Seven Minutes to Noon

and ordered a pound each of ground turkey and beef from Sal, who looked to be in his fifties, with his halo of tousled white hair spilling out from beneath a creased white paper hat.
    Sal handed over her order and in his sonorous voice nearly sang to her, “Anything else, young lady?” She adored him for that young lady. Thirty-six years old, hugely pregnant, with four children bedeviling his store.
    “Not today, Sal, thanks.”
    He distributed lollipops to the children, who had lined up on cue at the ding of the closing cash register.
    Back on Court Street, Alice checked her voice mail to see if she had possibly missed a call; her cell phone’sring was often subsumed by the children’s noise. There was, in fact, one message, caller ID unknown. She listened eagerly for the sound of Lauren’s voice, feeling the first note of buoyant relief as she dialed her code. Then the message played and her moment of hopefulness evaporated.
    “Hi, Alice, it’s Pam Short returning your call, returning my call, returning your call. Don’t ya just love playing phone tag? Now it’s your turn. You know my number.”
    Pam Short was a broker at Garden Hill Realty — where Ethan’s sitter, Sylvie, worked part-time as an office assistant — and was supposed to be some kind of miracle worker. Alice dialed Pam back and left her another message. It was a frustrating volley, and all Alice really cared about now was hearing from Lauren, but the house hunt couldn’t wait. She marched the children past gourmet shops, antique stores, designer boutiques, spiffy new restaurants and all the real estate brokers who had practically laughed at her request for a house under a million dollars.
    They crossed Smith Street and continued along President onto the leafy block of landmark brownstones where Alice had lived virtually her entire adulthood. Up the stoop and back home; well, it was home for now, though clearly Julius Pollack, owner, didn’t agree. In the foyer, Alice saw that Joey — who had moved out this morning after a lifetime in the house — had left behind some of the miscellany no one knew what to do with after a move: a bag of wire hangers, an old cork bulletin board, a box containing different shades of shoe polish and an ugly picture frame. He had probably left this stuff for Alice and Mike, in case they wanted it. But it was all junk. She would ask Mike to carry it to the curb later.
    She turned on the air conditioner and opened the kitchen door to the backyard, into which Nell, Peter, Austin and Ethan eagerly ran. She watched them from the broad window over the sink of her large, well-usedkitchen. Nell opened the toy bin and the boys made an eager collection of plastic shovels and buckets and hoes, which they tossed into the oversized sandbox Mike had built.
    As she watched the children happily play, unaware that anything was wrong, Alice thought back to yesterday, wondering what she had missed. She conjured Lauren and Maggie to the bench beside her and tried to recall if there was something she had not heard or understood about Lauren’s plans.
    The day before, Thursday, had been even hotter than today. Alice, Lauren and Maggie had gathered at the playground after school.
    Lauren shifted her bulky middle on the bench but couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Her blue eyes paled in a flush of sun and she inched closer to Alice, who instinctively slid over to accommodate her. It was an odd sensation that Lauren, who was the smallest among them, suddenly needed so much space. Her long brown hair was coiled atop her head and skewered with a takeout chopstick, but still she couldn’t seem to cool down her neck. She fanned it with her flattened hand. A wine-colored maternal family birthmark, roughly the shape and size of a quarter, was visible at the nape of her hairline, just at the nexus of her spine.
    Alice remembered the little portable fan she kept in her purse. She took it out, flipped up the yellow plastic blades and held it whizzing at varying angles around Lauren’s face and neck. Lauren leaned forward to catch the breeze.
    “Joey sold the house yesterday,” Alice announced.
    Lauren turned to her. “I thought the buyer wanted it delivered vacant.”
    “He did, but Joey had another buyer lined up, so the first guy gave in. He really wanted it.”
    When he decided to move to Florida, Joey had asked them if they wanted the house. They had always thought the day would come when Joey moved on and theywould take over