Page 144 of Across His Line

On the other side, there are three steps down.

The floor changes. Up here, it’s wide pale planks that came from somewhere out of state and costs too much for a floor. On the other side of the door, it’s old oak, narrow boards, worn dark in a path down the middle where people have walked on it for eighty years. The ceiling drops. The hallway gets narrower. The windows are smaller, with old wavy glass in them, the kind that makes the yard outside look like it’s underwater.

It smells different. Like wood and dust and the inside of an old book.

She stops on the bottom step.

And I watch her shoulders come down. In the guest room, she was all held in, arms close, every part of her trying not to touch anything. And here, on three worn steps in a narrow hallway with a water stain on the ceiling, she lets go. Just a little. Her hand comes out and touches the wall, the old plaster, cool and uneven under her fingers.

“What is this?” she says.

“This was the house.”

She looks at me.

“Before,” I say. “This was all of it. This hallway and the rooms off it and the kitchen downstairs. My parents bought it when my mom was pregnant with me. It was just this back then.”

“Just this?”

I nod. “Then my dad’s business started doing well around middle school. He bought the lot next door, and then the other side, and then he built.” I nod back up the steps, at the door, at everything behind it. “All of that is new. This is what’s left of the old house. He built around it.”

She’s quiet for a second.

“So your parents weren’t always—” She stops.

“Rich?”

“I didn’t want to say it.”

“No,” I say. “They weren’t.”

She stares at me. “Really?”

I nod.

She looks so surprised that something happens at the corner of my mouth that I don’t stop.

“My dad sold insurance out of an office over a dry cleaner when I was born,” I say. “My mom worked at a bank. We had one car. It was blue. The heat didn’t work on the passenger side.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

She looks at me like she’s trying to fit it together with the town car and the gates and the man named Martin, and it isn’t fitting.

I go down the narrow hall. She follows me. The floor creaks in the same three places it’s always creaked. I step over them out of habit, and I hear her behind me not step over them, and every one of them creaks. I don’t say anything.

The second door on the left.

I open it.

It’s small. That’s the thing she’ll notice first, I think. It’s smaller than her room at Corvin. One window, with the wavy glass, looking out over the side yard where the old maple used to be. A built-in shelf on one wall, painted white a long time ago, with the paint worn through to the wood at the edges where a kid used to grab it. A closet with a door that doesn’t close all the way. A radiator under the window, the old iron kind, painted silver.

No furniture. My mother cleared it out when we moved over. It’s just the room.

“This was my room,” I say. “Until I was fourteen.”

She comes in slowly.