offhand observations. Really ? he’d say, or, I never thought of it that way.

  It was flattering. Sometimes Annie wondered if he wanted more, but he was married and she was just enough older . . .

  It wouldn’t, she had told herself, be nice.

  Annie woke to the predawn song of the birds who had chosen her yard for their summer residence. To her, the scattered treetop chirpings always seemed a sort of girding of feathered loins to face the demands of the approaching day.

  “Tweet, tweet,” she cheeped from under her summer-weight blanket, preparing herself to do the same. Sylvia lumbered to her feet and peered, perplexed, across the top of the bedding at her. Annie smoothed her hand up and across the old dog’s furry brow. “Not to worry, old girl.”

  A distant boom made the dog cringe. She looked at Annie reproachfully. “It’s the Fourth of July,” Annie explained, “and that’s the first of many, I’m afraid.”

  Fireworks were illegal in Connecticut, and had been for a long time, but every year in every town someone was sure to smuggle them in from the Carolinas, and by the end of the day relieve one or two careless celebrants of a finger or an eye.

  Was it worth it? Annie mused. Certainly not to Sylvia, who was sent scuttling down the stairs by a succession of closer, louder booms. Annie threw on a clean shirt and jeans and headed barefoot after her, hoping to lure the dog outside for a brief visit before she hid herself in the cellar.

  The sun appeared above the hills just as they stepped out on the granite front step.

  “Mommy’s here, never fear,” Annie chanted in the soppy tone characteristic of pet owners sure of not being overheard. The sole of her foot encountered the broad head of a framing nail hidden in the overgrown grass. “Ouch and damn it to hell!” she cried, provoked not so much by the nail as by the blue-sky perfection of the day she would be spending inside, working. The sun’s rays slanting through bedewed cobwebs on roadside grasses spangled them with stars; the clear, still air smelled sweetly of drying hay.

  Another hot one, Annie judged, squinting at the haze on the horizon, but who wanted a cool Fourth? No, heat was wanted, required, really, for lemonade and potato salad, for swimming and sunburn, for softball and too much beer.

  Damm-it-to-hell, she repeated softly, knowing she would miss it.

  Boom-buh-buh-BOOM.

  Sylvia scrambled to the door, her frantic paws deepening the groove her nails had carved in it over the years.

  After waving her into the cellar and turning on the coffeemaker, Annie decided to visit the Wilder site. Now, she decided, before it was too hot to walk it in reasonable comfort.

  She climbed into her Subaru, put a coffee-filled Thermos and a couple of granola bars on the seat beside her, and started up the long, winding hill. One-hundred-thousand-plus miles had gradually turned the little wagon’s silver paint to pewter, but its four-wheel drive still thumbed its nose at Zion’s less-traveled roads—many of them still dirt. No camel, no mule had served its master better.

  No matter how often she drove the road that led from her house to town, she never took for granted the venerable maples that marched along it, shading it in summer, for two, almost three miles, up from the valley floor where her house stood, over the brow of the hill and down the other side. Age and disease and storms
had left gaps here and there along the way, but not until the road widened out through Zion’s small business district had they been felled en masse. Progress.

  Annie often envied the serene faith in the future that had allowed those long-ago farmers to plant trees they knew would outlive them. The good old days. Good, until you thought of those same farmers’ wives dying in childbirth, and too many of their surviving children being taken by pneumonia and diphtheria.

  When the hilltop property Ben Wilder had bought first came on the market the previous fall, Annie had asked Harry, who knew it well, to advise her about buying it for development. On the way up to inspect it, she had asked him whether he’d be willing to exchange the life of one of these great old maples for a man’s. It was a foolish question—she couldn’t remember what had led up to it—but he’d looked at her sideways and told her, in his mordant Yankee way, that it kinda depended on the man. Remembering, Annie grinned, shifting gears as the wagon edged up the grade near the top.

  In the end she had decided not to buy the parcel, sixteen acres in all, because she couldn’t bear to divide it.

  “I don’t understand,” Mario had said when she told them about it during a lunch break on a renovation job they had done last winter. “If you’d be willing to build a house on a lot bought from someone who did subdivide it, why not do it yourself? More money that way.”

  “More risk, though, right?” Teddy asked.

  “It’s not a matter of risk so much as intent, Teddy.”

  Teddy and Mario exchanged blank looks. “Go on, Annie,” Rob had said, sounding like an anxious parent. “You know, like you told me.”

  “You see, if I bought it and developed it, I’d have no one but myself to blame for carving up that orchard and dismantling stone walls covered with lichen that started growing there when our grandparents were kids.”

  “Jeez, Annie,” Teddy said, “the stones can always be used someplace else, and those apple trees are getting pretty old.”