Page 4

“You won’t believe this,” Finnegan told Annie over the phone. “I found you a place.”

She had been walking back from Charlie’s school. There might come a day when she’d let him walk there and back on his own,

but, hey, this was New York, and that day was a long time off. She was turning onto Bank Street when her cell started ringing

in her purse. She saw Finnegan’s name and took the call.

“Where is it?” Annie asked after he’d delivered his news.

“Upstate. Near Fenelon, which, I have to admit, I have never heard of. But it’s near Castle Creek, in case you’ve heard of

that.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yeah, there’s a gas station there or something. Anyway, it’s about a three-hour drive out of the city.”

Annie and John had gone several years without a car, but as their fortunes improved, they’d bought a small, sporty BMW SUV

for errands and out-of-town trips. They kept it at a garage one block south on 11th Street.

Annie liked the idea but wasn’t ready to commit. “Maybe Charlie and I will drive up and have a look at it on the weekend.”

“About that,” her editor said. “I hope I haven’t overstepped here, Annie, but I’ve gone ahead and set it all up for you.”

“What?”

“You were right, you need a break, we want you to have a break, and I couldn’t see you having to go to all the aggravation of looking for a place. It’s all ready to go. I’ll send you a link to the listing so you can check it all out, just in case you hate it, but I really believe you’re going to love it. And if you don’t, you’re not obligated to take it. Christ, I’ll take it. I’ll spend the summer there.”

“Fin, you really shouldn’t—”

“No, I should. This is something we want to do for you. It’s kind of northwest of Binghamton. There’s places there where you

can pick your own blueberries.”

“I get my blueberries from Gristedes.”

“Not for the next three months, you won’t. And you’re the one who said she wants out of the city, so don’t be throwing Gristedes

at me. Anyway, the larder’s already full. Got someone local to stock the fridge. You got wine, you got beer, you got yogurt.”

“Listing those things in order of importance? Charlie’s not quite ready for beer yet.”

“I didn’t forget the milk. And cereal and peanut butter and whatever else he eats. So you should start packing and get there

before all that stuff passes its best-before date.”

“I don’t know what to say, Fin. I wasn’t expecting you to do anything like this.”

“Oh, and the place has wi-fi. Already had the tech guys there. Everything’s up and running. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime,

Paramount.”

“God forbid we should be without those.”

She got off the call and as soon as she was home she fired up the laptop in the kitchen and checked the link that Finnegan

had emailed her.

It was a two-story Victorian-style home, built sometime around the 1930s, but had been updated over the decades so that there probably wasn’t much of the original house still around. Kind of like the Temptations and the Four Tops, Annie mused, whom she’d come to love, what with her mom playing them all the time when she was growing up. Still touring, but with all new singers. There were a couple dozen pictures to click through. The outside was painted powder-blue with white trim. A porch ran along the entire front of the house and about halfway down the left side. There were garden chairs placed on it with big flowery cushions, and Annie could already picture herself sitting in one of them, a tall glass of lemonade on the wicker table, the latest Ann Patchett on her lap.

“It does look wonderful,” she said under her breath, now viewing photos of the home’s interior. A large living room with overstuffed

furniture and a fireplace. A big kitchen with everything she could possibly want. She zoomed in on one of the shots and spotted

a Nespresso machine.

“Oh my,” she said.

There were four bedrooms on the second floor, one of which had been converted into a studio. No wonder Finnegan had liked

this place. A caption on the photo said that the home had previously been occupied by husband-and-wife photographers, that

they’d used this space as an office and for shoots.

Thoughtful, Annie supposed, but also sneaky. She was willing to bet that studio was as well stocked as the kitchen, but instead

of food and drink, it would come equipped with paints and brushes and markers and pencils and Sharpies and pads of paper and

a drafting table with multiple height adjustments. Fin’s motives were less than pure, but it was, she supposed, still a nice

gesture. In the very unlikely event she might want to do some work, everything would be ready.

As she continued to look at the photos, another email from Finnegan landed in the inbox.

Just one extra pic. Wanted you to see there’s a room all set up for Charlie.

She clicked on the photo. It was of one of the bedrooms she’d already seen a picture of in the listing, but it was all dressed.

A single bed with a Spider-Man bedspread. A set of shelves with books and half a dozen rubber dinosaurs. framed Harry

Potter movie posters on the wall. A large window afforded a beautiful view of green fields and trees and what looked to be,

in the distance, a set of railroad tracks.

