Edith Kramer came across the street on a morning when Andre was sweeping his front step, carrying a covered dish with both hands and walking the way people walk when they have decided that a short distance is still worth doing carefully.
She was smaller than he had expected up close, with silver hair pinned back and eyes that took in his porch in one unhurried pass. She had lived in the house opposite his for longer than Andre had been alive, and she saw everything on Juniper Lane whether she meant to or not.
She held out the dish. Inside, under a clean cloth, was a potato salad made the way someone makes it when they have stopped measuring years ago, with celery cut fine and eggs sliced on top in neat rounds.
For the new neighbor, she said. Officially. The unofficial part can wait until you have eaten something.
Andre thanked her and invited her onto the porch, where the two chairs he had set out still looked too new for the house.
They talked first about ordinary things, in the order that careful people talk about them. The heat, and whether it would break. The streetlight near the corner that flickered. The previous owner of Andre's house, a quiet man who had kept the hedges in a straight, severe line. Edith asked about Andre's work and his family and whether the house had shown him any of its secrets yet, by which she meant the plumbing, and Andre found himself laughing in a way he had not managed since the Saturday of the cookout.
She did not rush to the subject that had brought her across the street. It arrived the way a cloud arrives, changing the light before anyone names it.
She had seen the police cars, she said at last. She had watched from her front window, not the curtain, she wanted him to know, because she was too old to pretend she was not watching when she plainly was. She had seen Marjorie Whitcomb go through his gate as if she had a right to the latch. She had seen the officers listen, and she had seen them send Marjorie on her way, and that last part had stayed with her all week, because it was not how such afternoons usually ended on this street.
Andre set his plate down. He asked, as evenly as he could, how they usually ended.
Edith looked out at the lane for a moment before she answered. Usually, she said, the person whose yard it was ended up apologizing for something they had not done, just to make the whole thing stop. Usually a letter followed. Then another. Usually, by the time the letters stopped being polite, the person had stopped inviting anyone over at all.
She told him she was not bringing him gossip. She had no use for gossip at her age, and she said the word with a small, dry distaste. What she was bringing him was a warning, and warnings, in her view, should be delivered in person, with food, and without dressing them up as anything else.
Do not let them wear you down, she said. That is the whole method, if you want to call it a method. Nothing large enough to point to. Nothing that sounds serious when you repeat it to someone who was not there. Just a steady drip, week after week, until a person decides his own home is more trouble than it is worth.
Andre asked who them meant, though he already suspected the answer would not be a single name.
Edith folded her hands. Marjorie holds the pen, she said. But a pen needs people who look the other way when it writes. Some of them are afraid of receiving letters of their own. Some of them just like a quiet street, and they have not yet asked themselves what they are paying for the quiet.
She stood then, smoothing her skirt, and refused his offer to carry the dish back later that day. Bring it when it is empty, she said. No hurry. A dish returned too fast means a person did not eat.
At the bottom of his steps she paused and looked back at the gray house, at the fence, at the gate with its ordinary latch.
You kept your head on Saturday, she said. I noticed that. Keep it.
Andre watched her cross the street at her own pace. He stood on his porch a long while after her door had closed, her words settling where his own suspicions had been waiting for company.
He washed the dish that evening, dried it carefully, and set it by the door, empty, to be returned in its own good time. Not too fast, and not with thanks so large they would embarrass her.
Chapter 14: The Pattern
Edith invited him to her porch for iced tea the following week, and it was there, with a small fan turning in the window, that she told him about the others.