The heavy walnut door with its tall sidelights of frosted glass patterned in floral arabesques, the door that she has been going in and out of most of her life off and on, has been swollen and sticking all summer with a humidity that never produced rain. Now it swings open more easily, with a dry crack, fall crispness being in the air at last. The girl—woman, really, close to Nelson’s age—who stands on the front porch looks vaguely familiar. She has a broad white face, her eyes wide-spaced with some milk in their blue and middle-aged crinkles at the corners beginning to develop. Taller than Janice by a bit, she fills her beige summer dress well, the cotton taut across her bosom and lap. She wears a navy-blue sweater draped over her shoulders like the young women at the Pearson and Schrack Realty office do, manning their glowing computers, giving a businesslike air. She asks, “Mrs. Angstrom?”

Janice is taken aback. “I was,” she allows. “My husband’s name now is Harrison.”

The girl blushes. “I’m sorry, I did know that. I wasn’t thinking.” The girl’s milky-blue eyes widen and Janice feels this stranger is actually trembling, her body aquiver in its careful quiet clothes, a creature somehow trapped on the welcome mat, in the rectangular shade of the brick-pillared porch.

Behind her, cars swish by on Joseph Street with a fresh dry sound. A shiny-new, brick-red Lexus stands at the dappled curb, under the still-green maples. A cloud passes overhead and the shadow is almost chilling: that’s how you feel the new season, the shadows are sharper and darker, and the crickets sing under everything. With the terrible drought this summer the leaves are turning early, those of the horse chestnuts curling brown at the edges, and the front yards where no one has watered have turned to flattened straw, a look Janice remembers from childhood, when you are closer to the ground and summer is endless.

“My mother died two months ago,” the girl begins again, taking a breath to steady her trembling, both her hands holding a small striped purse in front of her belly.

“I’m sorry,” Janice says. Nelson deals with crazy people at his work all the time and says they’re not to be afraid of. She deals with people trying to buy or sell houses, the most money a lot of them will ever have to think about, and they can get high-strung and irrational, too.

“I’ve never married, she was all the family I had.”