She cried then.
So did I.
We sat there until the gulls stopped.
The first residents arrived in September, on a bright, windy Saturday.
Corey, nineteen, with his whole life in a duffel bag.
Jaden, eighteen, who looked at the long staircase as if it might be a trick.
Mia, eighteen, who didn’t speak for two days and then asked, very softly, whether the lock on her door was really hers to turn.
“It’s yours,” I told her. “Nobody else has a key.”
She turned it twice, just to hear it click.
We held a small opening ceremony on the lawn.
Ned Peterson came, and Hugh Loring, and half the old board.
The church ladies brought three kinds of pie.
Someone had set out rows of white folding chairs, and I walked up and down them with a clipboard, then stopped.
Because I remembered a black dress, a church lunch, and a woman with a Birkin on her arm who had told me where the help was supposed to sit.
I put down the clipboard.
“Corey. Jaden. Mia,” I said. “Front row, please.”
They looked at me.
“The front row?” Mia said.
“The front row. Every day, in this house. As long as I’m here.”
Forty people on that lawn applauded.
I’m not ashamed to say I couldn’t see them through my tears.
Cynthia Vickers was not among them.
I heard she sold the lake house in the spring and moved to Arizona.
I hope she’s sitting somewhere warm.
I mean it.
I stopped needing her to be sorry a long time ago.
Stella, who was eight by then, had made herself the unofficial head of the chess club.
Every afternoon she set up the board at the kitchen table, in the same chair where Chester had once sat, and challenged whoever walked through the door.
Corey lost to her in nineteen moves and demanded a rematch.
Jaden lost in twelve.
Mia, who never said much, beat her on a Thursday, and the whole kitchen went quiet.
Stella looked at the board for a long time.
“Good game,” she said.
Then she added, in a perfect imitation of an old, gravelly voice, “Keep going.”
