BING BONG SQUONK!

Avalon jumped and clapped a hand to her heart.

She craned her head and through the beveled glass of the front door she saw a pair of shadows shaped like her parents.

She quickly entered a note on her phone: Fix squonky doorbell.

Then she opened the door and her parents stepped wordlessly in the foyer. It was filled now with hazy gold sunshine thanks to a skylight that dizzied with views of blue skies and pine tops above. Below, a black-and-white checkerboard of marble gleamed. The little fang-like crystals on a nearby chandelier sprinkled tiny rainbows on the walls, the floor and, incongruously, her dad’s nose.

She’d called her dad a few hours ago to tell them the news, including her plans to flip the house quickly, hopefully to her friend Rachel, to whom she’d texted photos.

“But . . . that place has a turret,” her dad had finally said in an aghast hush after a long silence. He’d made turret sound like black mold. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to replace those curved windows in aMMMPH.”

His grunt was followed by a lot of crackling and rustling.

“We’ll be by around three, honey,” her mom said brightly, bravely, resolutely. She’d wrested the phone from her husband.

And now her dad was holding a big box full of things that clinked and clanked. A pot lid was balanced on top. Her mom was carrying the gym bag Avalon had left behind at the house this morning. It was now mysteriously plump.

“We brought you some things we thought might be handy,” her mom said.

Their expressions, however, suggested they were picturing her with her toe stuck up the faucet.

“I swear to you I did not pull an Oy Vay. I can handle this,” she reiterated by way of greeting. “I’m a great project manager and I’m pretty persuasive. Rachel is already excited about it, because it’s the kind of space she wants and she doesn’t want to do the work. I know I can flip this for a profit, even after renovations.”

There was a little silence.

“Guess you’re going to have to now, eh, pumpkin?” her dad said with mordant resignation. He gave her a shoulder pat.

She took the box from him and the bag from her mom and carried them off to the main room to deposit them on the floor. Her parents followed gingerly through at first, like people trying virtual reality goggles for the first time.

The scale of all the rooms seemed so profligate. Ceilings soared up to rounded corners, trimmed all around with stucco carved into birds and fruit and vines. Right smack dead center of the small ballroom (it had a freaking ballroom) was a crystal chandelier with as many tiers as a tycoon’s wedding cake. The floors were a sea of golden parquet. They really needed refinishing.

She and her parents fanned out like a SWAT team.

Her dad peered into the toilets (most of them tall, old, and rather grand) and flushed them; he tried all the faucets in the bathroom and kitchen (water gushed forth, a little rusty at first); he bounced on the floors to see if they squished around the (clawfoot!) bathtubs. None did. He used a little device to check whether the outlets were working. Three weren’t.

Then her dad wandered in one direction and Avalon trailed her mom as her mom poked around.

They were quiet for a while. She knew her mom was starting to relax; she was smart enough and experienced enough to recognize the quality of the place.

“You know, I remember how you used to look at him,” her mom said suddenly, running a finger along the grout in the kitchen. Avalon made a note in her phone: Replace kitchen grout. She did like the tile, though.

“Who . . . Corbin?”

His name in her mouth felt strange, like she’d been pronouncing it wrong, or misunderstood its meaning, all these years. She’d spent all of fifth grade pronouncing “superlative” as “superlaytive” and had been scorchingly mocked by her siblings when she’d said it out loud at the dinner table.

“Mac Coltrane.”

Avalon went still. Hearing his name in her mother’s voice was like a sudden little shock, both delicious and painful. Like when she was a kid and rubbed a balloon on her hair and then poked her brother in the arm. She wondered if her mom had any inkling of what she and Mac had gotten up to during the summers between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Her parents had been working pretty hard at the Misty Cat those years.

It wasn’t until that day that she realized that Mac had kept their affair a secret because he was actively trying to hide it, not because secrecy was more romantic.

“Probably I’d never seen a rich kid before. I probably stared at him the same way I stared at a three-story building the first time I saw one. Or that huge motor home Mrs. Morrison once drove into downtown.”

Her mom snorted. “You were pretty captivated by that thing. Maybe you should have bought one of those instead of a house. But oh my goodness, look at that garden!” She stood on her toes and peered out the huge window over the kitchen sink.

If she let this moment go by without mentioning that Mac Coltrane himself was responsible for how pretty that garden was, it meant she was still keeping him a secret, which meant whatever she felt about him was still raw.

Surely she could handle an offhand mention.

Funnily enough, she let the moment go by.

“I was just thinking about that poor child on the way here.” Her mom fingered the doorknob on the kitchen door that led to the garden, her face alight with wistful delight. Brass, carved in scrolls of flowers. She turned it; it came off in her hand.

