◆

I

They would only be in the house on Ashburn Street for six or nine months, a year at absolute most, and so although Merritt knew she should make a point of meeting the neighbors, she put it off for two weeks after move-in. She had begun to specialize in putting things off; these days she was leaden as an anchor, and Ashburn Street was the ocean floor. Screw the reverse welcome wagon, the hours of tweaking snickerdoodle recipes until she hit on one with just the right blend of nutmeg and friendliness. She was in no mood to put on a sundress.

“Should you maybe…?” tried Anthony on their first morning in the house, knotting his tie in the rising September sunlight, falling silent when Merritt shot a foot out from beneath the sheets and toward the crotch of his slim-fit trousers. He dodged it and gave the bed a wide berth as he broke for the door, the stairwell, the wide world outside. His wingtips beat out a judgmental tattoo on the pavement below: Fuck-up, fuck-up, fuck-up. It was Monday, and as a non-fuckup, he had places to be, small miracles to conduct. It was time to be friendly to strangers in transit. To excel at his job, even the parts of it he disliked or had to teach himself on the fly. His faltering suggestion—that Merritt get up and do something—drove her deeper into the plush cocoon of pillows around her.

That first day and each of the next thirteen, she waited until his footfalls faded and then begrudgingly made herself do things. She rattled around the house performing small unpacking tasks that stabbed at her temporal lobes but kept the creeping nihilism at bay. On the main floor, where her parents hadn’t laid carpet, even a small sigh echoed thunderously. She trawled Amazon and ordered rugs.

Their accumulated furniture had jam-packed the overpriced city apartment they’d left behind, giving it a cozy Breakfast at Tiffany’s vibe, but here in her parents’ single-family house it looked sparse and dollhousey and stupid. Merritt hated it, all of it, even the little birch curio table she’d bought in rosier times, trotting into Pier 1 Imports and plunking down the miraculous extra she’d saved from a first paycheck, customizing it by adding a little faux-ruby finial as a drawer pull. Formerly one of her prized possessions, it now looked like something you’d relegate to stepstool status before finally putting it out with the trash. Scuffed and dwarfish, it looked like what it was: an impulse buy chosen by a twentysomething Pinterest disciple with no real understanding of life or décor.

She stuck it in the kitchen and stacked it with cookbooks. Then, another day, she moved it to the foyer, where it would greet theoretical visitors with an array of framed photos, its ruby handle twinkling in the sunlight. Still another, she carried it up to the master bedroom and tucked her bullet-shaped vibrator into one of its drawers.

When she caught herself moving it for a fourth time, she recognized it for what it was, fucking lunacy, and forced herself out into the neighborhood.

◆

Just as she’d figured and feared, Ashburn Street was largely the same place it had been twenty years earlier. The houses were compact and crisp, timeless golden brick trimmed with powerwashed shutters. The HOA allowed some pizzazz in front-door colors, and they sparkled like a string of multicolored jewels: crimson, salmon, pearl.

Merritt’s parents had bought their house in the eighties, at a price that now seemed unimaginable. They had since moved to a different house upcounty, but still meticulously maintained this one to earn rental income—or so they had until Merritt’s great comeuppance, a for- cause firing so harsh it had obliterated any chance she’d had of being hired someplace similar anytime soon. There had followed a great valley of difficulty. A generation earlier, Anthony’s up- and-comer’s salary could have supported a family of four; now, it was either rent or student-loan payments, but not both. They fell short three months in a row, downgrading to cheap toilet paper.

And so, they had to go to her parents. The shameful slinking-back, the sheepish begging: That thing you always said, about how I could move back to the house on Ashburn Street if I needed to? So…did you really mean that?

Of course they did. When the current tenant’s lease expired, Merritt’s parents were only too happy to welcome their only daughter and son-in-law back into the family home. The circumstances worried them, but they rallied, summoning false cheer to comfort Merritt over the phone as they worked out logistics.

Won’t it be nice to have more space? said her mother, conspiratorial. You know, square footage is the secret to a happy marriage!

This is nothing to be ashamed of, said her father, jubilant. Think of all the money you’ll save on rent once you find a new job. This is how generational wealth is built!

Generational wealth. Sure it was—forgoing paying tenants to shelter a jobless fuckup. On moving day, she’d sobbed bitterly as Anthony and a buddy carried the birch curio table out of the apartment and down to the blanket-lined rental truck.

And now here they were, and again it was Monday.

She drifted toward the intersection of Ashburn and Greer, where on move-in day she’d noticed evidence of another black family, but that turned out to have been a miscue: a Haitian nanny looking after the sandy-haired children of the couple who’d bought the sprawling corner house. The nanny barely returned her hello.

Shrugging off her disappointment, Merritt turned onto Greer Lane, where the homes doubled in size. Benzes and BMWs stood in the driveways or coasted toward the distant city. Luxe marble fountains burbled on lawns you had to resist the urge to spit on. She walked west along the Greer semicircle, and there at number 303 was Lucy Shealy, watering a persimmon tree.

It had been twenty years, but the recognition was mutual and immediate. “Oh, my God,” said Lucy. “Merritt Scott? It’s really you!”

Lucy still had her cascade of amber hair, but now that they were old enough to run for President, she had chopped it to respectable shoulder length. Her twinkling eyes remained the color of Jacuzzi water. In the old days a bit of prepubescent chub had portended a future weight problem, but it had not materialized; she was long and trim aside from a mild postpartum doughiness where her top met her jeggings. Her changeable child’s face was now a beautiful woman’s, her rosebud mouth babbling disclaimers about the infant sleeping behind 303’s upstairs windows. She was closing in for a hug.

