The note lay on the hall runner a foot inside the front door, where anything pushed through the slot would come to rest.
It was ten to seven. Mara had come down in Evan's flannel shirt and two pairs of socks, because the house kept the night's cold until noon and she still hadn't found the box with her slippers. Light came through the fanlight and laid a pale wedge along the boards. The paper sat at the edge of it.
She crouched and looked before she touched. Old habit. An object tells you more before you've moved it.
One sheet from a steno pad. Green-tinted stock, Gregg ruling, a single red line down the middle. The top edge had come away along the perforation, but not cleanly. Two of the little paper bridges had held too long and taken a scallop of fiber with them. It had been folded once, not quite square. Blue ballpoint, pressed hard enough to raise a ridge on the back. Print, not script. Each letter stood apart from the next, the way people print when they mean to be read on the first try.
Your husband knows why the bedroom wall is thicker than the others.
She read it twice. Then she looked up at the slot.
Brass, with a hinged flap, as old as the door. The carrier used the box at the curb. In the week they had lived at 1127 Larch Street nothing had come through the slot at all, and she had started to think of it as ornament.
She lifted the paper by its edges. It was dry and flat. No cockling from the dew. It hadn't been outside long.
The bedroom was the front room off the hall, on the left. Its door stood open. Inside, Evan was asleep on his side with his back to the door, one arm crooked over his head as if the ceiling might come down. The room had four walls. Two were outside walls, with windows. One backed onto the closet and the bath. The fourth ran the length of the room from the doorway to the corner, and their headboard stood against it, and on its other side was the living room and the brick fireplace.
Her kit was upstairs in the slope-ceilinged room that was going to be her workroom, still half in boxes. She went up in her socks and came down with the long caliper and an index card.
The bedroom doorjamb, face to face: seven and three-quarter inches.
She wrote it in pencil. Then the kitchen doorway. Four and three-quarters. The bathroom. Four and three-quarters. The little back bedroom Evan had claimed for an office, the closet under the stairs. Four and three-quarters, four and three-quarters.
She went back and took the bedroom again, because a number you only take once is a guess. Seven and three-quarters.
Three inches. Somebody had built every inside wall in the house to one thickness and this one to another. This was the one she slept against.
She stepped into the room and knocked beside the frame, softly, with the second knuckle. Plaster on lath gives back a dense, flat note. This gave back a short, hollow one, like the back of a bookcase. She moved a foot along and knocked again. The same.
"Are you knocking?" Evan said into the pillow.
"There's a note."
He rolled over. His hair stood up on one side. She had the card in one hand and the note in the other, and after a second she gave him the note, edges first, as she would have handed a colleague something out of a box.
He sat up and read it. He read it again. Behind him the blind was a gray square going white.
"Do you know what—"
"No idea." He handed it back. "Somebody's idea of a welcome. Kids."
"Kids with a steno pad."
"Kids have everything." He swung his feet to the floor and looked for his jeans on the chair. "What time is it?"
"Seven. It came through the slot."
"Then it was kids. Or some guy who rented here once and thinks he's funny." He found the jeans. "Is there coffee?"
There wasn't. She made it. He came into the kitchen dressed, kissed the side of her head, drank half a mug standing at the counter, and then wiped the counter down with a paper towel, the whole length of it. She had wiped it the night before. Nothing had been set on it since but his mug.
"You're going to keep that," he said.
She had a box of Mylar sleeves in her kit, the three-mil ones, and she had already slid the note into one and pressed the air out along the edge with the side of her hand. It lay on the table between them, green behind clear polyester, like a leaf in ice.
"I'm keeping it flat."
"You're archiving it."
"It's paper. It's what I do with paper." She turned the sleeve over. The pen had embossed the back so deeply that the sentence read through in reverse. "Somebody pressed very hard."
"Somebody's angry at a house." He rinsed his mug and set it upside down on the rack. "I've got a closing file I have to get through by noon. Don't knock on the walls all day."