Her mom shrugged and handed it to Avalon.

“Who, Mac? Poor was the last thing he was.”

“Avalon, I think you know what I mean,” her mom said with the faintest hint of reproach, which Avalon rather liked, because she frankly liked being known well enough to be called on her bullshit. It perversely made her feel loved.

They both toed at the kitchen linoleum where it was peeling up near the back door. Avalon made another note in her phone.

They heard another flush and the thrum of water rushing through pipes as her dad progressed with thumping feet through the upstairs rooms. Mac’s mother’s taste was enshrined up on that floor in the form of that hideous black-and-gold metallic wallpaper in the master bedroom and light fixtures on chains, that sort of thing.

“We can ask Truck and Giorgio to help bring the mini-fridge and the sofa from the rec room for you to use in the short term. Oh, and the twin bed from your room and the bean bag chair.”

Truck Donegal sometimes played bouncer for the Misty Cat, and Giorgio was the grill savant.

“That would be awesome, thanks. I’m going to sleep in the turret.”

“Of course you are,” her mom said.

Avalon grinned. She fetched the clinking box to unpack (plates and glasses, potholders, that sort of thing) while her mom wandered back into the laundry room behind the kitchen. Her dad’s footsteps thumped directly overhead now. Thud thud thud creak.

Scraping that wallpaper off the walls in there was going to be cathartic. That’s where she was going to start. After she washed the walls downstairs.

“Mac was sweet.” Her mom’s voice was kind of muffled because she was peering into the dryer. “And kind of fundamentally lonely, even when he was with you kids. A mom notices these things. I always wanted to hug him but I don’t think he would have stood for it. He and his brother were so close, even with the age difference. They always struck me more as allies.”

Don’t worry, Mom. I hugged him kind of a lot, she thought. Horizontally, vertically, you name it.

But there was something satisfying in hearing she hadn’t imagined that sweetness. Despite his crackling personality and the half foot in height he had on her, there was a vulnerability in him, a haunting gentleness that was the thing she loved most and made her want to protect him.

She’d written to Mac once or twice during those years, in between the summers. He’d gone to a private boarding school. He was a pretty bad correspondent. Now she thought she knew why.

Avalon suddenly felt the need to defend the girl she once was. “He thought pretty damn highly of himself.”

“He did turn into rather an insufferable teenager practically overnight,” her mom agreed, equably. She was looking at the washing machine dubiously now. “The way he drove that Audi of his through town! A kid’s first car should be at least ten years older than the kid and smell like generations of his family members inside.”

Avalon’s first car had been a Plymouth Duster that smelled like her grandfather’s cigarettes and her brothers’ feet. The back seat had been chewed through by her uncle’s Boxer, Maxine, and even though they’d stretched a cover over it, at high speeds pieces of fluff would escape and circulate in the car cabin.

The very last time she’d seen Mac Coltrane in Hellcat Canyon he’d been a collection of glints: the shiny Audi his parents had given him for his sixteenth birthday, the flash of his sunglasses, the gleam of the blond hair of the girl next to him. His arm had been slung around her. He’d been eighteen.

She’d made sure he hadn’t seen her that day. Part of that was shame and shock over what he’d said. But another wiser, crueler part of her knew the best way to punish him was to take herself away from him.

Her mom pulled open a long narrow cupboard and they found inside a cunning little ironing board. “Avalon, would you look at this!” her mom said. “Isn’t this cute?”

“Almost makes me want to wear clothes I have to iron.”

Her mom snorted.

They went upstairs, and discovered the fourth stair groaned like a dying person. They found her dad studying a charming little flight of stairs suspended on a set of chains, leading to what looked like an attic door.

Avalon could see at once that his earlier tension had dissolved into a sort of smug satisfaction. “Boy, they don’t make them like this anymore,” he said. “This place is a beaut. You’re going to need to replace at least one of those window frames down here, though, and that’s an ugly job. Grout in the bathrooms needs redoing. I’ll get Doug out here to check the foundation and have a look at the roof tonight, but seems okay to me. You can get this done by the first of the year, easy, if you plan it right. Maybe sooner.”

That was a little over a month away.

“Thanks, Pop. And I promise I won’t bug you guys about it.”

He just shot her a wry look.

“Marco!” Her sister Eden’s voice rose up from downstairs.

“POLO!” Avalon bellowed.

They all thundered downstairs to greet her.

She’d sent Eden a quick text with the gist of what had gone down with both the house and Corbin. Eden had sent back an emoji of the scream face, followed by a house, some celebratory confetti, and a question mark. Which about summed everything up.

“Hey! So happy you’re here, oy, except for, you know, the circumstances.” Eden lowered her voice on the last word as they moved in to give each other a hug.

