The only person who didn’t laugh—or even smile—was Arthur. “I love the square,” he said, his tone serious. “I really do. It creates order, a feeling like there’s a center. It’s so European. Every town should have a square, and to have grown up on it? And in East Troy? There are some places that just make you feel good. I can’t explain it, I feel like myself there. I feel right.”

Sherri had never heard anyone speak so effusively about the town, not even the mayor. It was hard for her to imagine experiencing it as an outsider. As Sherri’s mother used to say, East Troy was the kind of place where they rolled up the sidewalks at night.

“First time I pulled into East Troy,” Arthur continued, “I knew I wanted to stay. I wish I’d been there my whole life. You’re lucky.”

“I guess.” Sherri was confused by this sentiment. All her life she’d thought everyone else had been lucky, from Roberta with her Sunday dinners to the kids from the big farm families who got into mischief in the barns.

Jerry said, “He’s not kidding. First day I took him to look at houses, he told me to write an offer.”

She couldn’t believe anybody would actually choose to live there. East Troy was where you ended up by accident, like her father, because his settler-ancestors had lost steam on their trip west and plunked down in Wisconsin, or, like her mother, because she would have gone anywhere to escape her parents. Muriel used to say that the only thing missing from East Troy was a city.

Judging from Arthur’s smile he was clearly still pleased with his purchase. “I knew I wanted to live there as soon as Jerry turned off Highway J.”

“You bought a house on Lake Beulah?” Now the story was starting to make sense. Lake Beulah she could understand. It was a beautiful, big, spring-fed lake.

“Not just on Beulah. On Jesuit Island,” Jerry said. “The house is all the way at the end of Island Drive.”

Sherri was impressed. Jesuit Island wasn’t really an island but a peninsula that stuck out into the lake like a skinny finger, separated from the rest of the land by a small, man-made channel that connected the lake to other, smaller lakes. It was named for a group of Jesuits who had owned a huge old retreat house there. When Sherri was in high school the Jesuits decided to sell, and they divided the land into half-acre lots and stipulated that the minimum price for a house was five hundred thousand dollars. Everyone in town talked about it. Half a million bucks! Now the “island” was home to some of the biggest, newest houses in East Troy, with views of Lake Beulah on one side, and Mill Pond, as the locals called it, on the other.