"Only the one."
He smiled at that, and went down the hall to the back bedroom, and shut the door.
Under the loupe the torn edge was a row of small gray mountains. Groundwood pulp, short fibers, the cheap stock every drugstore sold by the dozen. Two of the perforation bridges had torn late and dragged. If she ever had the pad, she could match it. She wrote that down too, under the numbers on the card, and then felt faintly ridiculous, and left the card on the table anyway.
They had moved for his father. Leland had been at Linden House, out on Orchard Road, for fifteen months. By spring the drive down from Carrick had stopped being something Evan could do twice a week and still keep his job. Then the Conservation Lab at Mercer State had posted a position, forty minutes up the river, and Mara had applied without telling anyone and got it. She started Monday. Today was the last day that belonged only to her.
The house had come with two things nobody wanted to move. A walnut wardrobe from the thirties stood in the bedroom against the long wall, so heavy that the men from the estate company had simply left it where it was. An upright piano stood in the living room with a white water ring on its lid. Neither of them played. They had agreed to keep both until they could agree about anything else.
She had been born here. Not in this house, in Averill: the county hospital, March, a Saturday. She had no memory of the place. Her mother had moved them to Ellsworth when she was five, and Gordon had adopted her at seven, so she had been a Sutter until second grade and a Frain after that, Mara Elizabeth both times. Evan liked to say she'd come home. She said you couldn't come home to a place you didn't remember. You could only move there.
What she knew about Averill was her mother's, and there wasn't much of it: the river came over the bridge every March, and eggs were a dollar sixty a dozen. Nora had left at thirty-five and never gone back for so much as a funeral. Mara had never needed more.
Evan had driven down alone on the last day of August to meet the locksmith, while she finished her last week at the archives. He'd come home that night with two sets of keys on new rings and a sunburn across the back of his neck. Every lock in the house had been changed.
She looked down the hall at the slot. The slot didn't lock.
She went out onto the porch in her socks. The boards were damp and cold enough to ache. Larch Street ran down toward the river one way and up toward the courthouse square the other, old bungalows and older foursquares under maples just starting to turn, every porch empty, every car in its driveway. Anyone could have come up these steps at five in the morning. Five steps, eight feet of porch, a slot at the height of a hip. You wouldn't need to knock. You would hardly need to stop walking.
From outside, the brass flap was dull gold in the middle where a century of fingers had pushed it in, and dark at the edges where nobody had. She went back in and shut the door and turned the deadbolt.
Her mother called at ten, while Mara was slitting the tape on a box of books.
"Tell me you've found the kettle."
"I found the kettle Tuesday."
"Tell me you've found the kettle and it's plugged in somewhere that isn't the floor."
"It's on the counter. There's a counter. There's a whole kitchen, Mom. It came with the house."
"Don't be smart. I've seen the pictures of that kitchen. Those cabinets are the color of a Band-Aid." Nora's voice had the brightness it got on weekday mornings, when she'd already been at Small Voices for two hours and had a meeting in ten minutes. "Are you ready for Monday? What are you wearing?"
"Clothes."
"Wear the green. The green makes you look like you know where the bathroom is."
Mara laughed, and sat down on the box. Outside the living-room window a man walked a beagle past the hedge. "How's the office?"
"The office is a fire I'm standing in, as usual. How's Lee?"
"Evan's going tomorrow. Mornings are supposed to be better."
"Mornings were always better with Lee." A pause, a sip of something. "Give him my love. Give Evan my love. Keep a little for yourself."
"Somebody put a note through our door this morning."
"A what?"
"A note. Through the slot." Mara picked up the sleeve from the table and read it to her.
The line went quiet. A door opened on Nora's end, and a second voice said something Mara couldn't make out. "Two minutes," Nora said, away from the phone.
"Mom?"
