Perfect Match Read online

  I set him down at the counter with a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios while I pack his lunch. "Noodles," I announce with flair, trying to boost him out of his blue funk. "And ... ooh! A drumstick from dinner last night! Three Oreos ... and celery sticks, so that Miss Lydia doesn't yell at Mommy again about nutrition pyramids. There." I zip up the insulated pack and put it into Nathaniel's backpack, grab a banana for my own breakfast, then check the clock on the microwave. I give Nathaniel two more Tylenol to take--it won't hurt him this once, and Caleb will never know. "Okay," I say. "We have to go."

  Nathaniel slowly puts on his sneakers and holds out each small foot to me to have the laces tied. He can zip up his own fleece jacket; shimmy into his own backpack. It is enormous on those thin shoulders; sometimes from behind he reminds me of Atlas, carrying the weight of the world.

  Driving, I slide in Nathaniel's favorite cassette--the Beatles' White Album, of all things--but not even Rocky Raccoon can snap him out of this mood. Clearly, he's gotten up on the wrong side of the bed--the wet side, I think, sighing. A tiny voice inside me says I should just be grateful that in approximately fifteen minutes it will be someone else's problem.

  In the rearview mirror, I watch Nathaniel play with the dangling strap of his backpack, pleating it into halves and thirds. We come to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. "Nathaniel," I whisper, just loud enough to be heard over the hum of the engine. When he glances up, I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.

  Slowly, slow as his father, he smiles at me.

  On the dashboard, I see that it is 7:56. Four minutes ahead of schedule.

  We are doing even better than I thought.

  The way Caleb Frost sees it, you build a wall to keep something unwanted out ... or to hold something precious in. He considers this often when he builds, fitting sparkling granite and craggy limestone into niches, a three-dimensional puzzle drawn thick and straight across the edge of a lawn. He likes to think of the families inside these baileys he constructs: insulated, safe, protected. Of course, this is ridiculous. His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors. And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting, as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.

  He stands at the edge of the Warren property with Fred, their contractor, as they all wait for Caleb to put on a show. Right now, the land is thick with birches and maples, some tagged to show the potential location of the house and the septic system. Mr. and Mrs. Warren stand so close they are touching. She is pregnant; her belly brushes her husband's hip.

  "Well," Caleb begins. His job is to convince these people that they need a stone wall surrounding their property, instead of the six-foot-fence they are also considering. But words are not his specialty; that's for Nina. Beside him, Fred clears his throat, prompting.

  Caleb cannot sweet-talk this couple; he can only see what lies ahead for them: a white Colonial, with a screened porch. A Labrador, leaping to catch monarch butterflies in his mouth. A row of bulbs that will, next year, be tulips. A little girl riding a tricycle, with streamers flying from the handlebars down the length of the drive, until she reaches the barrier Caleb has crafted--the limit, she has been told, of where she is safe.

  He imagines himself bent over this spot, creating something solid in a space where there had been nothing before. He imagines this family, three of them by then, tucked within these walls. "Mrs. Warren," Caleb asks with a smile, the right words finally coming. "When are you due?"

  In one corner of the playground, Lettie Wiggs is crying. She does this all the time, pretends that Danny socked her when the truth is she just wants to see if she can get Miss Lydia to come running from whatever it is Miss Lydia's doing. Danny knows it too, and Miss Lydia, and everyone, except for Lettie, who cries and cries as if it's going to get her somewhere.

  He walks past her. Walks past Danny, too, who isn't Danny anymore, but a pirate, clinging to a barrel after a shipwreck. "Hey, Nathaniel," says Brianna, "Check this out." She is crouched behind the shed that holds soccer balls as soft as ripe melons, and the ride-on bulldozer that you can only ride on for five minutes before it's someone else's turn. A silver spider has stretched a web from the wood to the fence behind it, zagged like a shoelace. At one spot a knot the size of a dime is tangled in the silk.

  "That's a fly." Cole pushes his glasses up on his nose. "The spider, she wrapped it up for her dinner."

  "That's so gross," Brianna says, but she leans closer.

  Nathaniel stands with his hands in his pockets. He thinks about the fly, how it stepped onto the web and got stuck, like the time Nathaniel walked into a snowdrift last winter and lost his boot in the muck at the bottom. He wonders if the fly was just as scared as Nathaniel had been of coming in barefoot through the snow, of what his mother would say. Probably the fly had just figured it was going to take a rest. Probably it had stopped for a second to see how the sun looked like a rainbow through that web, and the spider grabbed him before he could get away.

  "Bet she eats the head first," Cole says.

  Nathaniel imagines the wings of the fly, pinned to its back as it is turned and wrapped tight. He lifts his hand and slashes it through the web; walks away.

  Brianna is fuming. "Hey!" she yells. And then, "Miss Lydia!"

  But Nathaniel doesn't listen. He looks up, surveying the top beam of the swings and the jungle gym with the slide that's as shiny as the blade of a knife. The jungle gym is taller by a few inches. Settling his hands on the rungs of the wooden ladder, he begins to climb.

  Miss Lydia doesn't see him. His sneakers send down a rain of tiny pebbles and dirt, but he balances. Up here, he is taller than his father, even. He thinks that maybe the cloud behind him has an angel fast asleep in its center.

  Nathaniel closes his eyes and jumps, his arms glued to his sides like that fly's. He doesn't try to break his fall, just hits hard, because it hurts less than everything else.

  "Best croissants," Peter Eberhardt says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation, although I've only just walked up to stand beside him at the coffee machine.

  "The Left Bank," I answer. We might as well be in the middle of a conversation, come to think of it. Except this one has been ongoing for years.

  "A little closer to home?"

  This I have to think about. "Mamie's." It's a diner in Springvale. "Worst haircut?"

  Peter laughs. "Me, in my middle school yearbook."

  "I was thinking of it as a verb, not a noun."

  "Oh, well, then. Wherever Angeline gets her perm." He holds out the coffee and fills my cup for me, but I'm laughing so hard some of it spills on the floor. Angeline is the clerk of the South District Court, and her coiffure resembles something between a muskrat curled on her head and a plate of buttered bowtie noodles.

  This is our game, Peter and me. It began when we were both assistant DAs in the West District, splitting our time between Springvale and York. In Maine, defendants can come to court and plead innocent, guilty, or request to meet with the prosecutor. Peter and I would sit across from each other at a desk, trading court complaints like aces in a poker game. You do this traffic ticket, I'm sick of them. Okay, but that means you get this trespassing charge. I see Peter far less now that we are both trying felonies in the superior court, but he is still the person I'm closest to in the office. "Best quote of the day?"

  It is only ten-thirty; the best may be to come. But I put on my prosecutor's face and look solemnly at Peter, and give him an instant replay of my closing in the rape case. "In fact, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one act that would be more criminally reprehensible, more violating, than what this man did--and that would be to set him free to do it again."

  Peter whistles through the space in his front teeth. "Ooh, you are the drama queen."

  "That's why the