Second Viewing

The listing said two o'clock, so I got there at ten to two, because I'm the kind of editor who shows up early to things and then sits in the car feeling dumb about it. The property was an old convent on the edge of town, three acres of overgrown rose beds and a stone building with arched windows that caught the afternoon light like the place was showing off. Cool October day, leaves skidding across the gravel lot. I got out, buttoned my jacket, and headed for the front door where a printout said OPEN HOUSE in letters that had started to peel.

I'm Calvin Sandford, thirty-five, an editor at a midsize press, single for reasons I'll get to. And standing in the doorway of the convent, keys on a lanyard and a clipboard against her hip, was Jeni Hartford. Thirty-four now. A real estate agent, apparently, since I'd last seen her. The woman I'd spent six months of my life in a no-strings arrangement with, three years ago, and then never called again.

"Well," she said. "I'll be damned."

"Jeni. Hi. You're the, uh." I gestured at the door, the keys, all of it.

"Listing agent, yes. And you're my two o'clock, I'm guessing. The sheet just says C. Sandford, and I did not read it closely."

"Calvin Sandford," I said. "I called on Monday about the convent."

She looked down at her clipboard, then at me, and laughed a short laugh that I remembered way too well. "Of course you did. Small town, one convent."

"Apparently." I stood there on the top step like an idiot. She looked good. Her hair was shorter than it had been, and she was wearing a green scarf, and none of that should have mattered.

She held the door wider. "Listen, we can stand out here being awkward, or you can come in and I'll walk you through it like any other buyer. Which is what you are today."

The convent had four floors and I could see her already doing the math on the stairs. "Okay," I said, and followed her in.

***

The inside was better than the photos, which almost never happens. The main room had these tall arched windows going nearly to the ceiling, and the light came through them sideways and gold and hit the worn wood floor in long stripes. Somebody had already cleared most of the old furniture out, but on a side table near the window sat a ham radio, an old rig with a dial and a tangle of wires, left behind like a piece of furniture.

"That stays with the property, I think," Jeni said, nodding at it. "Sellers said take what's listed. It's not listed."

I picked it up. Heavy thing, warm-colored plastic, the kind of object that makes you feel like the past is closer than it is. "Do you remember," she said, coming over, "how we used to talk into the night on those old radios at your place? You had that one your uncle gave you."

"I remember." I did, more than I wanted to. We'd sit on my floor, she'd turn the dial slow, static hissing, and once in a while a voice from somewhere far off would drift through, a trucker in another state, some hobbyist, and we'd talk back and forth half the night about nothing.

She reached out and touched the dial, turned it a little, like checking if the past still worked. Static filled the room, soft and dry. Then a voice, faint, somebody reading coordinates off somewhere in Ohio. She turned it down but didn't turn it off.

"You kept yours?" I asked.

"In a closet. It still works." She said it lightly, but she was looking at the dial, not at me.

We finished the main floor. She narrated the property the way she must narrate it to every client, the water pressure, the roof work from two years back, the rose beds that the convent's last gardener had kept alive until he moved away. Out the window the beds had gone wild, canes everywhere, a few late roses still hanging on, red against all that brown. Then she pointed at a door off the side hall.

"Chapel's through there. They turned it into a sunroom, glass on the old window frames. It's the thing that sells this place."

***

The chapel had been stripped of pews and given tall glass panels where the windows used to be, and the whole room was full of pale October light. Plants in pots along one wall, half dead, abandoned with everything else. Benches along the other side. We sat down, not on purpose, just because there was nowhere else in that much quiet to stand.

"Okay," Jeni said, and turned to face me. "I'm gonna ask you something and you can refuse to answer."

"Okay."

"Why didn't you ever call? After. Three years, Calvin. Not one word. I ended it because you were pulling away, and I figured you'd be relieved, and then you were just gone." She said it plainly, no heat in it, which somehow made it worse.

I looked at the dead plants for a second. There wasn't a good answer, but there was an honest one, and I figured after three years she'd earned it. "Because I was too curious about what I was missing."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I was thirty-one when we started and thirty-two when it ended, and I'd been in one long relationship before you and one arrangement that was supposed to be casual, and I didn't know if I was the guy who could do the serious thing or the guy who couldn't. And instead of figuring it out with you, which would've been the decent move, I figured it out by myself, badly, and every time I thought about calling I felt like I'd be calling just to see if the door was still open, and that wasn't fair to you." I shrugged. "So I didn't call. That's the whole ugly answer."

She was quiet for a bit. Outside the glass a leaf came loose from something and drifted down past the window, taking its time.

"That's actually an answer," she said finally. "Most guys would've given me the 'I was really