Read The House on Juniper Lane free: the opening chapter

Part One: What the Lake Keeps

The kitchen floor had gone soft in the corner by the icebox, and Ruth Ann Poole was on her hands and knees trying to decide if she should tell Vera or just keep her mouth shut.

She pressed her palm against the boards. They gave under her hand like bread dough. The storm last week had pushed the lake up through the floor drain, and the water had sat there two days before anyone noticed, because nobody went into that corner of the kitchen unless they had to. The icebox hadn't worked since before the war. It just stood there holding old flower vases and a bag of mothballs.

"You're going to ruin your knees on that floor," Vera said from the doorway.

"They're already ruined. Yours will be too if you don't fix this."

Ruth Ann sat back on her heels. The water stains spread out from the corner in long brown shapes, and she had been staring at them too long, the way you stare at clouds. One looked like Italy, the boot, she was sure of it. Another looked like it could be Africa if you squinted. She would never see either place. She knew that. She had made her peace with it the way you make peace with a lock of gray hair. But it was something, finding countries on a kitchen floor.

"You see that one?" she said. "That's Italy."

"That's a leak."

"It's Italy. Toe and all."

Vera came over and looked down. She had her sleeves rolled up and her hair pinned back the way she always wore it, and there was flour on her forearm from the bread she'd started that morning. Vera Calloway was fifty-two years old and owned the biggest house on Juniper Lane, and she still got up at five every day to bake her own bread, like she was afraid somebody was going to come take the flour back.

"Huh," Vera said. "I see it."

"And that one there could be Africa."

"That one there could be a bill I can't afford."

Ruth Ann laughed and hauled herself up using the counter. Her knees cracked like someone stepping on ice. "You can afford it. Don't give me that."

"I can afford some of it. There's a difference."

That was how Vera talked about the house. Some of it. A difference. As if the house were a bill she was paying down to God and the balance never showed on the statement.

---

Ruth Ann had been coming to this house for thirty-one years, since she was twenty-two and Vera was twenty-one and neither of them knew what was coming. She had come when Vera worked here, back when the Whitakers owned it and Vera scrubbed these same floors on these same knees. She had come after, when the house became Vera's, in that strange spring of 1966 that nobody in Alder Falls had ever gotten a clean story about.

She knew every sound the house made. She knew which stair creaked third from the top, and how the west windows rattled when the wind came off the lake, and how the front parlor stayed cold all year, even in July, like the room had decided on its own to hold a grudge. The house was a drafty old Victorian with a tower on one corner and a widow's walk on the roof, and it was too big for one woman and it ate money the way a stove eats wood, and Ruth Ann loved it almost as much as Vera did, which she would never say out loud because it wasn't hers to love.

"Where are the kids?" Ruth Ann asked.

"June's at the library. Eddie's down at the dock, where he shouldn't be."

"It's July. Boys go to docks in July."

"He's ten."

"He's eleven."

"He's ten until I say otherwise." Vera wiped her flour arm on her apron. "The water got into his shoes last week and he wore them wet for two days rather than tell me. That's the kind of boy he is. He doesn't want to be any trouble."

"He's a good boy."

"He's a good boy who's going to drown being polite."

Ruth Ann let that go. She had learned a long time ago which of Vera's sentences were doors and which were walls. You didn't push on the walls.

Instead she looked around the kitchen the way she always did, taking inventory without meaning to. Copper pans on the hooks. The long pine table that could seat twelve and usually sat two. The stove Vera had bought secondhand in 1968 that still cooked hotter on the left side than the right. And over it all the smell of the bread rising, and under that, faint now but getting stronger, the smell of lake water sitting in old wood. A smell like a basement. Like something kept too long.

"You should open these windows," Ruth Ann said.

"They're painted shut."

"All of them?"

"Daniel had them painted over in '54. Some draft he was trying to stop."

"Daniel's been in the ground eleven years. I think the draft won."

Vera almost smiled. That was the thing about her. The jokes came out of her sideways when you weren't looking, and then her face closed up again like she'd spent something she hadn't meant to spend.

---

They made coffee and sat at the long table, one at each end, the way they had sat a thousand times. The morning light came through the window over the sink in a big pale block, and the dust moved in it, and the house ticked and settled around them the way it always did in summer, like a big animal shifting in its sleep.

"How bad is it really?" Ruth Ann asked, nodding at the floor.

"Bad."

"How bad is bad?"

"The joists under that corner are gone. Gerald looked at them Tuesday. He says the whole corner of the kitchen could go into the crawl space one of these mornings. Said we're lucky nobody was standing there when it softened up."

