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  Dan works beside his father at Glassman Locks & Keys (What Have You Got to Lose?). Sue assumed Dan’s salary would ascend with the years. Yet nearly two decades later, and even though Dan now technically owns the company, it’s Sy’s gifts that still keep them afloat, infantilized—a dishwasher here, a college fund there, orthodontics, an iPod. And now that Sue finally agreed to convert to Judaism, the big prize, a beach house.

  Craftily, this latest bribe was made on 9/12 even as Sue and Dan argued over who had left all the windows open in their cramped Tribeca apartment. And though Dan had never before interfered in his parents’ quest to convert Sue, in a few weeks, he was begging her to say yes. A bit unhinged, Sue guessed. In an unrelated crisis, Dan’s seemingly healthy mother lay dying in the ICU at Brooklyn Hospital—heart attack. How desperately she had wanted a Jewish daughter-in-law Dan reminded her.

  “Sorry, but that won’t work on me.”

  Ever smooth, Dan switched tactics. “Well, we can’t stay here. What do you think we’re breathing in?”

  “People, metal—”

  “That was rhetorical. Oh, Su-zy. Who loves the ocean more than you?”

  “We can move without your father, Dan.”

  “When we sell our apartment at Ground Zero?”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “You’re in denial.”

  “You’re in shock.”

  “My mother’s dying. And without a Jewish—”

  “Sorry, but that won’t work on me.”

  These words were repeated often, in the same order and also rearranged with the occasional add-on insult or plea. Then, for a time, Sue and Dan stopped saying anything. Dan’s mom died, and his dad gave him ownership of Glassman Locks & Keys. Dan sent Sue daisies and they made up (sort of), avoiding the subject(s). In the end, Sue discovered she was pregnant again…at forty-two. And caved. Blame hormones or love or the post-terror downtown stench, but moving suddenly seemed the only option. Within an hour of her assent, Sy had the whole conversion arranged with his rabbi and golf buddy Larry Gutman. An early-summer date was set for the ritual. As June loves to say, Sue sold her soul for a sea view and a few extra bathrooms.

  If Sue were converting to Christianity, she could confess and be absolved. Instead, there’s only punishment. First, the catch: her father-in-law was going to live with them. (So Sue could take care of him.) Then, the rub: other than Sy’s own bottom-floor suite, the old wreck would be renovated piecemeal. (It’s high time Dan got handy.) Next, the revelation that the Murder House was not a name coined by witty children but the result of a shooting death here in this room. Perhaps worst of all is the doorbell itself, now again chiming “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  Sue rises; head rush. The digital tune was clearly chosen by Sy to drive her, a lapsed music teacher, insane. And it’s working. As she zigzags down the front hall, faded forms on the peeling pink wallpaper shift from roses to skirts to tiny uteri to cupcakes.

  Sue swallows. She spits. Yet the saliva keeps returning, overflowing on her tongue, an eternal maternal fountain. This merely the latest in a tall list of pregnancy indignities—the bulging vein in her crotch, the dizziness and hemorrhoids, the itchy belly and startlingly graphic dreams of sex with Philip Glass, the Good Humor Man, and her own husband! “For He’s a Jolly”—

  If only it were possible to conjure a person bearing baked goods—éclairs, crullers, doughnuts. Sue would take a Pop-Tart, so severe is this sudden, almost nauseating need for frosting. The neighbors she’s met so far—retired firefighter cum driver’s ed teacher Tim Ray, with half his nose missing, and the always-yelling Mole-Kacy family—don’t strike her as people likely to bake. So Sue’s pleased that the peephole reveals a curvy Indian beauty swathed in lemony silk. (The fact that Belle Harbor homes aren’t sold to brown people Sue is still too new to have grasped.) When she opens the door, she finds an additional guest, below eye level, in a wheelchair. Elderly but solid, with a mustached smirk and a puff of no-color hair. In the lap of her flowered housedress sits an enormous, white, cracked leather pocketbook.

  “The lady’s come home,” the aide announces.

  “Excuse me?” Sue asks.

  “Excuse you, Mommy? Do you speak English? I said, ‘The lady’s come home.’”

  “There must be some mistake.”

  But the gorgeous helper just shoves the wheelchair over the threshold. Sue backs up to protect her toes.

  “Careful, carrottop!” The senior laughs, donning bifocals from a beaded chain on her neck. She peers up at Sue through newly googly, magnified eyes. “That your real color?”

