It was serendipity that eventually led him to Bascom. He met a woman at a conference in Orlando, an art professor at Orion College in Bascom. There was wine, there was flirtation, there was a wild night of sex in her hotel room. A few years later, during a restless summer break, he found out about an opening in the art department at Orion College, and that night came back to him in beautiful and vivid images. He interviewed for and got the position. He didn’t even remember the woman’s name, it was simply the romance of the thing. By the time he arrived, she had moved on, and he never found her.

The older he got, the more he thought about how he hadn’t married, about how what brought him to this town in the first place was another restless summer and a dream of a life with a woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand.

Okay, was that really romantic or just pitiful?

He heard a thud come from around the side of his house, so he took his hands out of his pockets and headed to the backyard. When he’d mowed a couple of days ago, the grass had been high, so there were big wet clumps of grass clippings all over the yard.

He should probably rake it all up. But then what would he do with all that grass? He couldn’t just leave it in a big clump in the middle of his yard. What if all the cut grass dried and killed the live grass under it?

One day out of school and he was already obsessively preoccupied with his lawn. And it would probably get worse.

What was he going to do with himself until the summer session started?

He had to remember to make notes to himself to eat. He’d do it tonight, so he wouldn’t forget. He’d stick them to the refrigerator, the couch, the bed, the commode.

The light from the back porch illuminated the backyard—a small yard, not nearly as large as the one next door. The Waverleys’ metal fence, covered with honeysuckle, separated the two yards. Twice since he’d moved in, Tyler had pulled kids off the fence. They were trying to get to the apple tree, they said, which he thought was stupid because there were at least six mature apple trees on Orion’s campus. Why try to go over a nine-foot fence with pointy finials when they could walk to Orion? He told the kids this, but they just looked at him like he didn’t know what he was talking about. That apple tree, they said, was special.

He walked along the fence, taking deep breaths of sweet honeysuckle. His foot hit something and he looked down to see he had kicked an apple. His eyes then followed a trail of apples to a small pile of them close to the fence. Another one hit the ground with a thud. This was the first time he’d ever had apples fall on his side of the fence. Hell, he couldn’t even see the tree from his yard.