By Gina Willner-Pardo

June’s cottage was only a block from the bluff overlooking the bay, though the views from its windows were limited to the weedy front and back yards where, years ago, the previous owner had planted hydrangeas. A Monterey cypress—the tallest on the street—towered over the roof, shedding limbs feathery with brown needles. The gutters, she knew, were clogged, but what difference did it make? It never rained anymore.

Other houses on the street were being renovated by the young couples who bought them: lawns torn up and replaced with boulders and drought-resistant plants, aging grape-stake fencing giving way to sturdy redwood planks, second stories added and painted in shades of white and gray. The neighborhood bristled with energy and new life, which June would have enjoyed more if there’d been children about: riding bikes, calling out to friends, organizing mysterious games. But the children who lived here were kept inside or rarely home: staring dumbly at screens or shuttled from lacrosse practice to an unwanted cello lesson. The vibrancy of new gardens and power-washed driveways seemed false, a rickety veneer behind which people were exhausted, numb. Afraid, although of what she couldn’t say.

Occasionally she thought about getting someone out to trim the tree and clean the gutters. Maybe even paint the cottage, although this seemed like a terrible erasure of George, who had insisted, just months before he died, that beige was the color he wanted. The painter, a British man whose name June couldn’t remember, had said, “Well, that’s a bit out of fashion, isn’t it?” but George had prevailed, and now the house looked as though it was wrapped in a giant ACE bandage.

But she did nothing about it. Months went by—how could it possibly be September again?—and she couldn’t seem to find the will to do what needed to be done. Sitting at the kitchen table, surveying the backyard’s dead lawn and overgrown ivy hedge, she sipped her tea, having grown used to things not being the way she really wanted them.

Her own childhood had been lived outdoors in the East Bay town of Lafayette, largely rural at the time, not yet suburbanized by BART, the brown hills round and soft, like puppies all nursing in a row. Her parents’ house was atop one of these hills, at the end of a poorly paved road and a long driveway that yellowed with acacia blossoms every February. Her first chores, assigned by her father, were to sweep the driveway and then, later in the summer, the patio beneath the buckeye, carpeted in pale pink flowers and leaves shed to survive the heat.

Was that seventy years ago? Her memories of that time were growing dim. She recalled them often to keep them from slipping away entirely: sitting with her father on the back patio, telling him matter-of-factly about the dead people she saw in the clouds; steering her tricycle into a scarlet firethorn and sobbing when her mother (who meant well but always said the wrong thing) told her the gash on her knee would leave a scar; the smell of fresh lumber her father hand-picked to build her a treehouse in a shady canopy of oaks; the headless bodies of lizards on the front steps, delivered regularly by the aloof Siamese cat they’d named Mamie, after Mrs. Eisenhower.

She would often venture onto the dirt road behind their house, leading up the next hill to the home of an elderly man who lived alone. “Dr. Berganti,” her mother explained. “A surgeon like your father.” In fact, her father was occasionally called at night when Dr. Berganti was having what Dad called “an episode.” The road, cut into the tall grass that was brown most of the year—green only after winter rains—rose steeply and seemed, to her, endless. At a sharp bend she could look out over the valley below, bisected by the highway, the wind in her ears drowning out the sounds of traffic.

The bend was where she turned back. At home she imagined hiking all the way to Dr. Berganti’s house, but in truth she was shy of meeting strangers. It was enough to stand with the wind roaring in her face, redtails rising on the thermals, turkey vultures circling above the whole world she knew.

Now, washing up her breakfast dishes, she thought about driving down to the beach and taking as much of a walk as her arthritic knees would allow, but something stopped her, as it always did: laundry to be folded, a program to watch, her walker difficult to maneuver on the sand. Better, perhaps, to imagine the blue-green bay at dawn, the shoreline nearly empty but for the men who drove up from Salinas and anchored their fishing poles in the sand, squadrons of pelicans flying low, dark clouds with nothing to release.

One morning in late September, responding to a knock on the door, she was surprised to find a masked man looking somewhat familiar, standing at the bottom of the front steps. “Mrs. Drew? It’s Barry,” he said. “Barry the painter.”