  “I don’t know who you are but—”

  “Well, I know you, Red. You’re, she’s—”

  “Suzanne,” prompts the aide, as though they’ve studied up. “I gather this is Suzanne, married into the Glassman family.” She reaches out and pats Sue’s bulge. “Twins? At your age?” Two insults in four words! As if on cue, the baby (singular) wakes and begins jabbing at Sue’s ribs in syncopation.

  “Suz-anne,” the old woman says, thrusting out a hand. A zing of window light electrifies her gaudy gold bracelet.

  Sue has to force herself to lean down and shake. Sure enough, the reptilian skin transmits a steady bolt of dread.

  “Rose Camille Joan Russo Impoliteri.”

  “Ohhh.” At last, Sue (partly) understands.

  The daughter-in-law, Maureen, who handled the house sale, told the Glassmans that the elderly seller was “incapacitated,” “lingering” in a nursing home in Forest Hills. But this old gal with the loud housedress, powder-blue hoodie, and fuchsia lipstick appears, if anything, overly animated. When Sue offers to hang up her things, she clamps onto her bag with a tissue-stuffed sleeve and commands the aide, “Move it!”

  Instantly, the chair is hurtling down the hallway. “This is my hallway,” Rose narrates, pointing out the obvious. To the right, “my graaand staircase.” To the left, the door to “my living room.” Farther down, “we have my half bath—”

  “Can I get you…anything?” Sue asks, a bit breathless from keeping pace. They’ve arrived at the end of the corridor, the doorway of Rose’s “famous kitchen.” Back in the day, Rose would right now be breading the Friday-night fish while figuring out her big Sunday meal. “That’s the antipasti and the pasta, two meats, a vegetable side—”

  The wheelchair veers off into the dining room/murder room, where Sue just assumes they will stop. But on they roll (the aide as if also on wheels, gliding), past the big round table piled with Sue’s books and CDs, over the long scratch in the tile floor, toward the back door.

  “Push hard. It’s broken!” Sue calls, idiotically. Rose obviously knows about the door. She moved out only five months ago, after…eighty years? Ninety? To all but the Glassmans, this is still the Impoliteri house when it’s not “that house” or “the Murder House.”

  “The Impoliteri house? That old wreck’ll be work!” said Dr. Mole next door, first day.

  “So you’re the plucky ones who moved into that house,” chirped Sage’s preschool teacher, Miss Katy.

  “The Murder House? People live in there? Ya sure?” This from the pizza guy before agreeing to deliver.

  Not to mention the ring-and-rip crowd, who chant, “Scary Impoliteri, Scary Impoliteri,” as they race away, shrieking.

  The Impoliteri house is rife with spider corpses, loose doorknobs, saggy ceilings, broken locks, and sweating walls, for starters. It’s a money pit with a weird oregano/shoe polish/moldy smell that no amount of Ajax will obscure. Like a third (or fourth or ninth) kid, it’s so used to being neglected that it acts out even when it’s paid attention to. An opera of a house is how Sue regards the heavy, dark, Old World mustiness. Fat, ornate furniture legs plot to trip you; worn velvet cushions sigh out clouds of melodramatic dust; drafty old windows turn ordinary sea breezes into hysterical arias.

  It moves Sue, despite everything, the overblown dynamics. She’s settling in. By the ocean, nothing can corner
you. The appearance of the old lady confirms it. Sue already feels…attached? Attacked?

  Sue retreats to the kitchen, spits into the stained, oversize marble sink, and scarfs down four Fig Newtons before picking up the phone to call Dan on the seventh hole.

  “She’s come home!” Sue says, her mouth still jammed with fig. “Whatever that means.” Then, flashing on the huge white pocketbook: “I think she might have brought a suitcase.”

  In the background, Sue can hear her father-in-law, Sy, barking at Dan to “wrap it up! We’re in the middle of a meeting here.”

  “Hello to him too! Will you…hurry back, please?”

  “On my way,” Dan promises.

  “Like hell you are,” Sy rails. “How dare you skip out on a dying man in the middle—”

  “You’re not dying, Dad.”

  Sy did have bone cancer. Fifteen years ago.

  “Gimme that phone!”

  “No!”

  “Hand it over!”

  Sue paces, half listening to them wrestle for the cell. The corner kitchen has windows on two sides—one facing her driveway and the Mole-Kacy garage, the other fronting the rhododendron hedge and, past that, the neighbor Tim’s house. He’s out back, as always, with his cronies, all in Adirondack chairs. But their eyes, usually fixed on the ocean, now stare into her yard.

