She nodded.
I looked at the mailbox, painted to resemble the sea and topped by a sailboat. “Somebody loves this house,” I said.
“And this is Ethan’s house,” Julie said as she pulled into the next-door driveway. She opened the car door before even turning off the ignition. The recent change in her was dramatic. I knew she was upset about Shannon, and I knew the past was weighing heavily on her in a way it had not for many years, but there was also a joy in her I couldn’t remember ever seeing before, not even when she was falling in love with Glen as a young woman. And the cause of that joy walked out the front door of his house and over to us, giving Julie an embrace that lasted several seconds as he planted a kiss on her neck. The scene made me smile.
“Welcome, Lucy!” he said to me, giving me the much shorter and more perfunctory version of the hug he’d laid on my sister.
“Hi, Ethan,” I said. “I’m desperate for a bathroom.”
He laughed, pointing behind him to the house. “Halfway down the hall on the right,” he said. “We’ll meet you in the yard.”
When I left Ethan’s bathroom, I headed for the back of his house. Through the open jalousies on the sun porch, I could see the canal clearly and suddenly everything seemed familiar. I walked outside to where he and Julie were leaning against the chain-link fence watching the beginning-of-the-weekend array of boats on the water. I felt almost dizzy with deja vu. The current was so fast, and I remembered my fear of it. I’d have nightmares of falling into the canal and being swept away by the water as I struggled unsuccessfully to swim into one of the docks.
I shivered as I leaned against the fence next to my sister.
“Whew,” I said. “I remember how scared I was of the water.”
Julie put her arm around me. “You were,” she said. “Poor little kid.” She nodded in the direction of the yard next door. I had not even thought to look over there. “Do you remember it?” she asked.
I looked across a short metal fence to see a little boy playing in a swimming pool. He was riding—and falling off—a huge plastic alligator, while a heavyset, dark-haired woman relaxed with a book on a lounge chair nearby. I could see the top of a boat in the fenced-in dock, but the long, dark, deep-green screened porch was the most familiar part of the scene to me.
“I’d love to see the house inside,” I said. “See how it’s changed.”
“It’s totally different,” Ethan said. “I’ll give them a call later and we can go over.” He glanced at Julie. “You don’t have to go with us, if you don’t want to.”
Julie bit her lip. “I think I can do it,” she said. It was clear they’d had a conversation about this before.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on Ethan’s boat on the canal and the river. It was my first voyage ever in those waters, since I’d been too chicken to go out on our boat when I was a kid. I loved it now, but what was most amazing to me—
After dinner, as the sky turned fuchsia from the setting sun, we strolled barefoot across our old front yard and knocked on the frame of the screen door. The young dark-haired woman I’d seen in the backyard pushed the door open for us.
“Hello!” she said, as we entered. “I’m Ruth Klein. And you guys must be the former residents of our house.”
“Hi, Ruth,” Ethan said to her. “This is Julie Sellers.” He rested his hand on Julie’s back. “And her sister, Lucy Bauer.” We stood packed into the hallway near the front door.
“When did you live here?” Ruth asked. She was beautiful in spite of the fact that she was quite overweight. Her pink skin was flawless, her blue eyes a vibrant contrast to her dark hair.
“Our grandfather built the house in 1926,” Julie said. “Lucy and I lived here during the summer in the fifties and early sixties.”
“Oh, wow,” said Ruth. “I bet it’s totally different by now. Where do you want to start your tour?”
“Well,” Julie looked at the partly open door on our left. “This used to be our grandparents’ room.”
“Go ahead in.” Ruth leaned forward to push the door open. It was a small room with a queen-size platform bed and sleeklined dresser and armoire. “This is the master bedroom, as you can probably tell,” she said.
Julie nodded. “And across the hall was the bathroom.”
“Still is,” Ruth said, and we followed her across the hall, taking turns peering into the tiny bathroom. The toilet and pedestal sink looked new. In the corner was a small triangular tub.
“We just had a shower there,” Julie said.
“I think the people before us put the tub in,” Ruth said.
We walked a short distance down the hall. “Here’s our son’s room.” Ruth pointed to her left. Inside, the room was just barely wide enough to fit a twin bed and a tiny dresser.
“This was Mom and Dad’s room, right?” I looked to Julie for confirmation.
“Yes.” She smiled. “They didn’t have much space, did they?”
Across the hall was the kitchen, and it was unrecognizable as any room we’d ever lived in, with white glass- fronted cabinetry and granite countertops. Julie laughed.
“Well,” she said, running her hand across the blue-gray granite. “I can tell you our kitchen looked nothing like this. This is beautiful.”
“This—and being on the water, of course—were what sold us on the house,” Ruth said.
We walked the last few steps of the hallway into the living room, which was painted a soft yellow and furnished
