The phone rang while Gussie Bennet was on her knees in the garden bed by the garage, pulling crabgrass out of the marigolds with the particular satisfaction of a woman who has decided that if she cannot control anything else this week, she can at least control the crabgrass.
It was a Saturday in late June in Kettering, Ohio, and the heat had come up early, the kind of heat that sits on the backs of your hands like a second pair of gloves. She had her actual gloves off because she liked to feel the roots let go. She wiped her fingers on the thighs of her gardening slacks, which were old enough to have earned it, and fished the phone out of the pocket of the apron she wore for exactly this purpose.
The number had a 252 area code. She did not know a single soul in a 252 area code, and she nearly let it go, because the only people who called her from numbers she did not know were people who wanted to talk about her car's extended warranty, and her car was a 2011 Buick with a warranty that had expired during the Obama administration.
But 252 was North Carolina. She knew that because she had looked it up in March, when she had put down the deposit.
"This is Gussie Bennet," she said.
"Mrs. Bennet, hi, good morning. This is Petronella Searcy calling from Searcy Shoreline Rentals down in Frisco, on Hatteras Island. Is this a good time?"
"I'm kneeling in a flower bed," Gussie said. "It's as good a time as I'm going to get."
The woman laughed, a short, easy laugh, like someone who said good morning to strangers for a living and had not yet been ground down by it. "I'll be quick. I'm just calling to confirm your six-person booking at the Pelican's Rest. Our system flags it when the cardholder isn't one of the people at check-in, and I like to call instead of sending one of those robot emails, because those scare people. Your party checked in about forty minutes ago."
Gussie did not say anything for a moment. A bee drifted past her ear and settled on a marigold and began its own small business.
"Checked in," she said.
"Yes, ma'am. Code's been used on the front door and the gentleman signed the guest agreement on the tablet. I just need to confirm a couple of things with the cardholder, which is you. You're still showing as the primary, so I want to make sure everybody's covered under the agreement. I've got four of the six names entered and two blank, and the occupancy on the Pelican is six, hard cap, because of the county septic permit. I'm not trying to be a pain. The county is a pain. I'm just passing it along."
"Forty minutes ago," Gussie said again. She had a sense, very distinctly, of standing at the top of a staircase in the dark and putting her foot down where she thought the next step was, and finding nothing.