Merritt was self-conscious. Having waited out the last of sundress weather, she had draped herself instead in leggings and a tunic and a sweater—black and black and more black. She had spent two hours meticulously straightening her hair for God only knew what reason; it hung lifeless around her face. She searched her memory for her most recent shower. In the mirror she had felt broody and complex, but now before her old neighbor she felt like a low-budget Halloween witch. Still, it was nice to see Lucy after all this time. Shocking, but nice. She heard herself answering in kind: “Lucy Shealy. It’s really you!” Their torsos met, Lucy’s arms mussing Merritt’s scorched lengths of hair. She had quite a grip.

◆

“Tell me about her,” said Anthony over Japanese takeout. “You were friends?” He was being kind, Monday being the day he and his coworkers gathered weekly in his boss’s office to receive praise for the excellent work they were doing, and when he then gathered his own team in his office to pay the compliments forward. On Mondays he came home buoyant, with takeout, and did his best to make Merritt smile.

“Good friends,” said Merritt. “We used to play at each other’s houses all the time. And we got on and off at the same bus stop, so we told everyone we were sisters.” She speared a blocky hunk of tuna roll with her chopstick and studied it, remembering. Two swaybacked little girls in the flannel and vests of the early nineties, hefting bulging L.L. Bean backpacks toward the corner of Ashburn and Greer. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“Sisters,” repeated Anthony, a twinkle in his eye. They’d looked Lucy up online, finding her looking slick and winter-pink in a professional photo from the corporate job she’d left to have the baby. He pursed his lips in a performative O and whistled a string of familiar notes: Ebony and i-vo- ry….

“Shush.” Merritt kicked him lightly in the shin. “You know what I mean. Friends. Sister- friends. Joined at the hip. Little-girl stuff.”

“I get it,” he said. “That’s nice, to reconnect with her. She’s home for now? With the baby?” Merritt’s brain fired a neon warning flare, having caught the shift in his tone, the measured casualness of the question. “Home with the baby,” she affirmed tightly.

“Well, great,” he said. “Great.” He cleared his throat and shifted his weight. He was gearing up, she saw, to launch into the Should you maybes of the day, starting with some innocuous comment about their dinner accommodations. They ate perched on stools before the kitchen sink. Should you maybe finish setting up the kitchen? he was probably going to say. It had been her project for the day, but she’d met quick defeat; their formica dinette was too collegiate, all wrong for the cavernous dining space her parents had added onto the house in recent years. He was going to say that it was okay if she hadn’t readied herself to tackle job applications just yet, but maybe she could at least do something to spruce up the dinette—or better yet, maybe she should be starting to think about job applications, since eating on stools at the sink, like anything less-than-ideal, was tolerable enough if temporary. And then he would say that her catching up with Lucy was great, great, but Lucy had a baby and priorities of her own, and meanwhile Merritt’s priorities would eventually have to include job applications—

“The other sushi place is better,” said Merritt a little wildly, cutting him off before he could start. As he sputtered a bit, she showed him the pink-and-white hunk on the tip of her chopstick. “This place uses zero nori and barely any tuna. I mean, what the hell.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“No big deal,” said Merritt, rising. “Just, next time, let’s use the other place.”

What sucked, what really rankled, was that in fact both places were excellent, their fish generously portioned, but now she had to make a show of not eating the rest and of letting the remainder fall into the sparkly blue Ikea trashcan that looked all wrong against her parents’ stainless- steel kitchen appliances.

◆

A few days later, another weekday (though Merritt wasn’t sure which), Lucy came strolling up Ashburn Street from the east, the baby tied to her torso.

Merritt watched from the window in the spare bedroom they’d designated as an office. She was finding there were details she’d forgotten about the neighborhood, such as that Greer Lane wrapped all the way around and rejoined with Ashburn Street at the other end, though you had to walk a foot-trampled path and duck aggressive brambles to take advantage. The sight of Lucy approaching, brushing dogwood leaves from the shoulders of her sweater, reminded Merritt instantly: It was the quicker route. It was how they’d traveled between each other’s yards back in the old days.

At the door, Lucy was flushed but smiling. Under her arm was a bottle of Rondel, icy-necked and deep pink. “Hey there! Wondered if you’d like to chat for a bit, finish catching up?”

Merritt’s anchor heart lifted, which almost never happened these days. “Yeah, come on in,” she said, pushing out the words before she had time to worry about her grubby True Religions, the kitchen that still looked like an almighty shitstorm. Or what Anthony would say—that she was supposed to be applying to jobs. An unfinished application blazed from the screen of the laptop balanced on her forearm; she slapped the machine closed and stepped aside, taking the Rondel as Lucy entered for the first time in twenty years.

They covered lots of ground quickly, falling into a sisterly shorthand as they exchanged briefings. Many of the beats were symmetrical. They’d parted ways in high school, when Merritt’s parents moved upcounty. Then off to their respective universities, good ones; meaty, impressive degrees. Merritt’s historically black sorority and Lucy’s functionally white one. Cutthroat internships in cities full of educated singles.

Lucy had lots of good hookup stories punctuated with party drugs and names Merritt recognized. In college, she’d fucked the cutest guy from their old middle school; a few years later, a well-preserved New Kid on the Block.

Merritt hadn’t done anything like that, but she recounted her own history as juicily as possible, imagining an earlier version of herself—the 16-year-old virgin who’d last parted ways with Lucy—gawking in disbelief.

She made Lucy laugh, the sound a sultry tremolo. The wobbly dinette chairs creaked on the hardwood.

