Poppy fished around in the giant woven bag that she’d bought in Honduras and wrapped her hand around her mother’s BOOKLOVER key chain, which she’d found hanging from the bulletin board in Milwaukee. Everything she owned came from somewhere else. Had she ever used a key? They’d always left the door unlocked. It was a heavy bitted key with an ornate bow, the only fanciful element of the no-nonsense Puritan design of the house. When she slipped it into the lock, she remembered the summer when she and her mom painted the door bright green, but it was red now. At least the paisley curtain was still there, hanging over the window. Her mother made it herself, at home in Milwaukee.

She opened the door and smelled the familiar scent of trapped air. She walked to the Formica kitchen table she and Ann used to cover with blankets and newspapers and hide under with flashlights and books. A pamphlet that said “Preparing your home for sale” sat on top of it. If only she could figure out a way to keep the house.

Poppy looked around and thought about all the things she had to do. Her parents had always attended to the business of opening the house for summer. They turned the water valves, lit the pilot light, and cleared away spiderwebs and evidence of mice. Now it was up to her to figure out how to make the house inhabitable, and she had no idea where to start. She didn’t even know how to turn on the electricity, and remembered the summer when she and Ann were little, when, just as an experiment, the family lived without electricity for almost a week.

She heard a noise on the other side of the house, near the sunporch. Was she imagining it? Was this what happened after spending too much time alone? She wished Brad were there. Footsteps. Then she swore she saw someone outside in the back lot, or was it just the tree moving in the wind? A neighborhood cat? A mouse? A squirrel? Ghosts? What was that?

“Hello?” Poppy said.

She ran to the kitchen and picked up the old mustard-yellow phone on the wall. Nothing. The service had been shut off for the winter.

She needed to be comforted by the sound of her own voice. “Noah?” she shouted. “Ann?” She looked at her Nixon watch. It was only five o’clock. Ann said they’d come down for the weekend, their first face-to-face encounter in more years than Poppy wanted to consider.