A week later, on a Saturday afternoon when they were drinking coffee together at the table near the window, a large white envelope was poked beneath the door. She went over to pick it up. Inside was a sidewalk snapshot of Walter. Just behind him, wearing a silver-fox jacket, was the girl Karin. She put it on the table. He looked down at it.

She took the old suitcase from the closet and began to pack. As she bent over, her mind on the sidewalk beyond this room, this life with Walter, a coffee cup hit her on the back of her head. She turned. He was standing there, his hands on his hips. She picked up a chair and ran toward him. He began to laugh. She broke the chair in front of him. They stood there with the jagged pieces of wood between them.

When she got to the door, he called, “Wait!” She turned.

“Why can’t we live like normal people?” he cried.

She laughed all the way to the sidewalk, aware that she was attracting attention but, for once, indifferent to it. There were coffee grounds on her shoulders. She found a phone booth.

“Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.

“Is this Mrs. Shore?”

“This is Eva.”

“Is Mr. Shore—”

His voice came on.

“Max? This is Annie. Can I come there?”

She heard a child’s voice in the background.

“I don’t know what to do…” she muttered to herself. Max heard her.

“Come right away,” he said. “But I can drive and get you.”

“No. I’ll get there.”

Chapter 14

Nothing that Annie had seen secured her attention so much as Max Shore, his wife and child, and the way they lived in their three rooms among their books, their cooking pots, their child’s battered toys. Sometimes Eva was late for work and left before making their bed. From the studio couch in the living room, Annie, drinking a cup of coffee, watched Max at this task through the open door. When the bed was made, the day began even though Thomas had been up for hours by then, building and kicking over towers of blocks, or rolling canned goods across the narrow kitchen floor.

They were kind to her. Eva tended to lower her voice when she spoke to Annie, as though she were convalescent. So she must have seemed to Eva, she knew. Her sense of her own strangeness grew apace with the efforts the Shores made to include her in their life.