Very quietly.
I went back to the casita.
I closed the door.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
And I looked at Harold’s blue mug on the nightstand.
That silence stayed with me.
A few months later, Daniel and Renee became obsessed with a house.
An old craftsman on Willow Creek Lane.
In Arcadia. The old part of Phoenix. Near Camelback Mountain. Where the streets are lined with citrus trees and the houses were built in the 1920s and 30s before anybody had air conditioning.
Four bedrooms. Two stories. A big front porch with square columns and a swing. Huge old shade trees. A pecan. Two sycamores. An orange grove in the back. Twelve trees.
The kind of house that makes people imagine holidays before they’ve even moved in.
Every evening, they talked about it.
At dinner. Over the roast chicken or the tacos or the spaghetti I made.
