"You visiting family?" Ray asked.
"My mother," I said. "I live in Singapore. I've been away six years."
He whistled. "Six years. She'll be glad to see you."
"She will," I said, and hoped it was true, and hoped, too, that gladness was all I would find waiting for me. Ray told me about his daughter in Knoxville and his grandson's Little League team while the town slid past, and I nodded in the right places and thought about how strange it was to be a tourist in the place that had made me. I had left Cedar Bluff at twenty-two for college and never really come back — four visits in eight years, each one a long weekend, each one stage-managed by my mother to look effortless. She had always met me at the door with a meal ready and the house gleaming, and I had always praised the gleam without once asking who had done the gleaming. The thought landed like a slap, there in the back of Ray's taxi, and I pushed it away, because I was not ready for it yet, because the plane had barely landed and I still wanted, desperately, for everything to be fine.
We turned onto the quiet street, the 1970s brick houses with their big porches, the maples already turning. And there it was: the house. Three bedrooms, brick, the porch swing I had paid extra for because my mother had mentioned, once, on a Sunday call, that she had always wanted a porch swing. The lawn was mowed. The hedges were trimmed. The maple in the front yard was a flare of red. For one full second, looking at it through the taxi window, I felt the pure, clean relief of a plan that had worked. I had bought this. I had done this right.
Then I saw the truck in the driveway. A big pickup, newish, with a dealership plate frame. And a basketball hoop bolted to the garage. And a child's bicycle tipped on its side by the porch steps.
My mother did not own a pickup. My mother did not play basketball. My mother was seventy-one years old and lived alone, as far as I knew.
"Something wrong?" Ray asked, watching me in the mirror.
"No," I said. "No, everything's fine." I paid him, tipped him too much, and stood on the sidewalk with my suitcase while he drove away, and stared at the house that looked the same and then, the longer I looked, did not.
The curtains in the front window were different — heavier, darker than the ones I had helped my mother pick out eight years ago. There was a satellite dish on the roof that had not been there. The porch swing was gone. In its place were two plastic chairs, the cheap white kind, one of them cracked.
I stood there long enough that a woman watering the roses next door stopped and stared at me. Eleanor Vance. I recognized her — she had been our neighbor for twenty years, back when we lived in the rental across town, and she had followed my mother here, buying the house next door two years after I bought this one. She raised one hand in a wave that was more question than greeting.
I waved back. I picked up my suitcase. I walked up the front steps of the house I had bought for my mother, and I knocked on the door, because something in me already knew I no longer had the right to just walk in.
The seconds stretched. I could hear the television inside, a laugh track, and then footsteps, and I stood there with my suitcase in my hand like a traveling salesman, like a stranger, rehearsing my smile. I had imagined this moment a hundred times in Singapore — the door flying open, my mother's arms around me, the smell of her kitchen. None of my imaginings had included knocking. None of them had included the particular humiliation of standing on your own mother's porch, the porch you paid for, waiting to be let into a house you bought, hoping someone was home.
Chapter 3: Scrubbing the Floor
Mark opened the door. My older brother, forty-two, in a golf shirt and jeans, his hair going gray at the temples in a way that suited him, his smile wide and immediate and utterly unconvincing.
"Diane!" he said, and pulled me into a hug that felt like a performance. "You're here! You're actually here. Come in, come in — Mom, she's here!"
The living room had a television the size of a small car. On the couch sat a woman I assumed was Tina, Mark's wife, forty, with tired eyes and a paperback held up like a shield. On the floor, cross-legged in front of the television, was a teenage boy with headphones around his neck — Josh, fifteen, who had been nine the last time I saw him.