Georgine heard the screen door slap and turned her head. She didn't get up. She looked at me from under the brim of that hat, and for a fraction of a second, before she arranged her face, I saw something cross it that I didn't understand until much later. It wasn't guilt, exactly. It was arithmetic. It was the look of a woman who had counted the cars in a driveway at a quarter to seven and come up with the wrong number.
"Mr. Osgood," she said. "You're home."
"I'm home," I said. "My daughter's home. My daughter was in the shower."
To explain what happened next, and why she said the things she said, and why I believed for almost a full half hour that I was the one who was going to be in trouble, I have to back up to March.
We bought the house on Chokecherry Court in the second week of March, after eleven months of looking, from a bank in Ohio that had foreclosed on it two years before and had apparently forgotten it owned it. The listing photos were taken in a snowstorm. The previous owners had been transferred to Houston, stopped paying, and left behind a dining room chandelier, a basement full of boxes of Christmas decorations, and a lawn that had died and been reborn as a field of cheatgrass and bindweed. The bank had paid an outfit to come by once a month and mow the weeds and check the pipes. Other than that, the place had sat with its blinds drawn for twenty-three months on the most visible corner in Piñon Draw, and I learned later that the homeowners association had sent the bank something like forty letters about it, all of which had been answered, if at all, by a form letter from a mailroom in Columbus.
So we were not, on arrival, strangers. We were the people who had finally bought the eyesore. The welcome basket Georgine Vandeventer left on our porch the first weekend had a loaf of zucchini bread, a jar of local honey, a laminated map of the subdivision with the trash days marked, and a ninety-one-page bound copy of the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions for Piñon Draw, with yellow sticky flags on Article VII, Landscaping and Exterior Maintenance. A handwritten note on violet stationery said she was so glad someone was finally going to love the house again and that she would be happy to recommend a sod company.
I liked her, at first. I want that on the record. She was sixty-seven, trim and quick, with short silver hair and reading glasses she wore on a beaded chain, and she knew everything about everything. She knew which houses had been built by which crew and which crews had skimped on the footings. She knew the frost line in Douglas County to the inch. She knew that the sewer cleanout in our front yard was a foot to the left of where the plat said it was. When I asked her how she knew all this, she laughed and said thirty-one years at the Cottonwood Bluffs Water and Sanitation District, honey, I've had my hands in every hole in this town. She'd started as a meter reader in 1988, walking routes with a clipboard, and she'd retired in 2019 as the supervisor of Field Services, in charge of every crew that turned a valve or dug up a service line from the county line to the reservoir. People at the mailbox talked about her the way people talk about a retired sheriff. Georgine knows every curb stop in Cottonwood Bluffs, they said. Georgine could find a leak with her eyes closed.