One couldn’t, in all honesty, accuse Nick Cox of starting the “big house” craze in Willard Park. The tearing down and building up had started long before he moved in. It was slow at first, a knock down here, an addition there, but the pace had increased with time. Now houses wrapped in shimmering Tyvek slips were a common sight. Latino gardeners spilled out of trucks in the springtime along with wheelbarrows full of mulch and trees with round, burlap bottoms. Walking mowers had given way to tractor mowers nearly as big as the modest lawns themselves. The home gardener, in kerchief and garden gloves, a pair of clippers in hand, was becoming a rare animal in Willard Park.

Allison looked past her and Ted’s little house, comfortably set back on their lawn, to the house Nick was currently building, rising skyward like Jack’s beanstalk. Until June a Cinderella-model Sears home had stood there, owned for the better part of the century by Miss Theodora Frey, vegetable gardener and birder extraordinaire, now resting peacefully in her grave behind the church. Or rolling in it. Nick Cox had told her he was buying the house for his diabetic mother. Cox had completely resculpted the backyard to add another daylight level. It was nearly blinding the way the sun hit the white facade.

Nick was beside the new house, camouflaged in part by the leaves. There was something brutal about him, but it wasn’t unattractive. He was so tall and fit, Kaye so petite, that Allison thought Kaye was his teenaged daughter the first time she saw them, at the town cherry blossom parade. The way they’d looked, the children dressed in cheerful pinks and greens, you’d have thought they’d descended from the trees themselves.

Good sex, Allison thought, not for the first time. Energetic. Acrobatic, even. It was a game she and Valeria played. Which couples had fun in bed, who wanted out of the marriage, who would split ten, fifteen years down the road.

Valeria and Phil had sex three or four times a week, down from five to six times when they first got married. Valeria had mentioned this one day, laughingly saying they’d be down to just once or twice a week by the time Sofia put them in a nursing home. Allison had laughed—just once or twice a week!—when actually that sounded like quite a lot. She and Ted had never had it more than twice a week even when they were in college. Now it was down to once or twice a month.

If that.