Lucy wasn’t actually Lucy Shealy anymore; she was Lucy S. Something-Else, having married a Joey Something-Else a decade earlier. Also, the baby was her third child; there were two others in school. From the pictures she pulled up on her phone, it was evident Joey’s genes had bested hers three times over. The children had the sleek dark hair of otters, espresso-chip eyes.  On Thursdays—it turned out this was a Thursday—Joey picked up the older kids from school and took them to dinner with his parents, who hated Lucy for her failure to genuflect properly. That was more than fine with Lucy. It meant Thursday was her oasis of solitude, just her and the baby from sunup to late evening. Nobody demanding the oregano flakes picked out of their alphabet pasta by hand.

“What about you guys?” asked Lucy. “No kids, looks like.”

“Nah,” said Merritt. Another swallow of the rosé and she found herself telling the rest. The closest they’d come was an abortion she’d had a few years back, weeks before their wedding. Anthony came from a family of gossipy churchfolk; he and Merritt had stared at each other over the little blue plus sign, telepathically working out the plan to stay in their good graces. It was early enough to do it with pills, each cashing in a single vacation day. Anyway, Merritt wasn’t much of a kid person. A few weeks later, clutching her peonies under the summer sun, she’d felt only relief.

“Well put,” said Lucy, nodding solemnly. “They’re real life-ruiners.” She winked and gave the baby’s back a pat.

Merritt returned to a thread from earlier in the conversation. “So you left your job?” “Had to,” said Lucy. “We were outnumbered here. But I had a good run!”

From the way Lucy lifted her glass, punctuating this answer with a long chug of Rondel, Merritt understood that they weren’t going to get into it—but according to LinkedIn Lucy had been hot shit, a high-ranking marketing dynamo at one of the largest regional retailers of women’s workout apparel. The sort of thing no 11-year-old would name as her dream job, but that many working women 35-44 would kill for. It was obvious how she’d risen to the top that fast. You could see the jets of intensity behind her eyes, the controlled intelligence in her posture. She was nothing like the millions of friends Merritt had lost to motherhood, who couldn’t string together two sentences without lapsing into banalities about caesareans and sleep training.

“How are your parents?” asked Lucy.

“Fine. They live up north. Not even a half-hour away.” Merritt paused. Emboldened by the wine and the camaraderie, she added, “They’re letting us stay here for free, until, you know. I find something else and we can go back to renting. Yours?”

“Both gone,” said Lucy. “Five years, three years.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Merritt. Trying to locate a memory of the elder Shealys’ faces, her mind settled instead on an image of Lucy from fifth grade—pudgy, wearing a handsewn dress in colors that put one in mind of dusty mantelpieces. The Shealys were old parents by the standards of the time, close to retirement age, which back then had categorically meant small but noticeable missteps. Sending their kid to school in starkly wrong clothes, spouting inscrutable film references. Merritt supposed their deaths might have been normal, timely ones. It seemed okay to add, then, “I guess that means the house is yours.”

“Yep. We were looking to buy around then anyway. I would have picked something downtown, but, you know.” Lucy gave her glass a swirl. “So mote it be,” she added, and tilted back to take a long swallow. The baby emitted a little bleat at the change of balance, but slept on.

◆

“Mote,” said Anthony. “The fuck does that mean?”

Merritt stopped what she was doing—measuring an overhead length of wall, trying to center a picture frame—and cocked her head to the side, thinking. “It’s like—it’s just what you say,” she said. Lamely, she knew. “When you want something to happen. So mote it be. It’s like, Amen.” She wasn’t sure how she knew this; consumed suddenly with trying to remember, she lost her balance and dropped the nail, the hammer, the frame. They clattered to the floor and Anthony leapt aside, gripped her waist to steady her. “Sorry,” she said, frustrated. Her head was foggy, Rondeled. “I just—can we finish this later?”

“Yeah,” grunted Anthony. He knelt to reach under the sofa, fished out the dropped nail. “Later. Fine. So mote it be.”

◆

They had to have Merritt’s parents over for dinner. It was one of the unspoken terms of the arrangement. Anthony had printed a coq au vin recipe from his work computer and spent a whole Sunday afternoon chopping vegetables. Merritt uncorked a Beaujolais.

Stepping into the dining room: “It looks nice!” said her mother, though it didn’t. “I like the airiness.”

Plates had to be served at the stovetop; the dinette table was just barely large enough to seat four. The women sat sidesaddle on the chairs. “Cozy!” said her father.

As they ate, Anthony gushed praise for the house, the wood-nestled neighborhood. He chattered about work, his invigorating new commute, the small victories of the past week. He hopped up and down replenishing the bread basket, spooning wine sauce over his in-laws’ bowls.

Merritt sipped her Beaujolais and dissociated, fixing her gaze somewhere between her parents’ heads. Flavorless lardons burst between her clenched molars.

Her mother was elegant and coiffed as always, a ruby teardrop at her clavicle. The proof of forty years of successful marriage.

Her father was dapper in his oiled brogues, self-actualized enough to laugh at Anthony’s jokes without reservation, a homeowner twice over.

In the old days, they had sat together in this dining room, albeit at a grander table made of real wood, to pay the bills by hand. Her paycheck plus his, a chunk carved out for the mortgage, another for the utilities, the rest into savings. Often they had let Merritt lick the stamps.“Merritt?” Her mother, phone in hand. “Want to see?”

Merritt forced herself to focus on her mother’s face. “See what?” Anthony, en route to the dishwasher, paused to heave a deep, show sigh.

