Painted Over

Chapter One: The Greenway

Annette Cawley walked the greenway at ten minutes past six, when the light in eastern Virginia was still the color of skim milk and the only sound was her own shoes on the crushed-stone path.

She had done this nearly every morning for fourteen years. Out the back gate, left along the fence line, down the gentle slope where the developers had left the land alone, and then into the orchard—eleven heritage apple trees, planted in the 1890s by a family named Hollis who had farmed this ground before anyone thought to divide it into lots. Nine of the eleven still bore fruit. The apples were small and freckled and too tart for pie without a cup of sugar, but every September the neighborhood children filled buckets with them anyway, and every October somebody complained about the smell of the windfall rotting in the grass.

Keith had saved those trees. Twenty-two years ago he had been a young planner in the Halcott County office, so new that his shirts still had the fold lines in them, and when the developer's first plat came across his desk with a cul-de-sac sitting right on top of the orchard, he had spent three weeks and most of his political capital moving it. He liked to say it was the only genuinely good thing he ever did in that job. Annette had heard him say it enough times to notice that it had stopped being a joke somewhere around year nine.

She touched the trunk of the largest tree as she passed. It was a habit she would have been embarrassed to explain. The bark was cool and rough and slightly damp, and the branches above her were heavy with fruit that would need picking within the month.

Orchard Terrace ran in a long loop around the greenway: eighty-four houses, five approved exterior colors, mailbox posts of a uniform height and stain, garbage cans behind fences by eight in the evening. It was not a wealthy neighborhood. It was a careful one. The people who lived here were teachers and nurses and shift supervisors and men who owned two trucks, and what they had in common was that they had all worked hard for something modest and were determined that nobody would be allowed to make it look shabby.

Annette understood that impulse. She had grown up in a house where the porch furniture was a dead washing machine, and she had learned early that the world reads a lawn the way it reads a face.

Wendell Boyer was standing at the end of his driveway in a bathrobe, holding a coffee mug, waiting for her the way a man waits for a bus he is not entirely sure will come.

"Annette."

"Wendell."

"You see the Tulleys' trailer."

She had. A boat trailer, empty, parked on the street since Saturday. "I saw it."

"Seventy-two hours is the rule."

"It is."

"So." He blew on his coffee. He was sixty-six years old and the HOA treasurer and he had a way of laying a grievance down in front of her like a dog laying down a bird. "What do you think?"

This was the part she was good at. She let a beat go by so he'd know she was actually considering it.

"I think Dale Tulley's father had a stroke on Friday," she said. "He's been in Petersburg all weekend. I think if you knock on that door and mention the trailer, you'll be the first person he's talked to since it happened, and it'll be about a trailer."

Wendell's jaw worked. "I didn't know about the father."

"Now you do."

"Well." He looked at the trailer. "Well, hell."

"Give it till the weekend," Annette said. "If it's still there Sunday, I'll mention it myself, and it'll come from the board instead of the neighbor. Then you two can still borrow each other's ladders."

He laughed, relieved, the way people usually were after she handled something for them. "That's why they put you on the board."

"They put me on the board because nobody else wanted the seat."

"That too."

She walked on. She would not have admitted, under oath, how much she enjoyed that exchange. Not the power of it—she genuinely disliked power, or believed she did—but the click of it, the sensation of a small mechanism seating properly. Two men who would have hated each other by Thursday would now split a case of beer in November. She had done that. It had cost her ninety seconds.

Her whole life had a shape like that. Annette Cawley, principal of Quarry Run High School, the woman who could stand in a cafeteria of nine hundred teenagers and quiet them by waiting. People asked her opinion on things that were none of her business and then thanked her for it. Twice a year some parent told her, with feeling, that she was the reason their kid had graduated. She kept those emails. She was not proud of keeping them, but she kept them.

The house was awake when she came in through the mudroom. It was the first day of school, which in the Cawley house meant that everyone was performing a version of themselves slightly louder than usual.

Keith sat at the kitchen table with a rolled plat drawing weighted flat by the sugar bowl and the pepper grinder. He was forty-five, gray coming in above his ears in a way Annette privately liked, and he had been at the same desk in the county planning office for nineteen years, approving setbacks and denying variances and going to meetings where retired men shouted at him about drainage.

"Morning," he said, not looking up.

"What is that?"

"Highway commercial overlay. Somebody wants a car wash where the feed store used to be."

"Are you going to let them?"

"I'm going to write a memo that lets somebody else decide." He said it lightly. Annette let it pass, because it was the first day of school, and because she had learned over twenty years that Keith's small bitternesses were like weather—if you named them, they got worse.

Spencer was at the counter eating cereal standing up, thirteen years old and all wrist, a book propped against the toaster. He read the way some children hide.

"Sit down to eat," Annette said.

"I'm almost done."

"Sit down to be almost done."

He sat. He did not stop reading.

Josie came down last, as always, sixteen and already dressed in the outfit she'd laid out three nights ago. She had her mother's height and her father's careful mouth, and she had been, for as long as anyone could remember, an easy child—good grades, good manners, the sort of teenager other parents mentioned wistfully at cookouts. Annette had heard herself described, more than once, as lucky. She had never corrected anyone. She had also never entirely believed it was luck.

"Do I look like a person who doesn't care?" Josie asked.

"About what?"

"In general. Do I look like a person who doesn't care what she looks like."

"You look lovely."

"That's the opposite of what I asked." But she took a banana and let Annette kiss the side of her head, and for one clean second the kitchen held all four of them at once, which happened less often than Annette liked to think.

They left in two cars, because Josie now drove herself and Spencer to school and Annette went in early. Backing out, she looked left down the loop toward the cul-de-sac, where Chester Dabbs owned the small brick rental at the bottom of the bulb—the only house in Orchard Terrace that had never been anything but a rental, and the source, over fourteen years, of roughly forty percent of the neighborhood's complaints.

There was a car in the driveway. A hatchback the color of a rusted nail, packed to the roofline, so full that the rear window was nothing but the flat backs of cardboard boxes and the corner of what looked like a stepladder. A mattress was strapped to the roof under a blue tarp.

Annette registered it the way she registered everything about Orchard Terrace: automatically, completely, and with a small internal note that she would need to know more.

Then she drove to work and did not think about it again for two days.