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  “The silver one there, see?” Amithi joined Violet near the window.

  Violet pushed her blunt-cut bangs out of her eyes and saw a gray Nissan across the street, idling in front of the acupuncture clinic. A man sat in the driver’s seat, but she couldn’t make out his face. “Did you see what the guy looked like?” she asked. “I can’t tell from here.”

  “I did not see him up close, but I think he has brown hair, balding a bit,” Amithi said. “He looked to be a large man. Bulky.”

  Jed, her ex, might have been losing his hair by now. And at the rate he consumed cans of Busch, at least back in their married days, Violet wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d put on some bulk, too. In the early days after their divorce, Jed used to drive three hundred miles just to get drunk and show up at her doorstep with threats to drag her back to Bent Creek, but he did so less often now.

  The man in the Nissan couldn’t be Jed, Violet thought. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything but an American-made pickup. She forced herself to take a calming breath, like she’d learned in the yoga classes she’d taken a few months before, in an unsuccessful effort to get more balance in her life.

  Across the street, the door of the gray car opened, and out stepped a man with muscular arms bulging from his white T-shirt. He wore the tough, poker-faced look of a person who did someone else’s dirty work.

  “Do you know him?” Amithi asked.

  “Never seen him before.”

  The man came in and pushed the door closed, clattering the bells. “Oops, sorry ’bout that.” He shrugged and looked down at a clipboard. “Violet Turner?”

  “Yes?” Violet touched her hand to her chest.

  Amithi stepped away and went to examine the racks of shoes in the back of the store.

  The man handed Violet a thick stack of paper. “I’ve been asked to give you this.” He didn’t move from his place on the welcome mat—perhaps because he sensed he wasn’t welcome.

  Violet pushed her horn-rimmed reading glasses up on the bridge of her nose and scanned the heading on the first page silently: “Notice to Vacate Premises.”

  “Am I being evicted?” she asked.

  Without making eye contact, the man thrust his clipboard at her. “I’ll just need you to sign on the line here to acknowledge that you’ve been served.”

  “I think you have the wrong person,” Violet said. “I have a rent-to-own agreement with my landlord, and a right of first refusal on the building. So I don’t see why they’d be evicting me. A portion of my rent each month is credited toward a future down payment.”

  “I’m just a process server, ma’am. I don’t know anything about what the papers are about. You’ll have to take that up with your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer,” she said in a low voice, glancing over her shoulder at Amithi. Violet scribbled her signature.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Best of luck to you.” The process server bent his head in a slight bow. “Seems like a real nice store you’ve got here.” He tucked his clipboard under his arm and left.

  Amithi came back toward Violet. “I am sorry I did not leave. Since you said you did not know the man, I was afraid for you and did not want you to be here alone.”

  Violet’s hands shook as she clutched the documents. She appreciated Amithi’s concern, but the only thing worse than getting served with an eviction notice was having a customer there to witness it.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Amithi asked. “I sensed that man did not have good news for you.”

  “No,” Violet said. “Not good news at all.”

  Chapter 2

  INVENTORY ITEM: plates, set of six

  APPROXIMATE DATE: 1988

  CONDITION: fair; small chip on the rim of one of the plates

  ITEM DESCRIPTION: Assortment of Fiesta ware dinner plates: two apricot, two rose, and two turquoise.

  SOURCE: estate sale

  April

  APRIL SAT AT THE round kitchen table, eating buttered toast and two hard-boiled eggs. She didn’t want to eat them, didn’t want to eat anything, but the obstetrician told her she needed to add more protein to her diet, and eggs were cheap and easy to cook. She sliced one of them and examined the two halves split open on her plate. The oblong pieces rocked back and forth on the pink Fiesta ware she’d inherited from her mom—if you considered the mess she’d left behind, the half-baked business venture and the cluttered house, an inheritance.

  April grabbed the plate and dumped its contents into the trash, but not before catching a whiff of something spoiled. She ran over to the sink, where she vomited up her breakfast. So much for trying to do something good for the baby.

  The nausea subsided, but April didn’t feel better. It wasn’t fair, she thought, that Charlie would be graduating from college in just a few weeks and would go off to med school in Boston in the fall. He’d forge ahead as if nothing had changed, and meanwhile, she’d be stuck here in Madison in this sagging bungalow.

  She’d grown up in this house, nestled on an isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, just blocks from the white-domed capitol building and the State Street pedestrian mall. The house was one of half a dozen bungalows on the block, mixed in with Victorians and American Foursquares shaded by wide front porches. One of the houses on the street, a Prairie-style beauty with clean lines and a low-pitched roof, had been designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Some of the homes, like this one, were still occupied by families, but many of them had been converted over the last several years from student rentals and single-family residences to yoga studios, art galleries, and swanky condo developments. As a kid, April would sit on the front steps on fall Saturdays and wave to college students walking to football games. She’d imagined that someday she’d be one of them, sporting a red sweatshirt and a carefree smile. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  She was more than twenty weeks into the pregnancy and there was no turning back now. Even if she could find a clinic that would perform an abortion this late, she couldn’t go through with one. This baby was her only hope for having anything that resembled a family.