Ruth Ann set her cup down. "Vera."

"It held. It's held."

"What did he say it would cost?"

Vera looked out the window. Out past the glass, down the slope of the yard, the lake sat flat and gray and innocent, like it hadn't just reached up and bitten the corner out of her kitchen. "More than I have. Less than it's worth."

"That's not a number."

"It's the only number I'm saying out loud today."

Ruth Ann knew better than to push, so she pushed a different way. "You could sell a piece of the land. That lot past the garden, up by the road. Somebody would pay good money for that lake frontage."

"No."

"Just the back acre. You'd never miss it."

"No."

"Vera, you own half a mile of shoreline and you're telling me you can't fix a floor."

"The land isn't mine to sell."

Ruth Ann went still. She had heard Vera say strange things about this house over the years, things that sat wrong, things she'd learned to chew on in private. But this was a new one. "What does that mean, not yours to sell? Your name is on the deed. I've seen it. At the courthouse, after, when you made me drive you."

"My name's on it." Vera turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. "That doesn't make it mine."

"It's been yours eleven years."

"Eleven years I've been keeping it. There's a difference between keeping a thing and owning it. You of all people should know that. You've been keeping that ring of your mother's for forty years and you never once called it yours."

"That's a ring. This is a house with four floors and a tower."

"Same shape of thing, Ruth Ann. Same shape."

Ruth Ann watched her friend's face and saw the wall come down behind it, and she did the thing she always did. She changed the subject and saved the strange sentence in the part of her mind where she kept all of Vera's strange sentences, in a box she never opened in front of anyone. There were quite a few in there now. After thirty-one years, the box was getting heavy.

---

They heard the screen door bang at the back of the house, and then fast feet, and then Eddie Calloway came through the kitchen like weather. He was small for eleven, all elbows and brown hair, and he had a mason jar in his hands with something moving in it.

"Mom. Mom, look."

"Your shoes are wet," Vera said.

"They're not that wet. Look." He set the jar on the table. Inside, a small painted turtle turned itself in a slow circle, bumping the glass. "He was sitting on the drain pipe where it's all soft. Right in the soft spot. I almost stepped on him."

"You're not supposed to be down at the dock."

"I wasn't at the dock. I was at the drain pipe. That's the yard." He said it with total sincerity, both hands flat on the table, and Ruth Ann had to look out the window so he wouldn't see her grin.

Vera picked up the jar and looked at the turtle, and her face did the soft thing it did only for Eddie. June got the lectures. Eddie got the soft thing. Ruth Ann had wondered for years if Vera knew she did it, and had decided she knew and couldn't help it.

"He was in the house's spot," Eddie said. "The turtle. Right where the floor's sick."

"The floor's not sick."

"Ruth Ann said it was going into the crawl space. That's sick." He looked up at his mother. "Can I keep him?"

"That is a lake turtle. He goes back to the lake."

"He came to us, though."

Vera set the jar down. "That doesn't make him ours."

Ruth Ann glanced at her. Same words. Same shape of thing.

"He can stay one night," Vera said, which Ruth Ann noted was not no. "In the garage. Then back to the water."

Eddie grabbed the jar and was gone again, screen door banging, feet pounding across the soft corner of the floor without a thought in the world, and Vera flinched, actually flinched, watching him cross the bad boards.

"Lord," she said quietly. "Don't run on it."

---

After Eddie left, the kitchen went quiet in the way only that house could go quiet, full of small noises pretending to be silence. The clock in the hall. The fridge, the new one, humming. The lake, if you listened for it, a low steady sound under everything, like a radio left on in another room. Ruth Ann had always thought you could hear the lake from every room in that house if you were still enough, even from the tower, even from the cellar. Like the house had been built leaning toward the water and had been leaning a little farther every year.

"Can I ask you something?" Ruth Ann said.

"You'll ask it either way."

"Why do you stay?"

Vera looked at her.

"I'm serious. You're alone in this house eleven months a year. June's going to college in the fall, you know she is, she's too smart not to. Eddie will be all you have, and boys don't stay, Vera, they never stay. The roof leaks, the furnace is older than I am, and now the floor's going. You could sell this place tomorrow for more money than either of us has ever seen, buy a little house in town with radiators that work, and never mop another lake flood in your life." Ruth Ann spread her hands. "So why? I've wanted to ask for years. Why do you stay?"