Merritt leaned in to look at what her mother was showing her. “Oh!” It was a picture she must have snapped at home, of a faded Polaroid on display in an old-school photo album. “Me and Lucy!” They were elevenish, Merritt’s hair in box braids, their heads tilted sideways in parallel sassiness. A crumb-sized black crystal twinkled in the cartilage of each girl’s upper ear.

“I found this!” said her mother, turning the phone to show Anthony. “When you told me you’d been seeing her around, I went and dug up the album. I had forgotten how much time you two used to spend together.”

“I had too,” said Merritt, zooming in. Her preteen self looked ecstatic. They had begged their parents for those cartilage piercings, irresistibly edgy because some girl a grade ahead had gotten one, and it had taken Merritt a perfect report card to earn permission. Her mother had chaperoned, turning the girls loose in a now-defunct mall. Merritt remembered how they’d forgotten their age and newfound maturity, galloping on sandaled feet toward the Piercing Pagoda they knew was tucked behind the food court. Lucy had gone first, swearing it didn’t hurt at all; when of course it did, Merritt had not screamed but simply stared at Lucy, impressed.

The site of Merritt’s piercing had gotten infected a few weeks later, her body unceremoniously rejecting the cheap little stud. Ping!—it had fallen from her ear in the middle of their accelerated math class, striking the tiled floor and rolling into the void beneath Lucy’s neighboring desk. Never to be seen again. A ferocious crumb-sized wound had remained for weeks in the cartilage of Merritt’s upper ear.“They were like this,” said her mother to Anthony, locking two fingers together at the knuckles. “Did nothing without each other. This was the same school year they actually got suspended, both of them.”

“Can you believe that?” added her father merrily, an elbow to Merritt’s ribs. “Honor roll every quarter, Sixth Grade Student of the Year—and then we get this call on a winter day. Come pick up your daughter. She was naughty, naughty, naughty! Ha!”

“I can’t even remember what they did,” mused her mother. “But if you ask me”—and here she leaned in, stage-whispering behind a manicured hand—“whatever it was, it was Lucy’s fault!”

“Ah,” said Anthony, looking at Merritt. “I see.”

Merritt realized she was rubbing the ancient indentation in her upper ear and redirected that hand toward the bottle of red. She had forgotten all of this. “Wild,” she said, pouring.

◆

In the morning, she was supposed to be finishing a job application, she was supposed to be organizing their books, she was supposed to be searching the unpacked boxes for the Tupperware they’d been unable to find the night before. But she’d had too much wine, opening a second bottle as motivation to deal with the dishes, and the air wafting in through the open bedroom window was muggy and Mondayish. She covered her face with a pillow and went back to sleep.

Anthony texted from work. BFD?

Breakfast for dinner. It had been one of her specialties back in the apartment. Cornmeal pancakes, the batter made from scratch; a frittata conjured up from this and that and farmer’s- market gorgonzola. But who knew if there was a farmer’s market this far out in the suburbs, and she found the local Safeway uninspiring.She checked the fridge. Leftover coq au vin sealed awkwardly in ziplock bags and very little else.

She texted back: Takeout? It was Monday, after all (wasn’t it?). It seemed cruel, his making her ask, surely realizing how her throat would fill with bilious inadequacy as she sent the message.

She left her phone beside her laptop and wandered out onto Ashburn Street. A sharp-edged wind licked her face, nudging her eastward. She found herself making for Greer, spotted Lucy in the glider bench on the front porch of 303, the baby in her arms. Rocking, rocking, rocking.

Merritt draped herself over the porch railing, whispering in case the baby was near sleep. “Can I bitch about my husband?”

Lucy leaned forward, blue eyes widening. “I wish you would,” she whispered back, scooting over. The persimmon tree trembled in the autumn wind.

◆

Her mother dropped by midweek with gifts. “Just a few things I thought you could use!” she said brightly, setting deep retail bags in the foyer. “I noticed you were still working on fixing things up around here…?”

“Well—we’ll only be here for like a year or two.” Merritt watched her unload picture hangers, crisp hand towels, curtain rods and velvet valances like the ones in the house upcounty. “Anyway, thanks,” she said. “Isn’t it Wednesday? Aren’t you working?”

A crease appeared between her mother’s eyebrows. “It’s Thursday, silly,” she said. “And I’m obviously teleworking. Can’t you tell?” She winked, managed a smile.

“Right,” said Merritt. It was one of the perks, of course, of a long and steady career, of striding into an office exuding straightbacked confidence, as her mother had done, for decades. Merritt’s feet felt leaden, anchored to the floorboards.

“Last thing,” said her mother. She reached into the bottom of the final bag and produced a volleyball-sized pumpkin, bright and orange, its stem curled cartoonishly.

“Oh, right,” said Merritt. Halloween, just around the corner. Lucy’s kids were going as characters from a Pixar movie Merritt hadn’t heard of. She sat the pumpkin on her birch curio table. Its waxy skin reflected in the translucent ruby drawer handle.

“I still have your witch hat at home, if you need it.” “That’s okay.”

“We remembered what it was, by the way!” Her mother tapped her shoulder, emphatic. “Your dad and I—we remembered why you got suspended in sixth grade. They claimed you were bullying other kids, you and Lucy. A boy from your class and a girl from another one. We actually had to keep you home for a week. It was totally trumped-up and ridiculous, of course. You? You’d never bully anyone.”