She had not remembered how tall he was—especially relative to George, whose stoop had come on quickly in his last years—and how his height and accent and general carriage lent him an air of wounded nobility, as though he worried others would see his painting clothes as camouflage designed to let him get away with something shameful. Mid-forties, she guessed. A wedding ring flecked with paint. She imagined a gangly son, knuckles big as marbles, wearing baggy shorts in January and sneaking looks at girls in the middle-school halls.

Barry removed his visored white cap, an ancient chivalry. “I was wondering if you and Mr. Drew were having any second thoughts about the painting we did for you a couple years ago.”

Was it years? It seemed to her it had been just a few months, but no, that couldn’t be right. George had died the summer before the world closed down. Was that 2019? It was all a terrible blur.

“My husband passed away,” she said, as if that were an answer to his question.

“Oh, dear. I’m so very sorry.” He brought his hat to his chest in a gesture of sympathy.

“Not COVID,” she said, because that was what everyone wanted to know these days. “Congestive heart failure.”

A failure of the heart? Not my George.

“What a terrible thing. How long were you married?”

“Thirty-two years.” They had married late, in their early forties, when the chances of having children had largely passed. George never wanted them, and June, who might have had them if she’d met the right man when she was younger, was content without all the trouble and mess and worry. She liked being in the presence of other people’s children, though, which struck her friends at the time—all of them gone now or living far away—as incongruous. She thought of kids in the same way she thought of worms in the dirt: a sign of health and vigor, a signal from the planet that all was well.

She didn’t grieve for her lack of offspring, but she did occasionally feel as though she and George had just skated through, not really doing their share.

“Jeanine and I are coming up on eighteen years this February,” Barry was saying. “And now, the way everything is, you wonder if you’ll make it.” He briefly replaced his cap, then removed it, remembering he wasn’t quite ready to leave. “The world’s in a bad way, isn’t it?”

“Just terrible.”

“All of us chasing happiness,” Barry said. “Struggling so.”

She thought fleetingly of the merry-go-round in Tilden Park with its tinny organ music, the blur of her waving father. Of parsing Wallace Stevens off campus at Fondue Fred: “…Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued/Elations when the forest blooms…” The way the shaft of morning light had fallen across her desk at Oakland Tech, where she’d taught English for thirty-three years.

A mostly happy life.

“I met George at the Berkeley Flea Market. We both liked a red ceramic bowl and argued about who’d seen it first,” she said. “We ended up having coffee and pie at Fat Apple’s until closing time. That was a happy day,” she added shyly. It was unlike her to confide in a near stranger.

Barry smiled. “I imagine so,” he said. “I remember Mr. Drew fondly. The way he wanted to write me a check before we started. ‘Just a couple hundred in advance,’ I told him, but he wouldn’t have it. ‘I trust you boys,’ he said.”

“He was like that. Even at the end. Always ready to take a calculated risk.”

“Here’s the thing, Mrs. Drew.” He twisted his cap in his hands as if wringing water from it. “This has been a tough few years for me. No one thinking much about painting with money so tight. I understand, of course. Truly, I do. It’s been a terrible time.”

He was speaking quickly, afraid she would cut him off.

“But I thought I’d reach out, see if you had any further thoughts about the paint color we chose.” He paused, looking miserable. “Any regrets.”

She was poised to tell him no, feeling a little affronted, as though he’d singled her and George out for questionable taste. And then she thought that if she ever did decide to have the house repainted, she’d have to make the phone call, have this same conversation all over again. Why not do it now, get it over with? It was easier than telling him no, seeing him nod his head and apologize for having troubled her. Watching from the front window as he made his way back to his immaculate truck, which she imagined him hosing down every morning, having nothing better to do.

And he’d been so kind, letting her babble on about George.

“I’ve been thinking about white,” she said. “With black shutters.”

His eyebrows rose immediately, like twin eaves above his mask; he seemed to stand even taller. “Lovely!” he said. “Very fresh and crisp. I’d like to get started right away, before the rain.”

“What rain?”

“You never can tell,” he said, eyes full of some mischievous knowing, “what Mother Nature has in store.”

She couldn’t remember the last time someone had referred to “Mother Nature.” As a young child she had thought of her as God’s wife, the pair of them working in tandem, He the gentle disciplinarian, she the one who vacuumed and shopped. Now it was all just catastrophe and crisis. She missed thinking of the earth as a parent who raged or went silent but always loved her children.

