How could she remember the apartment so well and not remember Mr. Sibley? thought Austin. But then, women seemed to care more about stuff like pillows and pictures. It was another of his parents’ problems. Dad failed to notice anything in the way of a scented candle or new dried flowers. He certainly failed to understand why hard-earned money should be spent on them. Mom shrieked that he might as well be a hound dog sleeping on an old blanket in the garage. Dad yelled that … oh, well.

“Nobody could believe that the owners would … um …” Alice Yinson coughed.

Austin knew the rest of the sentence. Nobody could believe that the owners rented to a black man instead of me, Alice Yinson Devers. Homemaker and native of the town.

I’m no different from this awful woman, he thought. I couldn’t believe I was trapped in that fire. I didn’t deserve it. Not me. Not rich, white Austin.

Alice finished coughing. “My husband and I were living with my parents that year,” she said, “and just happened to look up and see flames across the brook. We telephoned the fire department. Back then you didn’t have 911, you know. You had to look up the phone number like any other number.”

Austin made a resolution. When he got married, he would not live with his in-laws in a little teeny house with little teeny furniture and spend his time gazing at the apartment he had not gotten.

“Did you go see the fire?” asked Macey.

“No. That brook is dangerous at high tide.”

It was 1959, not 1659, thought Austin. You could have gotten in the car and driven over, like everybody else who was curious.

But Alice got to that. “We were not the kind of people who drive to fires and clutter the roads, gawking at the misfortunes of others. I’m sorry, Miss Clare, but I have a client waiting. Good luck on your project.” She hung up.

Macey put her phone down sadly. “Oh, Aus! What was it like for Mr. Sibley? If that woman was welcoming, he must have felt as if he were living in a freezer.”

They hugged to find the warmth Mr. Sibley had not received. It was a quick, neighborly hug. Austin did not want to be neighbors with Macey. But that’s what this is about, he thought. Neighbors, and what they are.

“Mace,” he said, and he could hardly swallow, hardly think. He absolutely could not talk about Mr. Sibley another minute. He could not think about Miss McCune’s poem, or divorce, or parents, or grandparents. “Let’s go to a movie tonight.”

She smiled as if he were a prince, the kind who carved marshmallow sticks, the kind whose T-shirt would hang forever in the back porch of their memories. “Yes. Let’s.”