The Lowland

netting. The peeling facade is being scraped down to reveal a base layer of thickly ridged gray. Climbing roses, a combination of orange and red, are in bloom in the small plot behind the gate. The name of the contractor, according to the sign posted out front, is Italian, but the workmen come from Bangladesh. They speak in the language Bela’s parents had used with one another. A language she’d understood better than she’d spoken in her childhood. A language she stopped hearing after her mother left.
    Her mother’s absence was like another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study, and even then, because it was foreign, a language never fully absorbed.
    She can’t understand what these men are saying. Just some words here and there. The accent is different. Still, she always slows down when she passes them. She’s not nostalgic for her childhood, but this aspect of it, at once familiar and foreign, gives her pause. Part of her wonders whether the dormant comprehension in her brain will ever be jostled. If one day she might remember how to say something.
    Some days she sees the workmen sitting on the stoop of the house, taking a break, joking with one another, smoking cigarettes. One of them is older, with a wispy white beard nearly to his chest. She wonders how long they’ve lived in America, whether and in what way they might be related. She wonders if they like it here. Whether they’ll return to Bangladesh, or stay permanently. She imagines them living in a group house, as she does. She sees them sitting down to dinner together at the end of their long day, eating rice with their hands.
    What do they make of her? Of her faded gray jeans, the unlaced boots on her feet? Long hair she’ll tie back later, most of it tucked for now inside her hooded sweatshirt. A face without makeup, a daypack strapped across her chest. Ancestors from what was once a single country, a common land.
    Apart from their vocabulary, their general coloring, none of these men resemble her father. But somehow they remind her of him. They cause her to think of him in Rhode Island, to wonder how he’s doing.
    Noel reminds her in another way of her father. He lives in the house, with his girlfriend, Ursula, and their daughter, Violet, in two rooms on the top floor that Bela’s never seen. Noel spends his days with Violet; Ursula, a cook in a restaurant, a pretty woman with a pixie haircut, is the one who works.
    Bela sees Noel taking Violet to kindergarten in the mornings and, a few hours later, bringing her home. She sees him taking her to the park, teaching her to ride a bike. She sees him running behind his daughter as she struggles to gain her balance, grabbing on to a woolen scarf he’s tied around her chest. She sees him fixing Violet’s dinners, grilling a single hamburger for her on the hibachi behind the house.
    Violet doesn’t begrudge Ursula all the time she’s away. Nor does Noel. They kiss her good-bye in the mornings, they fall into her arms when she comes home, sometimes with desserts from the restaurant. Because she’s the exception, and not the rule, Violet forms a different relationship to Ursula. Less consistent, but more intense. She adjusts her expectations, just as Bela once did.
    Noel and Ursula sometimes knock on Bela’s door as they prepare their own dinner, later at night, after Violet has gone to bed. There is always plenty, she is always welcome, they say. Bread and cheese, a big salad Ursula tosses with her fingers. Ursula is always a little wired when she gets home from her shifts at the restaurant. She likes to roll a joint for the three of them, listen to music, tell stories about her day.
    Bela enjoys spending time with them, and tries to be generous in kind. She looks after Violet, if Ursula and Noel want to go see a movie. She’s taken Ursula out to the community garden, sending her back with herbs and sunflowers for her restaurant. But she doesn’t want to come to depend on them. She says no when Noel and Ursula decide, on Ursula’s birthday, to get into the car and have a picnic on Fire Island. She’s been in too many friendships with other couples like Noel and Ursula. Couples who go out of their way to include her, to offer her the company she lacks, only to remind her that she’s still on her own.
    She’s used to making friends wherever she goes, then moving