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better,” and I was wondering in what way she had felt bad, and then she took a big deep breath, sat on the bed, kissed me in a sisterly way on the cheek, and said, “I have a million things to do before Hank gets home.” I was listening for any sign in her voice of fear or regret, but there was none. She got into her clothes. She was very boyish in her way, casual but confident about putting on this and stepping into that. She had slim hips, a small potbelly, and small breasts, long arms and a long neck. Her body was sexy in the same way that the whole experience had been sexy—a fluid combination of maternal, girlish, and boyish, not like anything I’d known before.
    I said, “You know, Felicity, this sounds strange, but I think you’re the only mother I’ve ever slept with. Some of them went on to be mothers, of course.”
    “We’ll have to talk about that sometime, Joey. That’s a very bad sign with regard to your level of maturity.”
    “Do you think so?”
    She kissed me again. “No. Good-bye. I’m leaving.” On the way out the door, she said, “By the way, Daddy seems to have solved that tax problem he’s been having. Thank you thank you.” She blew me a kiss and was out the door.

         
    CHAPTER
    3
    O N MONDAY, Bobby presented me with an offer from Marcus Burns for Gottfried Nuelle’s most expensive house. It was a full-price offer, but there was one contingency: that Gottfried would fence the road frontage with something appealing, like split rails. It was a smart contingency. The property would look better for it. If Gottfried had done it in the first place, the house might have sold more quickly and for more money. But it was a contingency that would drive Gottfried crazy, implying, in his view, that the property was less than perfect. When I went over to Maple Glen to present the offer, I was careful. I clapped him on the back. I was extremely enthusiastic. I exclaimed that it was a full-price offer with an early closing, only one small contingency.
    Gottfried, who was feeding electrical wire into a hole while someone two rooms away pulled it, shouted, “Stop! Wait a minute! Now.” He looked at me for the first time. “What contingency?”
    “Split-rail fence along the road frontage.”
    He stared at me for a long moment, then shouted, “Dale! Get in here!”
    Dale, the young kid who did all the moldings, entered from the kitchen. Gottfried said, “That Maple Glen Road house. Split-rail fencing along the road.”
    Dale shook his head.
    “No,” said Gottfried.
    Dale went out of the room.
    I said, “What do you mean, no?”
    “No split-rail fencing. It’s an aesthetic abomination.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “That’s a Queen Anne. Now, in this part of the country, the vogue for Queen Anne houses was in the late Victorian period, say 1890s. You didn’t do split rail in those days. Split rail was more rustic, a pioneer thing.”
    “They aren’t insistent about the split rail, they just want a fence. If there’s a style that would—”
    “They thought split rail; that’s what they
saw
there.”
    “I don’t know that, Gottfried. I can’t remember how the idea of split rail came up, actually. What sort of fence would
you
put up there?”
    “I wouldn’t put a fence up there. I didn’t put a fence up there, so if I didn’t, I wouldn’t.”
    “It’s a full-price offer. The house has been on the market since the first of September.”
    “I’m going to move in there myself.”
    “You don’t want to do that, Gottfried. That way lies bankruptcy. That’s what you always tell me.”
    “No fence.”
    “How about a hedge?”
    He looked at me, leading me to believe that a hedge was unspeakable. I glanced around the room. Gottfried was putting in flooring, which was wide pine boards of random lengths, nice and knotty. One of the knots caught my eye—it looked exactly like the head of a bird with a long beak and a wary eye. He said, “It pains me to say this, but have