They Left Me Out of Their Group, So I'll Leave Them Out of My Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Porch

Tegan drives to Lake Ossery and finds her grandmother's house standing, with a neon sign bearing her name in the kitchen; the neighbor who has guarded it for three years catches her on the porch and tells her to get off.

I got to Lake Ossery at nine at night, in Dee's car, with the heater blowing on my feet and the radio off.

I hadn't been on that road in three years.

I knew every turn of it anyway.

The gravel lane ended at a mailbox shaped like a trout. Past it, behind the pines, was the house.

Two stories. Green shutters. The porch light was off, and the porch swing was still hanging on its one long chain.

It was still there.

Nobody had sold it, or knocked it down, or put it on a postcard.

I got out of the car and stood in the gravel with my keys in my hand, and the lake smelled the way it did when I was nine.

Cold water, wet cedar, a little smoke.

I walked up the steps.

The third step still dipped in the middle where Gran said the wood had learned her weight.

I was crouching at the porch planter before I'd thought about it.

Under the third pot from the left, in a sandwich bag, was the spare key she had hidden there since before I was born.

It was still there too.

I stood up with the bag in my hand and looked through the kitchen window.

A pink light was on inside.

It was glowing on the wall above Gran's stove, where she used to hang her copper pans.

Neon letters, curled like handwriting.

Good Times Without Tegan.

I read it three times, and the third time I read it, I put my hand on the window glass, because I was dizzy.

Under the sign was Gran's kitchen table.

It was covered with plastic cups, a pizza box and a bottle of something orange.

There was a pong table in the dining room, where her piano used to be.

On the wall by the door, where Gran kept her photo of me on the dock holding up a perch, hung a banner.

BRANDOLINI FAMILY LAKE WEEKENDS, EST. 3 YEARS AGO.

I took a step back.

My heel caught the dip in the third stair and I nearly went down it.

A man's voice said, from the dark at the end of the porch, "That key's been in that pot since before you were born. You can put it back."

I turned around.

He was standing at the corner of the house with a flashlight pointed at the boards, not at my face.

He was tall, and wide in the shoulders, in a canvas work jacket with sawdust on it.

He looked about thirty.

"Friday's two weeks off," he said. "You people don't get in early. I told Santino."

"I'm not one of those people."

"Then you're a stranger on a stranger's porch. Same answer."

He stepped closer, and the beam climbed to my shoes and stopped.

"It's not a stranger's porch," I said. "I know the third stair dips."

"Everybody who's come here in three years knows the third stair dips. I've fixed it twice and it comes back."

His voice was low and steady, and the anger in it was flat and tired.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Tegan."

He didn't say anything.

The beam stayed on the boards, and I watched his face change in the light that came back up off the wood.

First nothing.

Then his jaw set.

"Tegan what?"

"Tegan McGovern. My grandmother lived here. I grew up here, every summer, until I was nineteen."

The flashlight came up, finally, into my face, and I squinted.

He took it in slowly: my eyes, my hair, the old blue cardigan in my arm.

I knew the second he believed me, because his eyes went to the sign in the window, and then back to me, and they went cold.

"Well," he said. "You came."

"I came to see if the house was still here."

"It's here."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Rowan Landis. I live next door." He pointed with his chin at a light through the trees. "Your Gran taught me to make pie crust when I was fourteen and my father left."

"I don't remember you."

"You were seven. You hit me with a plastic bat."

I almost laughed, and I hated that I almost did.

"I need to know why there's a neon sign with my name on it in my grandmother's kitchen," I said.

"I'd like to know why you're standing on her porch three years late."

"I didn't know it was still hers. Santino told me it was sold."

"Santino told you."

"He handled everything. I was nineteen. I was..."

"Save it," Rowan said.

He said it quietly.

"I wrote you eighteen letters," he said. "Eighteen. I told you the roof leaked, I told you the dock was rotting, I told you the pipes froze the first winter. Not one answer."

My mouth was dry.

"I never got a letter."

"Right," he said.

"I didn't."

"Three years I kept this place standing for a woman who stopped taking my calls. Don't tell me you didn't know."

He lowered the flashlight.

"Get off her porch, Tegan."

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