The Household Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page A

amount of time monitoring her profile. That is, until it disappeared shortly after she returned from Boston to nurse her dying grandfather.
    Before that, Howie had been able to keep track of her at BostonUniversity. She made 72 new friends. She was even “in a relationship with” what appeared to be an Oriental young man. In photographs she appeared happy, if overworked. Howie sometimes lingered over the doorbell of her Add Friend button, swirling his arrow, thinking, Why not?
    Thinking: Because you are a ridiculous man.
    His intentions, he knew, were chaste. Protective but not prohibitive. His interest in his neighbor no more inappropriate than that of an elderly female relative who cared from afar: Howie desired nothing more from Emily than the knowledge that she was doing OK. Even though she was closer now, no longer in Boston, right next door in fact, yards away, snug inside her house doing God knew what, Emily felt farther away than she ever had. She had deleted herself. He would plug her name into the internet computer search: emily phane. But there was no longer any active emily phane, or EMILY PHANE or Emily M. Phane or emily margaret phane, or any of the variations Howie tried. None of them was now doing OK.
    —
    If most adults are failed children, as Howie vaguely assumed, then Emily had been a rare success. She was first-rate. Year by year she didn’t grow out of or actively debase her girlhood but grew gracefully into the peculiar child that she had been. That was his take, anyway. Her presence next door enlightened him—made his days and thoughts
lighter
—especially after his own daughter had begun to become something he adored but could no longer entirely comprehend.
    Emily never smiled while waving hello to Howie. She got him. She did not smile so that he would not have to smile back. Because she sure smiled at everything else. She was made of nimbler stuff, maybe, more refined matter than the everyday heaviness Howie pushed through. Like everything was absurd, a joke, and watching her you felt in on that joke, aligned with the bright, mocking interrogatory light she shone on everything. Some people, nomatter what, when they start laughing, you can’t help but laugh along, even if you have absolutely no idea what’s so funny. Even if it’s abundantly clear that nothing ever really is. Not that Howie ever actually joined in laughing, alone, at his house, at his window. Because that would have been nuts.
    Her face was round but not chubby, not quite. Her hair was black, shoulder length, with bangs that drew a line above her dark eyebrows and grey eyes. Then her freckles. Rare on someone with her coloring, they looked as if they’d been painted on her high, wide cheeks—a light brown, almost tribal smear of them. If Howie had to guess, he would say that the girl’s father might have been an Eskimo. Though, from a distance—a next-door neighbor’s upstairs bathroom window, say—it looked like her father might just as well have been a panda bear. She had looked that way since she was five.
    The first years after the death of her mother and grandmother, Emily didn’t lack for feminine care. Old women abounded. Five or six of them took turns stopping by, badly parking their cars—sometimes in Howie’s driveway by mistake—bringing Tupperwared meals, pink baby supplies, cardboard boxes of used toys. One of the women stayed overnight occasionally, and Howie’s wife claimed to have seen this one holding hands with Peter out in the backyard, smoothing his eyebrows. Peter was to have many such friends in the years that followed, but never for longer than a few months. Howie couldn’t figure out where they came from, or why they left. He assumed they’d known Peter from before, must have, and that they’d long been kept at bay. Tellingly, the NO SOLICITORS sign disappeared a month after Gillian’s death. Later, when Emily began to walk, the old women came less and less, though they never entirely