Chapter 13: Garden Street

Dorothy Harlow's whole life was out on the curb of Garden Street.

Her armchair sat on the sidewalk with a lamp on its seat.

Her kitchen table lay on its side against a white van with a Crane Hospitality logo on the door.

Two men in work shirts were carrying out a box marked Books.

Zachary's truck stopped behind the van.

He was out before the engine quit.

"Put it down," he said.

"Property manager's orders," said the man with the box. "The lease was terminated. Notice was mailed."

"Mailed where?" Melinda asked.

The man looked at his clipboard and didn't answer.

She held up her phone and photographed the van's plate, then his face, then the clipboard.

"My husband's company is a party in my custody case," she said. "Every box you drop, I'm sending to his lawyer and to the judge."

The man set the box down on the sidewalk, carefully.

Across the street a screen door opened.

A woman in an apron came out, then a man with a dog, then two teenagers from a porch swing.

Nobody asked what had happened.

They picked up the armchair and the table and started carrying them to Zachary's truck.

Dorothy watched from the passenger seat with her glasses in her hand.

"That's my good teapot," she said to nobody, and got out to rescue it.

By dusk the equipment barn behind the gatehouse held four chairs, a bed frame and nineteen boxes of books.

The kitchen table went inside, under the gatehouse window, because it was the only thing in the room big enough to eat at.

Dorothy stood in the gatehouse door with her coat buttoned to the neck.

"A friend from the library has a spare room on Willow Lane," she said. "She has a television I'm not allowed to hear after eleven."

"Mom, you can stay here."

"I can see the size of the room, Melinda."

Dorothy looked at the cot by the stove, then at the narrow bed under the window, then at her daughter.

"Lock the door."

She walked down the lane in the last of the light.

Melinda turned the key, and it was loud in the quiet.

Zachary was at the stove with his back to her, feeding it a split log it didn't need.

"You've been staring at that fire for five minutes," she said.

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