  Sue pivots to see where exactly they’re looking. Beyond the doorway connecting kitchen to dining room, there’s a straight view across a strip of scuffed, sunlit tile and out through half a picture window. In the available frame, the aide’s graceful brown hand slices a piece of blue sky. Following her yellow dress downward, Sue can make out, in receding order, windblown greenery, a stretch of brick patio, some anemic grass, and, down at the bottom right corner, a miniature silver sandal—Sage! Her little girl is out there with strangers! “Gotta go!”

  “So you do!” her father-in-law bellows, having apparently wrested the phone from his son. “Shabbat shalom, Sue. Don’t forget to put in the brisket.”

  * * *

  Tim’s primed for the screech of the Impoliteri back door. On his feet as soon as he hears it, he tucks then untucks his T-shirt, sits again, stands again, sits. Which Glassman will emerge and what can he think to say to any of them? Then the house spits out Rose, and Tim feels, at once, paralyzed.

  During her absence, the old lady has acquired a wheelchair and a hot brown chick in head-to-toe yellow to push it. “This is my yard,” Rose says as they clear the weedy patio and plow onto the patchy grass. The long lawn is contiguous with Tim’s own save for a thick, dividing row of rhododendrons. Anyone can see that this was once a single property. But Rose insists that her companion “picture it!” back when her father owned the entire plot. No lawn at all then, just the best victory garden in the U. S. of A., spanning the beachfront between two soon–to–be–New York City streets.

  Apparently old Rose is still too proud for a hearing aid. Tim easily makes out every word.

  “One day, I’m a little girl playing on my private acre, and the next I’m a madwoman staring down a bulldozer.”

  Tim and his mom weren’t the ones to buy the parceled-off lot. They didn’t build the house on Rose’s Eden. They weren’t even the first people to live in it. Yet the Impoliteris have always liked to blame the Rays for their dip in fortune. The way Tim heard it, Rose’s father sold the land after his shoemaking business went bust. With the money, he imported Rose a husband from Italy and set the guy up with a store on Rockaway’s main shopping street: 116th. What little time remained, he spent on what little garden remained.

  “I’ve kept a lot of his plants alive,” Rose goes on, showing off a small tree by the back door. “This is his yew. That’s yew, not me, get it?” Tim waits anxiously to see when she’ll notice…“It’s shedding all its needles!” And beneath it: “Dad’s fool’s parsley! Flattened dead!” The little hoods on the monkshood resemble Rose’s own droopy purple eyelids. It’s worse than Tim even realized. In the five months since Rose left, her garden has totally tanked. Tim braces himself for the scowl now swiveling toward him.

  “And over there,” Rose tells her helper, “is one of my neighbors, drunk Timmy.”

  Wrong! Tim wants to shout. Eight months, three weeks, five days wrong, bitch! Don’t make me glad I killed your plants. FYI—I’m not Timmy (or Butter), I’m Tim! Tim Ray! Tim-Remember-It-Ray!

  But what if one of the Glassmans were to hear? They’d never want to get to know him then. And what if Rose’s return is his fault? What if crowing to his friends about the great new family next door has in some way invoked her? How foolish of Tim ever to have believed that he was free of Rose simply because she’d moved. She was his burden. And he forever part of her tour.

  “Timmy and his jolly band of firemen—”

  “Firefighters,” Yellow Babe corrects, then brings a hand up to her glossy lips to—hey—throw a kiss.

  Chris D. mimes catching it on his flushed cheek. “Wow.” Bean reaches back and slaps the side of Tim’s head. None of them have quite gotten used to their sudden social upgrade. Easier to get laid than to sleep these days. And what with the wreck crew finally dismissed from Ground Zero in May, there’s time to fantasize. Not that they don’t love their wives, not that they’d ever—but, oh, to be unattached FDNY at the onset of the summer of ’02! Why isn’t Tim out nightly, banging supermodels?

  I prefer widows, Tim thinks, again afraid they know he’s sleeping with Peg, widow of his best friend, Chowder. Add to this heavy secret the reappearance of Rose, and Tim’s body goes as rigid as Jill (his old lifeguarding partner Sloane’s Doberman) when she’s tensing to rip out some flesh. Tim could sic that bitch on Rose for how she scoffs at the Glassmans’ new lawn chairs, some kind of fancy wicker treated to withstand the salt air—“As if!” It is an unusual first purchase for a house in need of a new roof. But to Tim, it only makes his neighbors more intriguing. He tosses out one of his mother’s go-to warnings: “Judge not, that you not be judged.”