“Hey, what shampoo is that?” She and Eden were forever sniffing each other.

“I grabbed it because it was on sale at CVS near the register when I was in a rush. It’s pale pink, that’s about all I know.” Eden was busy as hell. A single mom with her own business. The nearest Sephora was hours away.

A colty-legged blur hurtled into Avalon and wrapped her arms around her in a big hug. Annelise had added a pink streak to her hair that made her look like a wild little fairy. She was ten, going on eleven. “Auntie Ava!”

“Baby girl! Good God, Leesy, did you grow five inches since the last time I saw you?” She and Annelise Skyped and FaceTimed, but not as often lately. She just worked so much. She and Annelise got the biggest kick out of each other.

“I’m going to be taller than Mom.”

“I’d say that’s a safe bet.” Eden was long and lean, while Avalon was short and curvy, like her mom. Whoever Annelise’s dad was (and Eden wasn’t telling) clearly wasn’t petite, either. And her sister Eden’s continued silence on the subject of who Annelise’s father was bothered her parents more than they would ever say out loud. And there was very little her mother wasn’t willing to say out loud.

Annelise slipped her hand into Avalon’s. “I saw your blue car parked in the driveway, Auntie Ava. It’s soooo pretty.”

“Thanks, sweetie. I like it, too.”

“It’s called a douchemobile, right?”

Avalon nearly choked.

“ANNELISE HARWOOD!”

It was an astounded chorus. Four jaws swung open and hung there.

Avalon almost laughed. Boy, when it rained ignominy, it poured.

Eden found her voice and wow, she sure sounded like their own mom. “Annelise Emily Harwood. What in the . . . where in the . . . what in God’s name did you just say?”

“What? What’s a douchemobile? What’s wrong with saying douchemobile?” Annelise was both genuinely surprised and a little thrilled to have caused such an uproar, and clearly rather savored saying that word again, because she likely had a hunch this would be the last time she’d get to say it.

And now Avalon’s parents weren’t precisely glaring at Eden, but their expressions of mingled hilarity, severity, and alarm did rather demand answers.

“Oh, God, Ava, Mom, Dad . . . I swear I have no idea where . . .” Eden looked wretched. “The internet?” she hazarded weakly. The source of all unknowns.

Pity for Eden surged through Avalon. Her sister always felt as though she was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. “See?” she’d imagine people saying. “Without the bulwark of a complete set of parents, a word like douche is bound to creep into a child’s vocabulary.”

“Hey, Leesy?” Avalon draped an arm around her and scooped her into her side, so Annelise would know she wasn’t mad. “My car is actually called a BMW, and it’s an awesome car because it’s built very well and it can go very fast, so it’s fun to drive. But a lot of people who aren’t very considerate drive much too fast and recklessly in them, which is dangerous and bad. And those people are sometimes called douches, which is another way of saying ‘jerk.’ But it’s not a nice thing to say to anyone. You only say it to hurt someone’s feelings or if you’re being naughty on purpose. So we’ll give you this one, but you can’t say it again. Deal?”

“Deal.” Annelise beamed up at her worshipfully. Avalon felt a bittersweet pang. The last few years had whipped by in such a blur of work. How had she forgotten how much she just loved hanging out with kids?

Eden shot Avalon a grateful look. “Annelise, where did you hear that word?”

“Megan’s brother Tod. He said BMWs are . . . that mean thing I’m not allowed to say anymore.” She was a little subdued. She shot a look at Avalon. She was worried she’d hurt her auntie’s feelings.

“Megan is . . .” Avalon prompted.

“From Hummingbirds,” Eden said. “Ponytails. Little, wiry, and mouthy.”

“Hummingbirds are . . .”

“A sort of scout troop. They do crafts, earn badges, shred my nerves, stuff like that. Apparently they also get ad hoc vocabulary lessons when my back is turned.” She fixed her little daughter with a quelling stare.

Ava was missing a lot of interesting stuff by being away in San Francisco.

“Gosh, Tod sounds like a charming guy,” she said.

“He’s a senior in high school. He drives a yellow car that has a gray door,” Annelise volunteered. “He has a fuzzy mustache.” She put her finger beneath her nose.

“Well, that explains a lot,” Ava said. “He’s probably just a little bitter. Growing a mustache as splendid as your grandpa’s takes years. So does owning great cars. Well, usually.”

She thought of Mac and the Audi and she wondered what became of that car. If it had been taken from him, too.

“We’re sorry if we hurt your feelings, Avalon,” Eden said firmly. “Aren’t we, Annelise?”

Annelise nodded, big eyes limpid with sympathy. Her hands knit together worriedly. “I really am sorry, Auntie Ava.”