This struck the flimsiest of chords. Merritt grasped for a relevant memory and located a contender: recess in their last year of recesses, Lucy in one of her weird outfits, rage blazing behind the blue of her eyes as they huddled together beneath a canopy of oaks at the edge of the playground. We need to get back at him, she said, nodding in the direction of a boy on the foursquare grid. In a time of great antagonism, an incessant crossfire of pubescent teasing, his taunts had particularly rankled because he was…well, hot was still a few years off—college—but cute, certainly, with a fringe of eyelashes that could be seen from space.

And the girl…Merritt recalled a flaxen-haired seventh-grader—she of the inaugural cartilage piercing—being sort of a bitch on the bus, in the usual way. Name-calling and taunting sixth-graders for being sixth-graders, flashing teeth free of orthodontia, flipping her waist-length braided ponytail hither and thither. Maybe targeting Lucy on occasion. It rang a bell.

What had they done to warrant suspension? Merritt couldn’t remember and honestly wasn’t even sure they had done anything. Those were the days of accelerated math and other sources of tantalizing validation, her first of many campaigns for the honor roll. And after-school activities: violin, a kids’ cooking club. She was busy, always busy. Mostly she thought she had kept Lucy company, working on homework while Lucy enacted whatever girlish revenge constituted bullying.

“Well, speak of the devil,” murmured her mother. Gathering her things to leave, she’d paused to look out the window. Merritt peeked around her shoulder and there was Lucy, pushing a stroller up the driveway. A bottle of Rondel peeked out from beneath the carriage.

◆

Back in their overpriced apartment, Anthony and Merritt had argued infrequently, and only over matters of territory—like when someone had piled sweaters in the other’s designated closet space. On Ashburn Street, space was at a surplus, fourteen rooms in total from the top floor to the bottom; what was there to argue about?

And yet, Anthony had chosen to plant himself in the kitchen, mere yards from where Merritt and Lucy sat talking, browsing the sparse contents of the fridge, and—Merritt could feel it—spoiling for a fight. He didn’t even make his usual beeline for the bedroom to change out of his work suit.

His posture was charged with antagonism. He wanted Lucy to leave, and he was being a dick about it. Reaching into the fridge to pick up objects, sticks of butter and condiment jars, and then setting them back down roughly, producing enough noise to interrupt the conversation. Over and over.

Lucy didn’t seem to care, even when a particularly loud slam woke the baby. “Totally, I remember,” she said, lifting her voice over the infant’s pitiful wail. “That girl’s name was Alexandra. You don’t remember her?”

Merritt didn’t remember much, but maybe it was because Anthony—glowering in the corner, making a huge show of not being able to find anything to eat—was consuming too much of her Rondel-addled brainspace. Her eyes darted back and forth between Lucy and Anthony, her mind lighting on the image of the person Lucy was calling Alexandra.

“We hated her. Remember?”

Merritt didn’t, but she believed it. In those days, it hadn’t taken much. She, Merritt, had resented anyone who bested her along any metric. A classmate with higher grades or a girl who better exemplified their homogeneous middle school’s Prussian beauty standard—as they nearly all did. She remembered little about Alexandra, but she remembered the white-gold braid. A neat, slim stream whose terminus hung in her lap when she sat hunched on the bus, painting her nails, being pretty.

Lucy had gotten to her feet and swayed back and forth with the baby pressed to her shoulder. “She made fun of my clothes. She made fun of your hair. She absolutely sucked! The bitch to end all bitches. I can’t believe you don’t remember that.”

And then, Merritt sort of did. “Did we do a—did we do something to her?” The words dribbled out, the memory half-formed. She saw them as girls, hunkering unsupervised in Lucy’s basement with the geriatric Shealys pacing the kitchen overhead. “Lucy, what did we do?”

A smile spread across Lucy’s face, her rosy lips twisting upward at the corners. “You cut off part of her braid,” she said. “Waiting for the buses. The same week I stole Nick’s world-studies notes and made him flunk the midterm.”

The counter was piled high with persimmons, a gift from Lucy’s garden. A stoic, slow- blooming little fruit. Anthony pushed them aside, found bread and peanut butter and the only clean knife in the kitchen. He pulled out a plate and began slathering with painstaking slowness. “Cut off some girl’s hair,” he muttered from the corner.

“She was so nasty to us,” continued Lucy, “and then this one day she was sitting on the little brick wall in front of the bus lines and you just sort of crouched behind and, schwick. We hid it in my backpack.”

“But we got caught?”

“Well, some administrator found Nick’s spiral in my desk, and then a note you had passed me in class that day, about how you always wished you had hair like Alexandra’s. Proof positive.” Lucy paused and took a sip of her drink, seeming to savor the memory. “We got suspended. Both of us, a week. And it was Halloween! So, like, twenty-five years ago this week. We weren’t even allowed to trick-or-treat.”

A murky memory had assembled itself in Merritt’s mind. She remembered the week of her suspension, her parents departing for their respective offices each day at dawn after warning her to stay put and work on her at-home studies. She, gangly, elevenish, had sat obediently in her room until their footfalls faded—and then, off like a shot, reckless in her hurry and leaving the front door unlocked, she’d raced through the dogwoods to enter Greer Lane from the east, finding Lucy waiting behind the open basement door. Lucy’s parents were indiscriminate bibliophiles and the basement was lined with wooden shelves, the volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien and Hussein Hadaway warping in the October damp.

There would sit Lucy amid the books, tween-plump and munching Thin Mints, a glint in her blue eyes, a tabletop-sized tome in her lap. Black text springing starkly from the yellowed pages.

Merritt reached for the bottle of Rondel. “This is bizarre,” she said. “I have no memory whatsoever of cutting off what’s-her-face’s braid. But I remember getting in trouble for it. And I remember hanging out at your house, and you had this giant book.”

