Dear Life

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    Now every single person is inside with their fans on or their air-conditioning. Numbers on the houses appear, just as in a city. No sign of a doctor.
    Where the sidewalk ends there is a large brick building with gables and a clock tower. Perhaps a school, before the children were bused to some larger and drearier center of learning. The hands stopped at twelve, for noon or midnight, which certainly is not the right time. Profusion ofsummer flowers that seem professionally arranged—some spilling out of a wheelbarrow and more out of a milk pail on its side. A sign she cannot read because the sun is shining straight onto it. She climbs up on the lawn to see it at another angle.
    Funeral Home. Now she sees the built-on garage that probably holds the hearse.
    Never mind. She had better get on with things.
    She turns onto a side street where there are very well kept places indeed, proving that even a town this size can have its suburb. The houses all slightly different yet somehow looking all the same. Gently colored stone or pale brick, peaked or rounded windows, a rejection of the utilitarian look, the ranch style of past decades.
    Here there are people. They haven’t all managed to shut themselves up with the air-conditioning. A boy is riding a bicycle, taking diagonal routes across the pavement. Something about his riding is odd, and she cannot figure it out at first.
    He is riding backward. That’s what it is. A jacket flung in such a way that you could not see—or she cannot see—what is wrong.
    A woman who might be too old to be his mother—but who is very trim and lively looking all the same—is standing out in the street watching him. She is holding on to a skipping rope and talking to a man who could not be her husband—both of them are being too cordial.
    The street is a curved dead end. No going farther.
    Interrupting the adults, Nancy excuses herself. She says that she is looking for a doctor.
    “No, no,” she says. “Don’t be alarmed. Just his address. I thought you might know.”
    Then comes the problem of realizing that she is still not sure of the name. They are too polite to show any surprise at this but they cannot help her.
    The boy on one of his perverse sallies comes swinging around, barely missing all three.
    Laughter. No reprimand. A perfect young savage and they seem to positively admire him. They all remark on the beauty of the evening, and Nancy turns to go back the way that she has come.
    Except that she does not go all the way, not as far as the funeral home. There is a side street she ignored before, perhaps because it was unpaved and she had not thought of a doctor living in such circumstances.
    There is no sidewalk, and the houses are surrounded with trash. A couple of men are busy under the hood of a truck, and she has an idea it would not do to interrupt them. Besides, she has glimpsed something interesting ahead.
    There is a hedge that comes right out to the street. It is high enough that she does not expect to be able to see over it, but thinks she might be able to peek through.
    That is not necessary. When she gets past the hedge she finds that the lot—about the size of four town lots—is quite open to the road she is walking on. It appears to be some sort of park, with flagstone paths diagonally crossing the mown and flourishing grass. In between the paths, and bursting from the grass, there are flowers. She knows some of them—the dark gold and light yellow daisies for instance, pink and rosy and red-hearted white phlox—but she is no great gardener herself and here there are clumped or trailing displays of all colors that she could not name. Some of them climb trellises, some spread free. Everything artful but nothing stiff, not even the fountain that shoots up seven feet or sobefore falling down into its rock-lined pool. She has walked in off the street to get a little of its cool spray, and there she finds a wrought-iron bench, where she can sit down.
    A man has come along one of the paths, carrying a pair of shears. Gardeners are evidently expected to work late here. Though to tell the truth, he does not look like a hired workman. He is tall and very thin and dressed in a black shirt and pants that tightly fit his body.
    It has not occurred to her that this could be anything but a town park.
    “This is really beautiful,” she calls to him in her most assured and approving voice. “You keep it up so well.”
    “Thank you,” he says. “You’re