Jesus , Annie thought. Charlie will love this.

She clicked on reply and wrote a note to Finnegan that read, in its entirety, You are a crafty son of a bitch. She hit send . The email had no sooner whooshed away than she decided to send a quick follow-up: How on earth did you find this place?

While she waited for him to get back to her, she rose from the kitchen table and went up to the bedroom she once shared with

John and began sorting through what she would take. When she was done choosing her own clothes, she’d sort out what she needed

to take for Charlie.

Now that so much of the decision-making was done, Annie felt there wasn’t a moment to waste. We are gettin ’ out of Dodge , she thought.

But there were things to do. Tell the neighbors she was going to be away. Have the mail held. Not that there was ever much.

All her bills either arrived by email or were automatically paid. About the only thing she couldn’t control were unexpected

FedEx or DHL deliveries of foreign-language editions of her books. She never knew when they were coming, or who they might

be coming from, so there was no way to intercept them. She could ask one of the neighbors to check the front stoop every couple

of days to see whether anything was sitting there.

When she went to meet Charlie at the end of the school day, she said, “How would you feel if I pulled you out of school a week early?”

The last day of school before the beginning of the summer break was the end of the following week.

“Why?” Charlie asked, stepping on every crack in the sidewalk as they made their way home.

“You know how I’ve been talking about us taking a break from the city? Out in the country. Maybe upstate?”

“Yeah?”

“I found a place. Well, Fin did.”

“Are there buildings there?”

“Are there buildings ?”

Charlie nodded.

“Of course there are buildings. And we’d be living in a big house. Probably bigger than our house here.”

“But you said it was in the country. I didn’t think there were buildings in the country.”

“You’ve been in the country before. Like when we went to Cape Cod.”

He looked at her like she was short a few marbles. “That was Cape Cod. Not the country.”

“Okay, the country is just something people say when we mean out of the city. There are buildings in the country . They’re just spaced out more, and they’re not twenty or thirty or seventy stories tall like buildings here.”

“I like it here. My friends are here.”

“Maybe you can make new friends there for the summer.”

“I thought you said the buildings are all far apart. How would I meet anybody?”

Before she could come up with an answer for that, he proposed a solution. “I could get a bike.”

“A bike?”

Another nod.

“You don’t know how to ride a bike.”

Even before what happened to John, the idea of a bicycle for Charlie had always been out of the question. Riding a bike in

the city was to take your life in your hands no matter what your age, but for a little kid? Okay, maybe some parents were

fearless—or reckless, depending on one’s point of view—when it came to this issue, but Annie was not one of them.

But, yeah, having a bike in the country was a possibility and was something that might close the deal with an as-yet-unconvinced

Charlie. Except, who’d teach him to ride it? Annie’d never had a bike, but she recalled John saying he’d had one as a kid.

He could have taught Charlie. Yet one more thing to make Annie feel she wasn’t up to the task. But she’d have to do her best.

“Yes, you could have a bike.” He raised two small fists in victory. “But I can’t promise that we’d bring it back to the city.”

Charlie shrugged, figuring that was a battle for another day. He’d won the first round. “When are we going?”

Annie felt a small tingle run up her spine. She couldn’t recall the last time she had felt anything close to excitement.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

Annie could barely get to sleep that night, she was so wound up. She’d helped Charlie pack, and very early on gave up trying to get him to be selective about which toys he wanted to bring and decided to let him toss into his bags whatever he wanted. Annie did a sweep of the medicine cabinets and packed everything she might need for both of them. In the morning, with Charlie in tow, she would go to the garage and pick up the car, then bring it around and pray she could get a spot on the street near the front door. Sometimes miracles did happen.

She slipped into bed after eleven, and when she couldn’t at first get to sleep, she turned the light back on and reached for

one of several copies of The New Yorker that littered the top of the bedside table, taunting her because she could never get to them. She was halfway through a movie

review when she felt herself nodding off.

Annie killed the light and put her head down onto the pillow.

At some point, she felt a stirring beside her. A familiar feeling. One she had not experienced in several months.

She turned over in bed and opened her eyes. It was dark, but the streetlamps’ glow filtering through the blinds allowed her

to see.

John was in the bed next to her, his head propped up on his palm, elbow dug into the mattress.

He smiled at her and said, “ Don’t go, Annie. Don’t go. ”

Annie woke up, sat up in bed, put her hand to her chest, and felt her heart beating so quickly she thought it might burn out.