“From the university library,” said Lucy. “A Guide to Spells and Incantations.”

“And you had the…the piece of braid, in your basement. And Nick’s world-studies notes.” Could that be right? A hank of woven hair, limp like a dead snake, gathered with elastics.

Lucy’s baby had gone quiet. Lucy crossed the room to retrieve the stroller she’d parked near the fridge. Anthony stepped sideways, giving her a wide berth. Lucy lowered the baby into the stroller and adjusted the little canopy, bathing the interior in darkness. She turned to Anthony, ignoring his body language, and let forth a husky little laugh. “Get this,” she said to Anthony. “I got this book out of the library, on modern Paganism”—Anthony’s shoulders shuddered slightly—“and so while we were suspended, we tried like hell to make one of the spells work.”

“A binding spell,” said Merritt. Remembering was like the cracking of an egg. They’d found it in the book, the very first section: Basic binding spells. It was vivid, suddenly. Two little girls, elevenish, drawing chalk circles on the hardwood floor of Lucy’s basement, setting their findings in the center: a disembodied bit of braid, a red Mead spiral filled with Nick’s notes on the European Renaissance.

Lucy had a gleam in her eye and was still addressing Anthony as though he wasn’t visibly leaning away from her, cramming the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth. “You take something the person cares about very deeply,” she said, rubbing her hands together.

“Like part of a ponytail she spent ten years growing,” supplied Merritt.

“Right. Or like Nick’s totally-fucking-incredible, perfectly curated world-studies notes for the first half of the semester. And you put it into a so-called magic circle, chalk, or salt if you have it. (We didn’t, because my parents were upstairs in the kitchen.) And then you say some words, and bam, they’re bound.”

“Bound?” Anthony, around a mouthful of peanut butter. Fumbling to fill a glass with water. “Stuck in place. You can use it for lots of reasons, but it’s perfect for bullies. Can’t fuck with you anymore.”

Anthony took a few long sips. “So did it work?”

Lucy laughed and returned to her seat next to Merritt. “Like hell,” she said. “We had to go back to school the next Monday and it was rabbit season.” She crooked her fingers, raised them to her temples: bunny ears. “Plus, Nick got to retake the midterm, and it turned out Alexandra was Claudia freaking Schiffer with a proper haircut. Disasters across the board.” She reached for the bottle. “However, I did fuck Nick at a frat party in college, ninety million years later, if that counts for anything. And I beat him out for a job later. He wound up working for his dad’s restaurant like five miles away from here.”

“Well,” said Merritt. “I never saw Alexandra again. So I guess that’s a wash.”

Lucy lifted her legs and laid them across Merritt’s lap. “She works for the DMV. Had kids, got fat.” She lifted her glass.

Merritt, moving almost involuntarily, clinked Lucy’s glass with her own. “Amen to that,” she said.

◆

They were late to Anthony’s work thing, catered Thai chicken skewers and an open (wine) bar at the office, because Merritt hadn’t gotten around to unpacking the box of her party dresses. Technically, they were supposed to be in costume anyway; Merritt vaguely remembered having been offered a witch hat (by whom? Lucy?), but she went with leggings and a tunic and a sweater, all black, supposing it was better just to blend in.

Anthony, in a Jackie Robinson jersey, tried to introduce her to the members of his team. Young people with plastic plates in hand and uncomplicated tipsy faces, sure they were getting away with something. Everyone turning dutiful interest on Merritt. What do you do for a living? The trillion- dollar question, everyone’s favorite conversation-starter in this godforsaken city. She managed with a bit of temporal finesse, telling them what she had done before her comeuppance, to impressed nods and other forms of approval. She pivoted the conversation back to Anthony, deftly and repeatedly.

A young woman named Loulou, her keen face amplified by an enormous Diana Ross wig, touched Anthony’s arm as she babbled compliments: The best boss I’ve ever had. He works soooo hard!

Anthony’s boss pulled them aside and offered them hearty shots of Macallen Scotch from his private desk stash.

And then it began to fall apart. First Merritt forgot her way to the marblesque lavatory, not once but twice, and Anthony lost his patience as he led her there for the second time. She had once been able to hold her liquor, in case she’d forgotten. Couldn’t she maybe slow down?

Then Loulou, grafting herself onto them once again, made a joke Merritt didn’t understand. Anthony dealt with the awkwardness badly, repeating it twice verbatim without further context, adding to Merritt’s mounting frustration.

Then Merritt had to pee again and intentionally got lost in her solo search for the bathroom, holing herself up in the building lobby instead. Her feet hurt in her heavy boots. She texted Lucy: Help! Anthony’s work party sucks. Am feeling like a failure among the gainfully employed. And there’s this irritating fangirl named Loulou. But it was Halloween; she realized after sending the message that Lucy and Joey were on a snail’s-pace journey along Greer Lane, trailing tiny Pixar characters.

She passed out briefly on a stool in the lobby and half-awakened a few minutes later to find Jackie Robinson propping her up at the front door, gruffly summoning the valet.

At home, Jackie became Anthony again and there was some halfhearted fumbling in bed. His kisses were rough and dispassionate, Merritt’s painfully uncontrolled; finally Anthony made his decree, I’m going to sleep, and immediately fulfilled that promise. He snored, as he only did when he was pissed off.

