The yellow clingstone peaches were soft enough to peel with my thumbnail, but the pocketknife Steve left in the kitchen drawer cut cleaner. I sliced them into a blue ceramic bowl, watching the children through the window above the sink.
The water in the concrete pool was a bright, clean turquoise under the June sun. It had cost twenty-four thousand dollars three years ago, a sum that still made my chest tight when I looked at our savings passbook. That money was supposed to be our safety net, but Steve had been determined to give the kids a proper backyard before the illness took him.
My ten-year-old daughter, Toby, leaned against the counter, her wet swimsuit leaving a dark patch on the yellowing linoleum. She pointed a sticky finger toward the window.
“Mom, why is Mrs. Vance staring at us?” Toby asked.
I looked past the water. Katherine Vance stood by her wooden porch railing, her posture straight as a fence post, her eyes fixed on our yard.
A sudden chill went through me, despite the humid afternoon heat rising off the stove. I put the knife down on the cutting board.
“She is probably just enjoying the afternoon,” I said, though Katherine had not smiled at us since the funeral in November.
“She is not enjoying anything,” Toby said. “She looks like she is counting.”
On the water, a cracked blue plastic pool toy bobbed against the concrete edge, its hollow belly half-filled with pool water. I watched Katherine smooth her gray-blond hair behind her ears, a quick, sharp motion she repeated twice before she turned and went inside.
I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and looked down at the bowl of peaches. The fruit was sweet, but the appetite had gone out of me.
The humidity broke slightly by four o’clock, leaving the smell of wet grass heavy in the cul-de-sac. I walked down the slope of the lawn to the row of red shrub roses Steve had planted along the eastern boundary.
Katherine was already there, standing on her side of the low wire fence with a pair of orange-handled garden shears in her hand. Her beige slacks were spotless, without a single speck of dirt from her own flowerbeds.
