Page 12 of Whistle

Annie and John had gone several years without a car, but as their fortunes improved, they’d bought a small, sporty BMW SUV for errands and out-of-town trips. They kept it at a garage one block south on 11th Street.

Annie liked the idea but wasn’t ready to commit. “Maybe Charlie and I will drive up and have a look at it on the weekend.”

“About that,” her editor said. “I hope I haven’t overstepped here, Annie, but I’ve gone ahead and set it all up for you.”

“What?”

“You were right, you need a break, wewantyou to have abreak, and I couldn’t see you having to go to all the aggravation of looking for a place. It’s all ready to go. I’ll send you a link to the listing so you can check it all out, just in case you hate it, but I really believe you’re going to love it. And if you don’t, you’re not obligated to take it. Christ,I’lltake it.I’llspend the summer there.”

“Fin, you really shouldn’t—”

“No, I should. This is something we want to do for you. It’s kind of northwest of Binghamton. There’s places there where you can pick your own blueberries.”

“I get my blueberries from Gristedes.”

“Not for the next three months, you won’t. And you’re the one who said she wants out of the city, so don’t be throwing Gristedes at me. Anyway, the larder’s already full. Got someone local to stock the fridge. You got wine, you got beer, you got yogurt.”

“Listing those things in order of importance? Charlie’s not quite ready for beer yet.”

“I didn’t forget the milk. And cereal and peanut butter and whatever else he eats. So you should start packing and get there before all that stuff passes its best-before date.”

“I don’t know what to say, Fin. I wasn’t expecting you to do anything like this.”

“Oh, and the place has wi-fi. Already had the tech guys there. Everything’s up and running. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, Paramount.”

“God forbid we should be without those.”

She got off the call and as soon as she was home she fired up the laptop in the kitchen and checked the link that Finnegan had emailed her.

It was a two-story Victorian-style home, built sometime around the 1930s, but had been updated over the decades so that there probablywasn’t much of the original house still around. Kind of like the Temptations and the Four Tops, Annie mused, whom she’d come to love, what with her mom playing them all the time when she was growing up. Still touring, but with all new singers. There were a couple dozen pictures to click through. The outside was painted powder-blue with white trim. A porch ran along the entire front of the house and about halfway down the left side. There were garden chairs placed on it with big flowery cushions, and Annie could already picture herself sitting in one of them, a tall glass of lemonade on the wicker table, the latest Ann Patchett on her lap.

“It does look wonderful,” she said under her breath, now viewing photos of the home’s interior. A large living room with overstuffed furniture and a fireplace. A big kitchen with everything she could possibly want. She zoomed in on one of the shots and spotted a Nespresso machine.

“Oh my,” she said.

There were four bedrooms on the second floor, one of which had been converted into a studio. No wonder Finnegan had liked this place. A caption on the photo said that the home had previously been occupied by husband-and-wife photographers, that they’d used this space as an office and for shoots.

Thoughtful, Annie supposed, but also sneaky. She was willing to bet that studio was as well stocked as the kitchen, but instead of food and drink, it would come equipped with paints and brushes and markers and pencils and Sharpies and pads of paper and a drafting table with multiple height adjustments. Fin’s motives were less than pure, but it was, she supposed, still a nice gesture. In the very unlikely event she might want to do some work, everything would be ready.

As she continued to look at the photos, another email from Finnegan landed in the inbox.

Just one extra pic. Wanted you to see there’s a room all set up for Charlie.

She clicked on the photo. It was of one of the bedrooms she’d already seen a picture of in the listing, but it was all dressed. A single bed with a Spider-Man bedspread. A set of shelves with books and half a dozen rubber dinosaurs. Three framed Harry Potter movie posters on the wall. A large window afforded a beautiful view of green fields and trees and what looked to be, in the distance, a set of railroad tracks.

Jesus, Annie thought.Charlie will love this.

She clicked onreplyand wrote a note to Finnegan that read, in its entirety,Youare a crafty son of a bitch.She hitsend. The email had no sooner whooshed away than she decided to send a quick follow-up:How on earth did you find this place?

While she waited for him to get back to her, she rose from the kitchen table and went up to the bedroom she once shared with John and began sorting through what she would take. When she was done choosing her own clothes, she’d sort out what she needed to take for Charlie.

Now that so much of the decision-making was done, Annie felt there wasn’t a moment to waste.We aregettin’ out of Dodge, she thought.

But there were things to do. Tell the neighbors she was going to be away. Have the mail held. Not that there was ever much. All her bills either arrived by email or were automatically paid. About the only thing she couldn’t control were unexpected FedEx or DHL deliveries of foreign-language editions of her books. She never knew when they were coming, or who they might be coming from, so there was no way to intercept them. She could ask one of the neighbors to check the front stoop every couple of days to see whether anything was sitting there.

When she went to meet Charlie at the end of the school day, she said, “How would you feel if I pulled you out of school a week early?”

The last day of school before the beginning of the summer break was the end of the following week.

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