"I'm here. Somebody at the door, sorry. Some neighbor with a parking grudge. Throw it out, honey."
"It's on steno paper. Someone printed it very carefully."
"Then it's a neighbor with a parking grudge and a steno pad. Those are the worst kind. Throw it out." Her voice came back up to its weekday pitch. "All the more reason. Take that wall down. Make it a real master suite, with the closet opened up and one of those window seats. I'll pay."
"You've paid."
"I'll pay again. It's my money, I'm allowed to be tacky with it. I have to go put out the fire. Wear the green."
"I love you."
"I love you more. That's just math."
The call ended. Mara sat on the box of books for a while with the phone on her knee. Then she went upstairs and put on a sweater over Evan's shirt, and came down and put the sleeve in the top drawer of the hall table, under the takeout menus, face up.
She spent the afternoon on the porch, breaking down boxes for the recycling. The porch was deep and gray-painted and faced north across Larch Street. By four the September sun came in low under the roof at the west end and lay along the boards. It was the first time all day her hands weren't cold.
Across the street stood a big white house with a wraparound porch and pots of red geraniums along the rail. An old woman lived there. Mara had seen her once, in a quilted vest, taking in her mail. An outside staircase ran up the side of the house to a door on the second floor.
At five o'clock the upstairs door opened and a woman came down the stairs and stood at the porch rail.
Not the old woman. This one was small and very upright, somewhere past sixty, with a long gray braid down her back and glasses on a cord around her neck. She had a camera in one hand. She raised it and took a picture of the street. Not of the house. The camera was pointed lower, at the curb in front of 1127, at the empty stretch where the moving van had stood a week ago. She took a second picture. Then she let the camera hang and wrote something in a small notebook, pale green, too far off to read.
She didn't look at the house once. She went back up the stairs and the door closed behind her.
Mara stood with a flattened box in her hands. She looked at the curb. There was nothing at the curb. A storm drain. A maple leaf that had turned early.
At dinner she told Evan. He was eating standing up again, a plate of pasta at the counter, reading something on his phone.
"There's a woman across the street who photographs our curb."
He looked up. "Our curb."
"At five o'clock. Two pictures. Then she writes it down."
"Maybe she's with the city. Parking." He looked back down at the phone. "Your mom's neighbor with the grudge."
"You talked to my mother?"
"She texted me. 'Don't let Mara knock the house down by herself.'" He put the phone away. "She says hi."
Later, drying the pot, he went to the front window and stood there with the towel over his shoulder. The porch light across the street had come on. He stood there until Mara said his name, and then he turned around and folded the towel into a square and hung it over the oven door, very straight.
In this house Evan slept facing the window.
For as long as she had shared a bed with him he had slept on his left side, toward her. She'd teased him about it once, early, and he'd said it was so he could see if she was still there. Here he slept on his right, toward the street, with his back to her and to the long wall, and in a week she hadn't once woken to find him turned around.
She lay on her side in the dark. The house ticked as it cooled. A car went past, and its headlights crossed the ceiling and slid down the far wall and went out.
She put her hand flat on the wall beside the bed.
It was cool, and very smooth. Too smooth. The walls upstairs had the long soft waves of hand-floated plaster, a century of settling in them. This one was flat as a tabletop. She moved her hand in a slow circle and found nothing, no ripple, no crack, only paint over something even and new.
Evan breathed slowly on the other side of the bed. She left her hand where it was until it had warmed the paint, and then a little longer.
At eight the next morning she was standing at the bedroom window with a mug, still in the flannel shirt, when the door across the street opened.
The woman came down the outside stairs with the camera. She stopped at the rail. She raised the camera, took the curb, lowered it, took out the notebook, and wrote.
Then she looked up. Not at the curb. At the house, and along the front of it, and at the bedroom window, and at Mara standing in it.
Mara didn't step back. The woman lowered the notebook and held her eyes across the whole width of Larch Street, and did not look away.