“Oh, ha ha, don’t be silly. No worries, you guys,” Avalon managed gamely. “C’mon! You know me. You’d have to do a lot worse to offend me. Like maybe shtup my inter . . .”

Crap.

Eden closed her eyes and shook her head slowly to and fro.

“What’s shtup?” Annelise of course missed nothing, including the abrupt loaded little silence.

“I meant to say stuff, baby, but I’m so tired my tongue tripped over itself.”

Avalon’s dad sighed. “I’m going to go outside and poke around a bit. We have to get going but we’ll be back with some furniture tonight, eh?” He smooched her on the cheek, and so did her mom.

“We have to roll, too,” Eden said. “Annelise has a project on the Greeks due tomorrow and we have to get poster board. Maybe we’ll get the full tour later this week?”

“If you can get away, that would be awesome.”

Eden squeezed Avalon in a hard hug on her way out and low-voiced her good-byes. “I’ll visualize Corbin doubled over from a groin injury. Maybe I can have the Hummingbirds make voodoo dolls and stick pins in him.”

“I’m on board with that. Every little girl needs a merit badge for Revenge.”

Eden laughed.

And then everyone was gone.

The quiet in the house was so complete. It was like she was a bug captured in a jar. Only the apocalypse would visit that kind of silence upon San Francisco.

She knew if she remained still long enough, the country’s ambient sounds would reveal themselves to her. The house would creak and pop and settle with wind and temperature; outside she’d tune into the birds and squirrels, the rustles in the grass and trees.

She opened the sash window in the living room and stood by, listened.

She thought she heard the low hum of a riding lawnmower off in the distance. The bleating of goats.

Her heart gave an involuntary little jolt.

Like a bird pecking its way out of an egg.

She drove downtown and stopped in at the hardware store to buy a slew of cleaning and scraping things, brooms and mops and buckets and sponges and the like, and took home about a ream of those paper paint samples. She stopped in at the grocery store to get some tea and food that could be noshed from a box or heated in the oven. By the time she got back Truck Donegal and Giorgio and her parents had arrived with the rec room couch, the squashy old bean bag chair, a short fridge, her twin bed, a card table, and a couple of chairs. She paid them in beer and pizza.

When they were gone, Avalon threw her yoga pants and T-shirt in the washing machine and found an old T-shirt and leggings her mom had stuffed into her gym bag. She pored over paint samples as if they were the Rosetta stone that would crack the code on all of her life issues, sorting into stacks she considered “probablies,” “love but have no use for,” and “afternoon light.”

By the time the very first star winked on in the purple sky, she was ready to crawl into the twin bed in her turret and sleep like the dead.

The sheets her mom donated were regular old white spares Avalon recognized from the family linen closet, which meant her mom must have upgraded her condition from “suffering” to “doing okay and probably going to survive.” She was amused by that subtle vote of confidence.

She slept fitfully, though. It was one thing to be under her parents’ roof with the two of them snoring away a few rooms over; here, she was profoundly conscious of being alone in the bed, almost as if she were perched on the end of the world and was in danger of tipping off because Corbin’s hot skinny body wasn’t next to her to stop her.

She dreamed that it was her job to assign unique color names to everything in the world. Furniture and bathroom tile and clothes and hair dye and lipsticks and animal fur. Her deadline was tomorrow morning because all of her deadlines were always tomorrow, forever, and it was already midnight. Corbin was there, pacing manically to and fro, to and fro, nervously pulling his fingers up through the front of his hair in that way he had, over and over, that she’d once thought endearing and she now realized was why the sink in their bathroom was always clogged, and his fingernails were painted a sparkly orange. And Mac was there, too, in the background, shooting pool shirtless, because it was her dream after all. She’d never even seen him shoot pool, which was kind of odd. Boy, had her subconscious given him a fabulous set of abs. Her squirrel, Trixie, was sitting on his shoulder, and her heart nearly broke open with happiness when she saw the two of them together. But with every step she took toward them, the carpet spread wider and wider, like an oil stain, and they got farther and farther away. She stopped trying, remembering her deadline, and had just decided she’d call the sweater Corbin was wearing Bastard Orange when she woke up with a start, heart pounding.

The sunlight squeezing in between the slats of the blinds (homely ones with chipped edges; she’d want to replace them) was benign and lemony.

A split second later she remembered Mac Coltrane was nearby.

And in that undefended moment just after waking, where her reason was too sleepy yet to corral her heart, it was like an entire sun rising in her chest.

It was telling that Corbin was her third thought.

Funny that her job was after that. Her entire life was enmeshed in something she’d created but patently wasn’t missing at the moment.