Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Given that the Hartigans owned Glendale, at least in Josie’s mind, she assumed their house would be the biggest and grandest, nicer than even the best houses her parents had inspected before moving here. But the house to which Mrs. Hartigan drove them on Thursday afternoon was old and strange, a lumpy stone structure that looked like a place you’d go on a field trip. The house was odd inside, too, with tiny rooms, low ceilings, rough plaster walls, and wooden floorboards that creaked underfoot. The kitchen, into which they entered from a side door-the Hartigans had no garage, just a circular driveway-was the only room of any size, and it felt crowded, for it was trying to fill the role of three rooms-kitchen, dining room, den.

Yet the things inside the Hartigan house were notable-a huge television set, a refrigerator with glass doors, a bright red stove.

“Aga,” Mrs. Hartigan said when she saw Josie staring at it, and Josie nodded as if she understood. Mrs. Hartigan had white-blond hair like Kat’s, only she wore it loose, almost to the middle of her back. She dressed in what Josie thought of as a Gypsy-ish way-a purple tie-dyed T-shirt and a gauzy, almost transparent skirt worn over velvet leggings. She gave the girls a snack-cranberry juice and Fruit Roll-Ups-and sent them to the family room to amuse themselves. Here, unlike the other homes in Glendale, the family room was not off the kitchen but in a separate room on the second floor. Kat had plenty of toys that were new to Josie, including a small chest of dress-up clothes.

The girls arrayed themselves in Mrs. Hartigan’s cast-off dresses and shoes.

“What should we be?” Kat asked Josie.

“Be?”

“Perri usually makes up a story.”

“Oh.” Josie was not very good at making things up, but Kat seemed so sure she could that she felt obligated to try. “We could be…lion tamers.”

“We’re lion tamers?” Kat indicated her dress, a long peach-colored gown that she said her mother had worn in a wedding.

“Lady lion tamers. And models.”

Josie thought Kat would laugh at this unlikely idea, but she seemed delighted. “We’re modeling clothes when a lion gets loose, and they call us to come get it.”

“But we don’t use whips. We…we talk to the lions and ask them what they want. And they say they want pizza.”

“I love pizza,” Kat said. “Do you go to Fortunato’s?”

Josie shook her head. “No, my mom and dad make their own, from scratch. But we get Domino’s sometimes.”

“Fortunato’s is in the city. My dad orders the pizzas half baked and brings them home and puts them in the oven to finish them, and it’s like having delivery, only it’s really hot. No one delivers out here. No one good. We have them every Friday night. Do you want to come over for dinner tomorrow night?”

Josie did but knew that this, too, would have to be negotiated. Her mother was reluctant at first, saying it wasn’t polite to wear out one’s welcome. But her father saw how much she wanted to return and agreed to come home early, if Mrs. Patel would run over and pick Josie up when the playdate was over. Yet when Mrs. Patel came to collect Josie Friday night, she didn’t hurry Josie out to the car but stayed for the glass of wine that Mr. and Mrs. Hartigan offered, oohing and ahing over the Hartigans’ house.

“It’s great that you kept this old farmhouse the way that it is,” she told Mr. Hartigan. “It’s a gem.”

Mr. Hartigan, a dark-haired man with glasses, ducked his head and nodded. “It’s the original Meeker homestead, goes back to the early eighteenth century, maybe the late seventeenth.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Mrs. Hartigan said. “I can’t believe I married into Hartigan Builders and I have to live in this relic.”

“What’s a relic?” Josie asked Kat.

“Something old,” Kat said. “Old but nice.”

“Something old, ” Mrs. Hartigan said. “Dale’s family moved out here when the boys were in high school, and he’s still sentimental about it, even though the family only lived here a few months before taking over one of the model homes.”

Josie wasn’t sure what “sentimental” was, but Mrs. Hartigan made it sound like a very bad thing indeed.

“It’s a historic landmark,” Mr. Hartigan said. “Where do you live, Mrs.-”

“Susie,” Josie’s mother supplied when she realized he was fumbling for her name. “We’re in Glendale Meadows.”

“That was my father’s first development. I love those houses-they’re so simple and efficient.”

“And tacky,” Mrs. Hartigan said. “Oh, I’m sorry…I didn’t mean-It’s just that Thornton ’s early stuff seems a little dated to me. All that redwood and rectangles. Very seventies.”

“We keep telling ourselves they’ll be historic landmarks by the time our children are grown,” Mrs. Patel said, laughing. “But we were willing to live in a mobile home if that’s what it took to get into this school district.”

“Glendale Meadows is what Glendale was supposed to be,” Mr. Hartigan said. “Affordable, energy-smart houses for middle-class families. The original vision for Glendale included apartments and even Section 8 housing. But my father’s partners cared only for maximizing profits. They talked a good game, but once they got the public water and sewers, they abandoned the idea of mixed-income housing.”

“Honey, your dad did the right thing. I mean, it was all very utopian and sweet, but people leave the city to get away from poor people. You don’t want to live next door to people with cars up on blocks and old appliances in the backyard. The farmers out here are bad enough.”

“Can we take our dessert to the family room?” Kat asked, and her parents nodded. The girls carried their bowls of ice cream to the television set, leaving the adults with their wine and boring conversation.

“This tastes funny,” Josie said, forgetting that it wasn’t good manners for a guest to comment on food.

“Oh, it’s low-fat, sugar-free,” Kat said. “My mom says I need to watch what I eat.”

Perri’s strep was so badthat she stayed out of school another week. Later Josie would come to learn that Perri never got sick the way other people did, the two-or three-day kind of way. Her colds bloomed into pneumonia, her sprained ankles ended up being borderline fractures. So Kat was Josie’s for another week. They ate lunch together every day and were given permission to make another playdate, even though the Patels had not yet been able to reciprocate, as Josie’s mom kept insisting they must.

Seth and Chip noticed that the two girls were spending time together and decided to taunt them. They would sing to the girls, during lunch and recess:

Other students picked it up and sang along. It took all Josie’s concentration not to break down in tears. It wasn’t so bad, being called short. Certainly she had heard much worse-monkey-face, for example. Her real fear was that Kat would stop doing things with her, rather than risk hearing that song over and over. But Kat merely shook her head and laughed. “I’m not fat,” she said. “Just big-boned, my mom says.” She told Seth to stop. And the strange thing was-he did. Josie was beginning to realize that everyone craved Kat’s approval. Was it because her grandfather had built all their houses? Because she got straight A’s? But none of this was enough to explain the effect that Kat had on people.

Perri came back to school in mid-November. Pale, even thinner than before, she had dark shadows beneath her blue eyes that made her look angry and pretty at the same time. Perri was not pink-and-white beautiful like Kat, but there was something about her face, the eyes in particular, that made people want to look at her. Josie thought she resembled an old-fashioned girl, perhaps someone from Puritan times, which they were studying just then in preparation for Thanksgiving. The first day Perri was back, Josie waited nervously in the cafeteria to see if Kat would drop her now, if Perri would insist on a return to their closed-off twosome, but Perri accepted Kat’s decision that Josie should be their friend.