The first thing I heard when I came through my own back door was the shutter of a camera, that quick double click, coming from my kitchen like somebody snapping beans.
I had been gone two hours. Outpatient therapy at the hospital in town runs an hour, and the drive is twenty minutes each way when Ada Shroyer is behind the wheel and taking it slow for my hip.
Ada had dropped me at the steps and gone on home to let her dog out. I worked my walker up the two concrete steps the way the therapist taught me, good leg up first, bad leg follows.
Up with the good, down with the bad. I had said it to myself every day since the end of January, like a little prayer, and it had gotten me this far.
Then I pushed the door open, and there was a woman in a black blazer standing in the middle of my kitchen with a big camera held up to her face.
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She was aiming it at my white cabinets. My son Garrett was standing by the refrigerator with his arms crossed, wearing that gray quarter-zip pullover he wears for anything he thinks is important.
“Mom,” he said. “You’re back early.”
“I’m back when I always get back,” I said. “Ten after eleven. Who is this, and why is she taking pictures of my cupboards?”
The woman lowered the camera. She had a dark blonde bob, cut sharp at the chin, and a face I knew before I could put a name to it.
“Hi, Mrs. Ruble,” she said, and her voice went up at the end, the way a girl’s does when she knows she is somewhere she ought not to be.
That was when I knew her. Kim Tuttle. She had been ten years old in my 4-H sewing club, the year we met in the basement of the Methodist church because the extension office flooded.
She was forty-one now. I knew because her mother had Kim the June before I had Garrett, close enough that the two of them spent their first Sundays in the same church nursery.
“Kim,” I said. “Honey. What are you doing in my kitchen?”
She looked at Garrett. Garrett looked at the floor. And in that small silence I understood more than either one of them wanted me to.
“I’m photographing the house,” Kim said slowly. “For the listing. Garrett said you knew.”
I did not know. I had not known anything about any listing. But I stood there on my walker with my purse hanging off the handle, and I let the word settle in the room.
Listing. Like a boat going over. Like a list of things you are going to lose.