  April paged through a pregnancy book she’d checked out from the library. She didn’t relate to any of the smiling, shiny-haired women in the pictures. She wished her mom were there so she could ask her about all the weird things happening to her body and emotions, and whether they’d go away. She thumbed through a chapter on prenatal complications, running her finger over all the strange-sounding words for things that could go wrong. “Ectopic pregnancy.” “Polyhydramnios.” “Preeclampsia.” The numbers, especially, stood out for her on the pages, and she fixated on probabilities and percentages. After twelve weeks, the chance of miscarriage is three in one hundred.

  April also wished her mother were around so that, for once, the focus could shift to something other than her mom’s problems. A baby, even an unplanned one, might have injected some normalcy into the frantic highs and bottomless lows that had characterized her mom’s last years. Medication kept her bipolar disorder at bay, but just barely, and only if she took it. On more than one occasion, April had found full prescription bottles in the bathroom wastebasket.

  April swished some water in her mouth and spit it out in the sink, then sat back down at the table to sort through the mail. Most of the envelopes were addressed to Clutter Consulting LLC, the business her mother had thought up in the middle of a manic streak. Her mom had quit her longtime secretarial job to start the business but never got it off the ground. When April questioned her mom about the feasibility of helping other people organize their lives when she could scarcely manage her own, Kat Morgan had said, “Oh, honey. Not everything comes down to mathematical certainty. Sometimes you’ve gotta take a chance.”

  Saliva pooled in the back of April’s mouth and she got up and ran back to the sink, thinking she was going to be sick again. Despite what her mom had said, April knew quite a bit about taking chances. She’d taken a big one five months earlier
, on the December morning after her eighteenth birthday.

  She should have known better than to have sex for the first time just a few days before she had to retake the SAT, but she and Charlie had already waited for what felt like forever. When the condom broke, he’d held her and told her not to panic. They’d gone together to Walgreens to get the morning-after pill, where the pimply young pharmacist told them about the likelihood of side effects like nausea, vomiting, and severe cramping. About one in four women experiences unpleasant side effects.

  April couldn’t live with those sorts of odds of getting sick during the SAT. She had bombed it when she took it in November, just weeks after her mom’s accident. She needed to do well the second time around to have a shot at getting any of the scholarships she’d applied for. With that in mind, she had thrown away the white paper pharmacy bag without opening it. She went on to ace the SAT, earning a perfect score on the math section. Unfortunately, she also aced the at-home pregnancy test she took two weeks later.

  And that was how she’d ended up here, dry-heaving over the kitchen sink.

  The doorbell rang and April straightened her back, startled. She went out to the foyer, where, through the leaded glass window, she saw a gray-haired woman in a suit and sunglasses standing on the front porch.

  Shit, thought April. It was Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett, a member of the local women’s organization that had awarded her a full college scholarship. April had forgotten about the meeting they’d scheduled.

  April opened the door and tried to shield her body with it. She hadn’t yet told anyone from the scholarship committee about her pregnancy. “Hi, Mrs. Barrett.”

  The older woman stepped inside. “Good morning.” She removed her sunglasses and tucked them into her handbag, which was enormous and bright yellow. And probably expensive.

  “I like your purse,” April said.

  “You don’t need to suck up to me, dear. You’ve already got the scholarship. Unless you’re trying to get me to leave you something in my will, which seems to be the reason most people kiss my rear. And if that’s it, I’ve got news for you, honey. I’m not planning on dying any time soon.”

  “Okay,” April said, taken aback. “But I wasn’t sucking up. I really do like the bag. And I’m definitely not after an inheritance. I’ve got enough problems trying to deal with my mom’s estate.”

  The word “estate” was misleading, April thought. Before her mom died, she’d always thought the word implied some sort of wealth. She learned she was wrong after seeing all the letters from banks trying to collect debts from the nonexistent assets of her mom’s “estate.” Now she just piled all the letters up and dropped them off periodically at the lawyer’s office.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” April asked.

  “No, thank you, I’m fine,” said Mrs. Barrett. “Let’s just have a seat.”

  April led her into the living room. They sat down opposite one another in worn wing chairs.

  “So.” Mrs. Barrett leaned forward. “One of the other committee members stopped by your school to drop off some forms for you the other day.”

  April sucked in her breath. She was busted.

  “The front office said you’ve been absent lately. Have you been ill?”

  By reflex, April folded her arms in front of her midsection. “Not exactly.”

  “April,” said the older woman after a pause. “Why do you think I’m here today?”

  April sat up straighter. “I thought I was required to meet with you as a condition of my scholarship. That’s what you said on the phone, anyway.”

  “That’s not entirely true. Well, for you it is.” Mrs. Barrett repositioned a gold watch on her bony wrist. “What I mean is, in the past we haven’t required other scholarship recipients to meet with a committee member. But because of your special circumstances, having lost your mother so recently, we thought it would be a good idea to make sure someone checks in on you.”

