The yellow clingstone peaches were soft enough to peel with my thumbnail, but the pocketknife Steve left in the kitchen drawer cut cleaner. I sliced them into a blue ceramic bowl, watching the children through the window above the sink.
The water in the concrete pool was a bright, clean turquoise under the June sun. It had cost twenty-four thousand dollars three years ago, a sum that still made my chest tight when I looked at our savings passbook. That money was supposed to be our safety net, but Steve had been determined to give the kids a proper backyard before the illness took him.
My ten-year-old daughter, Toby, leaned against the counter, her wet swimsuit leaving a dark patch on the yellowing linoleum. She pointed a sticky finger toward the window.
“Mom, why is Mrs. Vance staring at us?” Toby asked.
I looked past the water. Katherine Vance stood by her wooden porch railing, her posture straight as a fence post, her eyes fixed on our yard.
A sudden chill went through me, despite the humid afternoon heat rising off the stove. I put the knife down on the cutting board.
“She is probably just enjoying the afternoon,” I said, though Katherine had not smiled at us since the funeral in November.
“She is not enjoying anything,” Toby said. “She looks like she is counting.”
On the water, a cracked blue plastic pool toy bobbed against the concrete edge, its hollow belly half-filled with pool water. I watched Katherine smooth her gray-blond hair behind her ears, a quick, sharp motion she repeated twice before she turned and went inside.
I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and looked down at the bowl of peaches. The fruit was sweet, but the appetite had gone out of me.
The humidity broke slightly by four o’clock, leaving the smell of wet grass heavy in the cul-de-sac. I walked down the slope of the lawn to the row of red shrub roses Steve had planted along the eastern boundary.
Katherine was already there, standing on her side of the low wire fence with a pair of orange-handled garden shears in her hand. Her beige slacks were spotless, without a single speck of dirt from her own flowerbeds.
“These bushes are spreading, Clara,” Katherine said, her voice clipped and formal.
“They do get a bit wild this time of year,” I said, reaching down to twist my gold wedding ring around my finger. “I can trim the branches back this evening.”
“The branches are not the issue,” Katherine said. She pointed the tip of her shears toward the base of the main rose cane. “The roots are three inches over the line. They are drawing moisture from my turf.”
I looked at the thick green sod of her lawn, which her husband’s crew treated three times a year. Our own grass was patchy, drying to a pale straw color near the fence.
“I could dig up a starter for you if you like them,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “They are very hardy. Steve bought them from the nursery in Lancaster.”
“I have no use for invasive plants,” Katherine said. She smoothed her hair behind her ears again, her fingers tense. “I prefer things to be contained. We have lived here thirty-two years, and we have always kept our borders clean.”
“The fence has been in this exact spot since ninety-eight,” I said.
“Fences can be wrong,” Katherine said.
She turned back toward her patio without waiting for me to answer, her shears clipping the empty air as she walked. I stood by the red roses, the heat from the ground rising through the soles of my shoes, leaving me with a strange weight in my stomach.
The house was quiet by eight, the younger children upstairs with their books while the hum of the neighbor’s central air unit vibrated through our living room wall. I sat on the sofa with a small can of metal polish and a soft cloth, rubbing the tarnish off the silver measuring tape Steve used to keep in his truck.
My oldest son, Leo, who was fourteen and already had his father’s broad shoulders, sat on the rug near my feet. He was sorting through his baseball cards, but his movements were slow.
“Are we going to have to move, Mom?” Leo asked, not looking up from a card.
The silver casing of the tape was cool against my palm, the small spring-loaded button resisting the pressure of my thumb. I polished the engraved initials on the side, my hand shaking slightly as I worked the cloth.
“Why would you ask that, Leo?” I said.
“I heard Mrs. Vance talking to a man on her driveway yesterday,” he said. “She was pointing at our roof.”
“She is just particular about the neighborhood,” I said, though my mind immediately went to the mortgage payment due on the first of the month. “Your father built this house to last, and we are staying right here.”
“But the money,” Leo said, his voice dropping. “I know the pool took a lot of what we had.”