  Rose just snorts. “What’s Irish and lives in the backyard?”

  “What?” Chris D. wonders. He would.

  “Patty O’Furniture!”

  Yellow Babe looks down at the ragged tan grass. (Tim’s cropped, hydrated side of the lawn glares green.)

  Bean laughs himself into coughing.

  Encouraged, Rose goes back in for a knock-knock joke. “Who’s there?” she asks herself and answers, “9/11.”

  “Enough!” Yellow Babe insists, shaking her unshakable hair, a tall, braided, layered (maybe varnished?) creation. “These jokes of Rose’s, I don’t know. It’s like Tourette’s.”

  No prob, no biggie, the guys explosively assure her. Chris D. even spits out a “9/11 who?” But the question is swallowed up in the old lady’s sudden agitation for “the hose! The hose! Get the hose!” The withering yard was already upsetting to Rose but now with her glasses on, it’s “devastating.” Her bracelet trembles as she points at a mopey purple mound, her “poor, poor lobelia!” And—“Holy God!” Beside that: “My climbing sweet pea! What was my sweet pea! The hose, please! Someone help me!”

  Tim feels hot. At the very least, he could have recommended a gardener to the Glassmans. The exuberant health of his own flowers in comparison embarrasses him. Dahlias in five candy colors. (If you stand at a distance and squint, you can pretend they’re fireworks.) Loud, pink fringy dianthus that smell spicy enough to bite. Sprouting, ruffled stalks of lemon geranium that glow at dusk and make the air taste like citrus. To Tim, this has been the biggest revelation of sobriety, how all is more, not less, vibrant, amped up, full. On a good day, Tim feels almost like he’s gone back to Sage’s age, constantly bugging out on flowers and insects, on the way people move, on the words they use.

  “That red, that’s my bleeding heart!” Rose wails. But it’s the ravaged cherry tree that truly ignites her. She tries to rise from her chair, then swats the aide with her pocketbook for daring to restrain her. You don’t need to know Italian to get the
gist of what she’s shouting. Tim’s friends promptly remember they have stuff to do; they’re off. Later, man. Under the tree, little Sage, with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, believes she has made herself invisible.

  * * *

  Queens has thirty cemeteries, but Rose’s father long ago decreed that the family ashes be sprinkled out here, on the cherry tree. “Of course, as a Catholic, he’d have preferred burial, but laws are laws. And for eternity, look it, you can’t beat this view.” Southwest, there’s Sandy Hook. Southeast, Far Rockaway. Straight ahead, the magic horizon, able to hold down the whole Atlantic with one single thin line. Most of the time.

  Best not to ask what Rose means by that, Tim warns Sue. He grew up in the next-door house, so he knows. “Rose has seen more nor’easters and hurricanes than you have time for.” And: “Better watch your feet around that wheelchair.”

  Sue’s bare feet feel as bulbous as the rest of her—knees, belly, boobs. Wherever they move, they’re in the way of the dressy aide laboring to push big Rose there and there, and “not there, there!” while the old lady brandishes the hose gun, apologizing to her cremated relatives about the sorry state of the yard. “The foxglove and castor bean might rebound with a good soak, Daddy, but the horse chestnut is just too paaarched! I heard that! Don’t you start, Vin…”

  Tim leans in toward Sue, his pointer finger revolving by the side of his head in the crazy sign.

  And what’s your excuse? Sue resists asking. The guy may share their lawn and wall, the door to the sand, and, for all she cares, that mangy cherry tree, but does that give him the right to stroll over with his half a nose every time she appears? Between Tim and the Mole-Kacys (with their four wild look-alike boys), Sue’s had more neighbor contact during five months in Rockaway than in all fifteen years in Tribeca. Not to mention Tim’s rank dog, Blacky, who pees against her shower house hourly. Even Rose asked what Tim and his mutt thought they were doing when they sauntered around the hedge.

  “Helping?” he asked, looking down at his chest. What appears to be mustard obscures one arm of the red cross on his faded lifeguard T-shirt. Now he scratches at his already raw, stubbled chin, adding, “That tree seriously needs some fungicide. I can run down to the store?”