Merritt tumbled out of bed and went looking for her vibrator. She knew it was still housed inside the birch curio table, which finally she had moved from the master bedroom into the main- floor hallway. Banging her elbows and shins on absolutely every-fucking-thing, she felt her way down the stairs in the dark. Muscle memory led her to the place where she’d finally set up the table, and she confirmed its location by ramming it with her knee. “Fuck,” she muttered and reached for the drawer handle. The sensation in her palm screamed and simmered, an arpeggio of sudden pain. “Fuck!” she said again.

She pulled her phone from the deep pocket of her pajama pants and turned on the flashlight. The curio table was without its bespoke handle. The faux-ruby finial was gone, completely missing; the sharp ridges of the underlying screw glinted in the glow of her phone’s flashlight.

II

The November sunlight glowed persimmon-colored in the window. Anthony had tried a persimmon once, at a coworker’s Japanese wedding. The thing looked like an underripe beefsteak tomato and tasted like a gummy bear.

Merritt stirred beside him in bed, still asleep. She was rumpled and irritatingly beautiful, her shoulder-length hair imprisoned in a silk bonnet. She looked like a younger, less assured version of her mother, frowning in her sleep. She snored lightly, as she always did in the suburban aridity.

Anthony showered and then dressed in the dark, fuming. On moving day, they’d had a whole discussion about setting up standing lamps in the walk-in closet. It was one of about twenty things Merritt had promised to do with her rafts of unstructured time, and it hadn’t gotten done.

Back in their old apartment, they had always brushed their teeth simultaneously at the his- and-hers sinks and snuck touches as they dressed together in his-and-hers suits they’d had tailored in Chinatown. On Ashburn Street, he had been asked not to make too much noise if she was still knocked out when he descended the stairs and headed out to work.

Grouchy, he gave the front door a hard tug and experienced a nasty little current of satisfaction at the loudness, then an aftershock of guilt. The guilt settled in his throat—or was it the start of a November cold?—and stayed with him all day.

From the driver’s seat of his Prius, he sized up the front lawn, the pale frost on the hedges, and began a voice-to-text email to his father-in-law. “Good morning, sir,” he began, as he did weekly, starting the ignition. “Checking in with a little update on lawncare.” It was one of the explicit terms of the arrangement: Someone was to keep his in-laws apprised of the state of the home, just like regular tenants would, but more vigilantly given their close relationship. Merritt had said she would do it, but the responsibility had gradually shifted to Anthony. He wouldn’t even bother asking this time. Even if he did, she would say she didn’t know anything about winter plant aeration, and still it would fall to him.

Concentrating on his verbal email, he drove slowly toward the main thoroughfare, casting a glance down Greer Lane as he passed. The school bus was stopped there, waiting; the stay-at-home mothers shepherded fleece-bundled kids inside. Lucy among them? Anthony couldn’t tell; they were all pink and laughing, not so much as a brunette among them, everyone in a uniform of yoga pants. And now he had passed, so mote it be. What the fuck sort of word was mote, anyway? He had started to look it up, but the headings on the search results—Wiccan shit, and Freemasons—had unsettled his Baptist-reared heart. His mother would have disapproved, and so he’d abandoned the research. The unease had remained.

“Anyway,” he concluded, wrapping up a remark about fertilizer, “let me know if that sounds good to you. Thanks again, sir.” And, send. He liked his father-in-law, who never turned anything into a pissing contest or exuded superiority, though he’d already owned the house on Ashburn Street by Anthony’s age. A professor of American economics, he alone had refrained from haranguing Anthony and Merritt about babies and home purchases. He knew how it was in this era, and in this town.

He swung the steering wheel to guide the Prius onto the main thoroughfare, away from Ashburn Street, and his mood unclenched itself instantly. The neighborhood was beautiful, but darkly so. From the lack of lighting in the walk-in closet to the shadowy half-memories Merritt kept uncovering, thanks to Lucy and her strange lies. Merritt, cut off some kid’s ponytail? Fuck that—not a chance. Anthony didn’t believe it any more than he believed the reason her last job’s HR department had given for her abrupt firing.

He thought of her face, contorted with panic as she hovered over a pregnancy test, wedlock still weeks away. Rules and benchmarks governed Merritt’s life. She was lots of things, including able to hold a grudge—but vengeful and roguish, she was not. A less-than-stellar performance review could alter her mood for months. At eleven, a straight-A student, there was no way she’d have risked falling out of the school administrators’ good graces.

Lying Lucy. He floored the accelerator, and Ashburn Street disappeared behind a wall of oak trees.

◆

At the office, he shared an elevator with Loulou, the star of his team and one of the keenest people he’d ever met. “New suit!” she chirped, regarding him. He understood that she meant Nice suit!, and stood a bit taller.

“You ready for the thing?” he asked her, gesturing to indicate their big task for the day, a presentation that stood to make or break (but probably make) one of their most important client relationships. He was letting her take the lead, confident she’d represent them well.

“I think so,” she said. “I double-checked my notes and practiced all weekend. I’ve been second-guessing my hair, though.” She touched his arm, briefly. “You know.”

He did know. Early on, he’d worried about his locs, though he always pulled them back for work. Conservative clients and all that. But Loulou’s Afro puff looked smart and professional, neatly secured with black pins that echoed the sheen of her blazer. “You’re good,” he told her. She would understand that he meant, You look good.

At their floor, they parted ways. Once, Loulou had reminded him viscerally of his wife, all radiant confidence and vocabulary. But at the Halloween party the other night, he had noticed it was no longer true. Merritt getting drunk too quickly and deflecting all conversation with dull half-truths about her old job.

He sat at his desk and saw that tech had rebooted his computer over the weekend. His internet browser restored a series of old tabs, among them his unsettling Google search. Mote. He frowned and closed the window.

