The Human He Waited For

Lainey POV The first thing I learned about Cedar Ridge was that it wasn't on the way to anything. We had left the highway forty minutes back. Since then it had been one two-lane road, a whole lot of trees, and Travis drumming on the steering wheel of the moving truck like we were headed to the beach. "You're gonna love it," he said, for the ninth time since the state line. "I know." "No rent, Lane. Ever again. Nobody can raise it on us. Nobody can sell it out from under us." I got it. I had gotten it three weeks ago, when he turned his laptop around at the kitchen table and showed me a house that was already ours. Paid for, with all of it. Eight years of his paychecks and my savings, including the little account I'd been feeding for vet tech school, converted into a three-bedroom I had seen in exactly eleven photos. "I get it," I said, and I smiled, because he was smiling, and it had been a long time. That was the thing. Since the layoff, Travis had been a man-shaped dent in our couch. Now he was singing along to the radio and getting the words wrong on purpose to make me laugh. I could be mad, or I could have him back. I had never been very good at mad. The trees opened up. A wooden sign said WELCOME TO CEDAR RIDGE in fresh paint, with no population number under it. Main Street ran four blocks. There was a diner, a hardware store, a post office the size of a garden shed, and a bar with a dark green door called The Hollow. It was late August and hot enough that the air wobbled over the road. Everyone we passed stopped what they were doing. I don't mean they glanced up. A woman watering her petunias let the hose run over her own shoes. A man coming out of the hardware store stood holding the door open for nobody. Two kids on bikes braked so hard that one of them went over the handlebars, popped back up, and kept staring. "Friendly," Travis said. "That's one word for it." The house sat at the end of Alder Lane, where the pavement gave up and the woods took over. And fine. It was pretty. It had white siding, a deep front porch, and a swing hanging from two chains. It looked like a house where somebody's grandmother had made a lot of pie, which turned out to be accurate. A skinny kid of about twenty-one was sitting on the steps next to a backpack the size of a toddler. He shot to his feet when the truck groaned into the driveway. "Matthew?" Travis called. "That's me. You found it." He sounded surprised, like people usually didn't. He shook Travis's hand, then mine, and dropped two keys into my palm instead of Travis's. I liked him for that. He was jittery, though. He kept looking down the street. "Furniture's all yours, like I said. I've got a guy coming to stamp the paper for it, and then I'm out of your hair." "Where are you headed?" I asked. His whole face lit up. "Everywhere." The guy with the stamp came up the walk a few minutes later. He was sixty or so, in a short-sleeved button-up, carrying a little leather case and whistling. "Your mama know you're giving away your grandma's couch?" he called. Then he reached the top step and the whistling quit. He looked at Travis. He looked at me. His nostrils flared, actually flared, like a horse deciding whether to bolt. "Matthew," he said, very pleasantly. "Who are these folks?" "The buyers." "Of the couch." "Of the house. The couch comes with it." A long pause followed. A cicada started up and thought better of it. "The house," the man said. "It's done. I filed it at the county on Tuesday." "At the county." He repeated it the way you'd repeat a diagnosis. Then he turned to me with a smile that showed every tooth he had. "Well! Welcome. Would you excuse me for one minute?" He stamped the bill of sale without reading it, the way you'd sign for a package while your kitchen was on fire. Then he walked out to the middle of the yard and made three phone calls in a row. I caught pieces while I pretended to study the porch swing. "No. No, not from here. Not from anywhere." Then, lower, "Then you tell him. I'm not telling him." Travis noticed none of it. He had the truck's back door rolled up and was already wrestling a box labeled KITCHEN, the happiest I'd seen him in a year. Within ten minutes we had company. A silver sedan parked crooked across the street, and a woman got out wearing a blazer in ninety-degree heat. Her smile looked stapled on. Behind her came a round man at a jog, his tie flipped over one shoulder, who turned out to be the mayor. I had never been greeted by a mayor before. I had never been greeted by a mayor who was out of breath. "Gene Abbott. We don't get many new residents," he said, pumping my hand a little too long. "How many do you get?" He thought about it. "Just.. Not many." The woman in the blazer was the town's realtor, which she mentioned twice. She asked how we had found the listing. "Online," Travis said. "Online," she repeated, to Matthew, who had become very interested in the gutters. She pressed a card into my hand, and her fingers were cold. "If it turns out not to be the right fit, for any reason at all, you call me first. Any hour." "We're not going anywhere," Travis said cheerfully. Every smile on that porch twitched. Then a pickup took the corner too fast, and a woman was out of the passenger side before it had fully stopped. "Matthew!" Matthew closed his eyes. "Hi, Mom." "You sold it? You sold your grandmother's house to…" She looked at us. I watched her swallow whatever came next. "To this lovely young couple." "You said deal with it," Matthew said. His father climbed out from behind the wheel in house slippers. "We meant mow." "I did mow. For a year." Matthew swung the enormous backpack onto his shoulders. "I'm sorry. I love you. I'll send postcards." Then he walked off down Alder Lane, right down the middle of the road, while his mother followed him for half a block listing everything he had forgotten to pack.