  April couldn’t decide whether to be touched or annoyed. She was so tired of everyone feeling sorry for her. Most of her interactions lately were stripped down, sanitized through a filter of pity. What people didn’t know, though, was that April had been taking care of herself for years, even before her mom died. There were plenty of times when her mom was so out of it that April had to do everything around the house: grocery shop, renew the license plates, make sure the bills got paid.

  “You can tell me what’s going on,” Mrs. Barrett said. “I won’t tell the rest of the committee, not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Okay, but you can’t tell anyone else. Not yet, anyway,” April said. She figured there was probably no point in lying. It would be impossible to hide her condition soon enough, if it wasn’t already. Recently she’d caught a lot of people staring at her belly. That shop lady with the tattoo, Violet, had done it the other day at the vintage store.

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Mrs. Barrett said. “That is, unless you’ve committed a crime.”

  “Well, it’s not a crime as far as I know,” April said. “I’m pregnant.”

  April had only uttered those words aloud once before, to Charlie, after she’d taken the home pregnancy test. He’d responded with a marriage proposal.

  Mrs. Barrett’s response was less enthusiastic. She looked shocked, and April was certain she was going to lose her scholarship on the spot. Surprisingly, the realization didn’t sting very much. April wanted it to sting, wanted to feel any sort of sensation other than the hollow ache she’d been feeling since Charlie left. Losing him so soon after losing her mom, though in a different way, burned like ripping the bandage from a still-seeping wound.

  “You can’t just drop out of high school,” Mrs. Barrett said. “If you’re embarrassed or worried about what your classmates will think, I’m sure we can talk to your teachers and figure something out.”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” April said. “I didn’t stop going to class just because I’m pregnant. I was also bored.”

  Mrs. Barrett put a hand to her temple. “I have to say this is terribly disappointing. How will you be able to go to college if you don’t graduate high school?”

  “I’d still like to go to college. I took the GED already.”

  There, thought April. I’m not a complete fuckup.

  Mrs. Barrett opened her mouth, then shut it again. She shook her head.

  “I passed,” April said. “And I already sent my scores to the University of Wisconsin. The admissions committee said they were fine, in terms of holding my place in the freshman class. I should have taken the GED months ago, really. I could have saved all that time I spent sitting in class.”

  April knew she was acting defensive with Mrs. Barrett, maybe even cocky. But one of the main reasons she’d stopped showing up at the high school was that everybody, from her guidance counselor to the lunch lady, seemed to think they knew what was best for her. They didn’t hesitate in sharing their opinions but never asked April about her own.

  “I’m assuming the fact that you’re telling me all of this means you’re planning to keep the baby,” Mrs. Barrett said.

  April nodded. She knew Mrs. Barrett probably expected her to say what a difficult decision it had been, how she’d considered all of her choices, including adoption, but that would have been a lie. April knew what it was like to lose a mother, and she couldn’t put another person through it.

  “I don’t have children,” Mrs. Barrett said. “But I’ve managed to stay busy all these years with my charity work. I’m not sure I would’ve had time to do it all if I did have a family.”

  April realized she must have looked scared, because Mrs. Barrett continued. “Not that I’m saying you can’t have children and still do other things you want to do in life, necessarily. And that’s what we should talk about. If you haven’t been going to your classes, what have you been doing with your time?”

  April looked out the window. The peony bush her mom had planted several summers ago on the side of the house wa
s now blooming a brilliant pink. Peonies had been her mother’s favorite flower. April thought they were a rather unstable plant. The flowers were too showy for their own good; the stems often flopped toward the ground under the weight of the huge blossoms.

  She turned her face back toward Mrs. Barrett. “Well, I’m still going to my advanced calculus course at the university, so I can get the credits, but that ends in a couple of weeks,” she said.

  April didn’t mention that the main reason she kept going to her college-level class was that she hoped to run into Charlie on campus. She knew he had some science classes in the same building she went to for calc. They’d met when the building was evacuated for a fire alarm in the fall. April had stood shivering on the sidewalk waiting for the firemen to let the students go back inside, and Charlie had offered her his sweatshirt. She still remembered the way it smelled, of pine needles and Ivory soap.

  After that, they’d started studying together. April also began spending the night sometimes at Charlie’s apartment on campus, telling her mother she was staying at a girlfriend’s house. She hated lying to her mom, but she was willing to do almost anything to spend a series of uninterrupted hours with Charlie, lying skin to skin and sharing secrets underneath the billows of his down comforter—a shield from the petty, perpetually boring world of high school, which April couldn’t wait to leave behind.

  Her mom didn’t approve of the relationship. The few times April had brought him over for dinner, Kat had thought Charlie was sweet enough, but she worried that, because he was older, he would soon move on and break her daughter’s heart.

  Charlie’s parents didn’t approve of the situation, either, but for different reasons. Judy and Trip Cabot thought it was inappropriate for their son to be dating a girl who was still in high school, and they worried about what people would think. Even before they had a chance to meet April, they pressured Charlie to break up with her. After April’s mom died, though, the Cabots softened their stance. They didn’t accompany Charlie to the funeral, since they’d never met Kat or even April, but they did invite April to spend Thanksgiving with them just a few weeks later.