His phone chimed, the alert interrupting his wandering thoughts. A text from Merritt: If you’re getting sushi don’t forget do the other place.

His ears went hot. He had hinted the night before that maybe they should move away from the takeout-on-Mondays routine to save money, so that they could start socking away. To which she had replied, I did the math; even if I never find a job, look how much we’ll save if we stay here for like three years.

When only a few weeks earlier, they’d commiserated about wanting a place to call their own. Merritt had just come back from Lucy’s and was disheartened by her failure to connect with her old friend over the desire for sovereignty. She, Merritt, felt inadequate and like she was taking advantage of her parents’ generosity, if not stealing from them outright. Why hadn’t Lucy validated or understood those feelings?But Anthony knew why not. Merritt’s parents were first-generation homeowners, while Lucy’s had inherited their house on Greer Lane—just as Lucy now had. Lucy felt no less entitled to it than had been her grandparents, who in turn had paid for it with money sown a couple generations earlier. Laughing heirs, or close to it. Old-rich cavalier. Anthony saw this sort of attitude daily in the faces of several of his reports, who wore four-figure suits but showed up late half the week.

His fingers tapped out a snarky reply to Merritt’s text, then backspaced it. He was exhausted even before engaging.

After a moment, he texted Loulou instead, thinking of her manicured fingers on his arm that morning. Lunch before the thing? He would ask her what to do about this takeout issue, though her previous idea—counter with a request; BFD?—had crashed and burned. Her brand of intelligence was deductive and methodical. She would come up with something else, and something else after that if needed. Eventually, something would work.

III

The baby was crying—not the patient little warning bleats that made strangers comment on what a sweet little thing she was; but the guttural bloody-murder screams she saved only for after midnight, and for her mother.

Joey’s elbow jutted out from beneath his mound of covers. “She’ll wake them,” he slurred. Their older kids had not acclimated to the late-night symphony.

Lucy slid her legs over the side of the bed. It was her turn to go. It was always her turn to go. Joey had work in, let’s see, four-point-five hours.Before the baby, before she’d left Stella Sport and her days had gelatinized, they had taken turns. Now her brain lagged sometimes, searching a stale schedule until she remembered. Now and forever, it was her turn to soothe the baby back to sleep.

Pulling a sweater around her shoulders, she drifted into the little nursery adjoining the master bedroom and tried the first of her tricks: a hand in the crib, slow strokes to the infant’s quivering shoulders. Sometimes it worked, but not tonight. Nor did increasing the volume on the white-noise machine. Nor the pacifier with the dumbfaced plush lamb hanging from its handle.

A baby was no different from any other challenge. You tried different things. You layered strategies until something clicked. Just like at Stella Sport. Some combination of cunning and luck, with a sprinkling of manual labor and old-fashioned wait-it-outness. Everything on Earth was this way. If reporting a bully to the teacher went nowhere, you took matters into your own hands. You stole notes. You tried a binding spell. And if the white-noise machine fell on deaf ears, you strapped the baby into the Tula wrap and paced the house awhile.

Lucy strapped the baby into the Tula wrap and paced the house awhile. Quickly there was silence, but she knew not to let her guard down, just yet. She scanned her mental to-do list. It was Monday, a day of few oases. Now was as good a time as any to chip away at the list.

She went to the linen closet and set aside fresh sheets for all the beds.

She went to her office—what had once been her office, now overgrown with Legos and old homework—and used the computer to order a delivery of diapers and baby wipes.

She went to the kitchen. She peeled and quartered four persimmons and dropped them into a Mason jar; she filled the jar to the brim with high-quality vodka. Merritt would love the infusion, when it was ready in two weeks or so. Meanwhile the garage fridge suffered no shortage of Rondel. You tried different things.

While she was in the kitchen, she fixed the kids’ lunches. Turkey sandwiches with coarse- ground mustard and Swiss Lorraine, leafy greens from the backyard. They would pick at it and probably throw half away or trade it for Cheetos, but whatever. Her effort was what mattered.

She grabbed the navy cylinder of Morton’s salt and tucked it into a superfluous strap of the Tula wrap.

She went back to her office. She scribbled out a love note, borrowing the words from a book she’d read, and dropped it into Joey’s briefcase. If adding a new baby to the brood didn’t work, well…you tried different things.

She went to the basement and pulled the laundry from the dryer, sorted as much of it as she could without disturbing the baby.

She approached the ancient mahogany bookcase, one of the few things her parents had left behind that she hadn’t revamped with modern equivalents, and knelt at the level of the correct shelf. She sprinkled fresh salt around the cufflinks Joey had inherited from his grandfather, her eldest child’s first shed baby teeth, the ruby-red drawer pull. She murmured an incantation over each, and then a single conclusion: So mote it be. She hoped the drawer pull held even more potency than the earring, a tiny, elusive thing now housed in a ziplock to avoid its getting lost—though the earring had proved plenty powerful in its own right, both then and now. Although her own time spent practicing a perfect imitation of Merritt’s handwriting probably hadn’t hurt, either. You had to come at things from every angle.

She grabbed the laundry and climbed both flights of stairs to the top floor. She spread the clothes on the guest bed and began folding.

Down the hall, her middle child let out a pitiful, howling whine. Lucy’s shoulders tensed, but she composed herself. As in every room of the house, there were a few favorite books on the floor of the guest bedroom. She tucked one under her arm and made for the hallway, moving slowly to avoid waking the baby.

If a story didn’t work, there were the melatonin drops—shameful though they were—in the medicine cabinet between the kids’ bedrooms.

You tried different things.