Zoe broke into her reverie. “Mom! We’ve got to get going!”
“Right.” Lucy grabbed her purse, automatically fishing for her car keys as she checked to make sure the coffee pot was off and the dog’s water dish was full. “Let’s go.”
Stepping off the porch, Lucy’s eyes were drawn to the new houses Fred Stanton, Preston’s father, had built on the old Pratt property. “He didn’t actually build those houses,” scoffed Bill, a restoration carpenter known for his meticulous work, “he assembled them.”
It was true, in a way. The houses were modular homes; they’d been built in a factory and delivered in sections. Fred and his crew had bolted them together and done the finish work, a process that had gone remarkably quickly. It seemed to Lucy that the houses had sprouted, like mushrooms on a rainy night. One day the old Pratt house was standing there, looming over them, and the next it was gone. Before they knew what had happened, their country road had turned into suburbia.
Designed to have high curb appeal to the potential buyer, each little house had an oversized Palladian window front and center, and a double-door entry overlooking a landscaped front yard boasting two small yew bushes and a couple hundred square feet of sod. It had been a particularly dry summer but now, in August, the sod was still the same bright emerald green it had been in April when it was installed, thanks to the sprinklers the new neighbors ran day and night. The sprinklers clicked and sputtered, lawnmowers roared, barbecue smoke filled the evening air. It was enough to make you miss the Pratts, thought Lucy, starting the car.
She didn’t actually miss the Pratts, she admitted to herself as she carefully backed the car around, but she did miss seeing their house at the very top of Red Top Hill where it once seemed to symbolize the simple, rugged way of life that was becoming increasingly rare, even in Maine. It was the kind of house a child might draw, a too-narrow rectangle topped with a triangular roof. The windows were rectangles, too, without shutters. The siding was weatherbeaten gray clapboard, and the white paint on the trim boards had peeled off long ago. There was no landscaping to speak of, no bushes softening the stark lines of the house, and no lawn at all. Just a dirt yard with a chicken pen and a rotting old car or two, kept for spare parts. It wasn’t a friendly house; it might as well have had a big “Keep Out” sign nailed to it. Which was just about right because the Pratts hadn’t been friendly people. They’d been horrible neighbors, mean and quarrelsome. They were gone now. Prudence had died, been murdered, actually, and her husband Calvin and son Wesley were in the county jail for stealing lobsters out of other people’s traps. All that remained of the Pratt family was the name of the street that now bisected their land. The developer, Fred Stanton, had named it Prudence Path.
She was starting down the driveway when she saw Fred’s wife, Mimi, marching along the road, headed their way. Only Zoe’s presence in the seat beside her kept her from saying a very bad word.
“Lucy, could I just have a quick word with you?” asked Mimi, bending to look into the car window. She was talking in that false, bright tone a lot of women use when they’re broaching an uncomfortable topic.
“Sure, Mimi. What’s up?”
“Well, Lucy, it’s really the same old thing,” sighed Mimi, adding a fleeting, tight little smile. “I’m afraid those bushes of yours are really a safety hazard. They block the sight lines on Prudence Path, you know. Why, just yesterday I was almost hit by a speeding truck when I was pulling out, on my way to work.”
“I don’t see how you can blame my lilacs for somebody going too fast on Red Top Road,” said Lucy.
“Well, of course, you are right. The truck was going way too fast. But the fact is that I couldn’t see the truck because of your bushes.” She smiled again and Lucy wondered if she’d had her teeth whitened or something. Maybe it was just a reflex, a nervous twitch. A tic. “I’ve spoken to you about this before, numerous times in fact, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to file a formal complaint.”
“So go ahead and file,” said Lucy, impatiently checking her watch. She knew Zoe hated to miss the opening circle at day camp when commendations and prizes from the previous day were handed out.
“I’m not sure you understand exactly what that means,” said Mimi, looking concerned. “A traffic officer will conduct an investigation and, if he determines the bushes are a hazard, the town highway department will cut them.”
“They can’t do that! The town can’t touch my bushes. And they’re not just bushes, anyway. They’re lilacs and they’re absolutely gorgeous in the spring.”
“I’m afraid they can, Lucy, even if they are lilacs.” Mimi was positively grimacing, attempting to illustrate how terribly painful this was for her. “You see, I work at town hall—in the assessor’s office—and I know they do it all the time. Why, just last week they cut Miss Tilley’s privet hedge. Of course, she’s in her nineties and nobody expects her to clip her hedge herself….”
“The town cut Miss Tilley’s hedge?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, Mimi, that’s terrible. That hedge gives her relief from the traffic noise.”
“Not anymore,” said Mimi, with a mincing little shrug.
Lucy didn’t run her over as she sped down the driveway, she just wished she could. The woman was infuriating, coming on all mealy-mouthed and nicey-nice when she was planning to destroy bushes that had been growing for at least a hundred years, probably planted by the original builders of the Stones’ antique farmhouse. But, shrugged Lucy, her encounter with Mimi had cleared up one thing. She now knew where Preston got his annoying tendencies—he’d inherited them from his parents.