a quiet road, which was the reason houses get bought, and the entire
transaction had the deep, almost comic ordinariness of a weather report from
a place where nothing had ever happened. Owen might have left it at that,
and let the Mosses become the kind of neighbors you wave at, if it had not
been for the car.
The mother drove a black SUV.
It was not the same make. He knew that the first time it passed him on the
lane, knew it in the way he knew bird calls and engine sounds and all the
other filed things, the shape of the lights wrong, the roof line wrong, the
wheels wrong — it was not the vehicle, it was not even a cousin of the
vehicle, which was under a tarp in a state lot two counties away waiting out
its years as an exhibit of the people versus. It was just a black SUV, of which
there were perhaps four thousand in that part of Texas alone, and Owen stood
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in his own driveway with the mail in his hand and felt the old machinery in
him start up anyway, the lift of the eyes, the noting of the time, the hand
going halfway toward the pocket where the notebook no longer was, and he
stood there and felt it run, and felt it — because there was nothing for it to
catch on, no seal number, no business on that road that was his to log — run
down, like an engine switched off and sighing back to stillness. It happened
the next day too, and the day after, weaker each time, a bell struck farther
and farther off. For a week he felt the old pull every time it passed. He told
nobody. There was, he understood, nothing to tell; it was not news, it was
weather in a climate that was changing, and you do not file a report on
weather. You dress for it, and then one morning you don't have to.
On the Thursday of that week the SUV came down the lane in the late
afternoon while Owen was up the chinaberry at the edge of their yard — not
past the second fork, in honor of rules older than the week — shelling the
high branches of nothing in particular, in the way of a boy in a tree in May. It
slowed at the Mosses' drive, the way everything slowed there, and in the
back window, as it turned, he saw a small face and a small hand pressed flat
to the glass, waving at the world in general or at the tree in particular, and
something orange pinched between the fingers like a tiny flag. He waved
back before he had consulted himself about it. The hand waved harder. The
SUV turned in and was gone behind the new fence, and Owen sat in the fork
of the tree with the bark rough through his shirt and felt the whole elaborate
machinery of the week — the times noted, the makes compared, the hand
halfway to a pocket — settle into the perspective it had been asking for all
along: there was a kid back there, riding backward through the world with a
cracker in her fist, waving at trees. Some facts you write down. Some facts
wave at you, and you wave back, and that is the complete and sufficient
record.
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On Saturday Paula baked a pie, which was the law of the county in such
cases — apple, because apple travels and keeps and offends no known
theology — and she and Owen walked it over in the late morning with the
dish towel over it, down the lane and up the Mosses' drive, where the black
SUV sat in the sun with its doors closed and was, at that range and in that
light, so completely and obviously just a car that Owen felt the last of the
week's weather go out of him like heat off a stove when the burner clicks off.
Sadie's mother answered the door with the baby on her shoulder and flour on
one wrist from some project of her own and said, "Well, glory, come in,
we've been eating off the cooler for two days," and the house inside was
boxes and a couch and a rug rolled like a scroll, and the smell of new paint,
and none of the houses' old weather anywhere in it at all, because weather
belongs to people and not to houses, and the people were new.
Sadie emerged from the back in sock feet, assessed Owen with the directness
of ten, and said, "You're the boy from down the road. Is it true there's a tree
fort in the chinaberry behind the school?"
"There was," Owen said. "It fell in the ice two winters ago. But the tree's still
good to climb if you don't go past the second fork."
"I can climb anything," Sadie said, with the confidence of a person who has
not yet been contradicted by a tree, and then, because her mother had told her
to show the guest where things were while the pie was cut, she conducted
Owen on a tour that consisted mostly of the kitchen, the location of the
bathroom, and — with the air of a curator arriving at the prize of the
collection — the back seat of the SUV, which she insisted he inspect through
the open door while she narrated. "This," Sadie said, "is where the baby sits."
The car seat, buckled in and festooned with a hanging toy. "This is where I