Vera got up and went to the window over the sink. She stood there a while, looking down at the water, and Ruth Ann thought she wasn't going to answer. It wouldn't be the first time.

But then Vera said, "When I came here, I was eighteen. I had forty dollars and a suitcase with a broken handle. I cleaned that window you're sitting next to on my first day, and Miriam Whitaker came in and told me I'd missed a spot." Her thumb moved over the edge of the sill, slow. "I hated her for saying it. And then I spent four years trying to make her glad she'd said it. That's what this house does to you, Ruth Ann. It gives you a spot to clean and then it makes you want to clean it right."

"That's not an answer. That's a story that sounds like an answer."

"It's the only kind I have."

Ruth Ann let a moment pass. "Does it have something to do with what Daniel left you?"

The room changed. She felt it change. Vera's shoulders altered by some small degree, and the lake sound under everything seemed to get closer, and Ruth Ann knew she had put her hand on one of the walls.

"Daniel didn't leave me anything," Vera said. "He paid a debt."

"To you?"

"To this family." A pause. "Both parts of it."

And that, Ruth Ann thought, was the strangest sentence yet, and she put it in the box with the rest, and she did not ask what it meant, because there are questions you save for when your friend is ready, and there are questions your friend will never be ready for, and after thirty-one years you can tell the difference.

---

She stayed through lunch. Vera cut the bread she'd baked and they had it with butter and sliced tomatoes from the garden, and they talked about easy things, the Dahlbergs' new dog, the price of gas, whether Ruth Ann's niece was really going to marry that boy from Wausau. Ordinary talk. Kitchen table talk. But the whole time, Ruth Ann kept looking at the brown shapes on the floor. Italy. Africa. Countries made of damage.

It's funny what a floor keeps, she thought. She had scrubbed these boards herself, some years, back when Vera's legs were bad in the winter. She knew there was a burn mark by the stove from 1959 where Miriam Whitaker dropped a coal from the dumbwaiter grate and made Vera leave it there, said it would give the room character. She knew there was a patch near the pantry door where Daniel Whitaker had pried up a board once, drunk, looking for something he'd hidden years before, and never found it, and put the board back wrong so it always squeaked after. She knew there were Eddie's crayon marks under the table where nobody saw them but her, a blue boat and a stick boy waving from it, drawn the summer he was six.

Floors keep all of it. Everything that falls and everything that's spilled and everybody who ever stood and lied about something. Walls get painted. Floors just get walked on. The truth stays down there where nobody looks.

"A penny," Vera said.

"For my thoughts?"

"You went somewhere."

"I was thinking about floors."

"That's a worse thought than the bill."

Ruth Ann smiled. "I was thinking you should get Gerald back here. Get it fixed proper. And if you won't sell the land, we'll figure out the money another way. Church does loans. I know people."

"You're not paying for my floor, Ruth Ann Poole."

"I didn't say I'd pay. I said we'd figure it out. That's different. That's us."

Vera looked at her across the long table, and for a second the wall came down, and Ruth Ann saw what was behind it, which was only ever the same thing: tiredness, and love, and something underneath both that had no name Ruth Ann had ever learned. Then Vera nodded once, short, the way she accepted things she couldn't argue with.

"All right," she said. "We figure it out."

---

It was past two when Ruth Ann left. Vera walked her out onto the porch, which sagged on the left side and always had, and the two of them stood looking at the lake doing its afternoon glitter, boats out, somebody's radio faint across the water.

Down at the dock, Eddie was a small shape at the end of the boards. He had the jar. Ruth Ann watched him crouch and tilt it, and the turtle slid into the water and was gone, and Eddie stayed crouched there looking down at where it had been, one hand trailing in the lake.

"He's a funny boy," Ruth Ann said. "He lets everything go."

"He's like his grandmother that way."

Ruth Ann turned. Vera almost never spoke about her mother. Nobody spoke about Vera's mother. Ruth Ann had spent three decades not asking.

Vera wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the boy on the dock, and her face was doing something Ruth Ann couldn't read, and she said, more to herself than to anyone, "Let it all go back to the water. It's easier than holding it."

Then the wind came off the lake and the west windows rattled, all of them, painted shut and rattling anyway, like the house was answering.

Ruth Ann drove home slow with the window down, and she thought about countries in the floorboards and debts paid in deeds, and she did not know, could not have known, that in two years the boy on the dock would be gone and the house would keep that too, the way floors keep everything. She only knew that her friend's kitchen floor was soft as bread dough, and that something under that house had been going wrong for a long, long time, and the water had finally found it.

The sample ends here.