“I’ve been watching the news. Nothing in the forecast,” she said. “But I’m happy for you to start tomorrow, if you’d like.”

She awoke the next morning convinced that someone was in the house. “George?” she said reflexively, tongue thick with sleep, heart pounding, imagining him grabbing the baseball bat he kept near his side of the bed, her having to tell him not to be silly, that they must call the police. A moment later, orienting herself—her blue bathrobe at the end of the bed, Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God and a half-full glass of water on the nightstand—she remembered George was gone, of course, but still she felt that someone was nearby, rummaging through kitchen drawers, rifling papers on her desk, whispering on a cell phone, something she rarely used, stowing it in her purse, where it often went uncharged.

When, finally, she realized it was Barry and one of his workers duct-taping tarps over the yard’s spindly shrubs, she was surprised to find herself vaguely disappointed. Disgusted with herself—An intruder isn’t company!—she threw off the duvet, sat up slowly, rested her hands on the arms of her walker. Her knees hummed with pain.

The pressure-washing lasted for an hour or so. “Seems like an awful lot of water, but it has to be done,” Barry explained at the door. “We’ll be back day after tomorrow, when it’s dry.”

“Would you like to come in and have a glass of iced tea?” she asked. Her voice shook—it had been so long since she’d made an overture of any kind—but she longed to speak more of George: his expert bridge playing, a penchant for nineteenth-century novels, the way he taught himself Spanish before their trip to Madrid.

“Oh, that’s lovely of you,” Barry said, “but I have a meeting with a property manager at eleven. If I get the job, that’s twenty-four units that’ll need sprucing up!” He tipped his cap. “Another time, perhaps?”

She smiled as she closed the door, appreciating his courtesy, knowing he wouldn’t be able to make it. She cringed at how she must seem to him: her life so small, everything she had to offer faded with age, barely recalled.

Two days after painting began, it started to rain. Clouds apparently unnoticed on Doppler radar the night before rolled in quickly. The downpour was instant and ferocious: gray sheets of water drenching June’s crinkly lawn, spilling over the walkway, the cracked earth too stunned to drink. On the roof a terrible drumming that made her heart wobble. She imagined artillery fire, the roar of a fighter jet as it beat on the aging shingles.

Barry phoned her from his truck, parked at the curb.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“We painters have a sense.”

“Is it all ruined?” she asked, tears starting in her eyes unexpectedly.

“No, no, nothing like that,” he said cheerfully, raising his voice to be heard over the rattling clatter on the roof of his cab. “Just delayed. Have no fear.” He must have heard her sniff because the tone of his voice softened. “Really, Mrs. Drew. I would tell you if there was a serious problem. I would. It’s a small thing, really. We’ll get through it.”

For a moment she heard nothing but the rain.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Drew,” he said, so quietly she had to strain to hear.

She flushed with embarrassment at how she longed for the sound of a man offering her solace.

The rain. Her father watching the merry-go-round’s whirl and spin. Barry’s words of comfort.

In the middle of the night, she sat straight up in bed, remembering.

It was the last time her father was summoned to Dr. Berganti’s house. Her mother was at a PTA meeting, and he’d brought June along, even though it was dark—eight or nine—and she was already in her pajamas. In the front seat of the Imperial, tires crunching and raising dust, she saw the brown grass at the side of the rutted road illuminated, blown almost flat in a cold wind.

He steered them slowly up the hill, through a grove of oaks, and there the road ended at the house she’d never seen. An off-white stucco ranch like her parents’, two small front windows curtained and dark. No lawn, no hedge, just a widening of the unpaved road into dirt. Off to the side an ancient, black Cadillac caked with dust and grime, no longer driven.

Dad reached into the back seat for his bag and the old blanket they used for picnics. “Stay in the car,” he said, handing her the blanket. “I won’t be long.”

He shut the heavy door. At the front stoop he pulled open the battered screen and let himself into the house with his own key.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the leaves of the old oaks stirring in the heavy wind, the dry grasses and weeds at the edge of the drive bending wildly, heard the frenzied susurration that meant rain was coming fast. She imagined the birds in their twiggy nests, the rabbits still and watchful in the ground, and wrapped the blanket tightly around herself. It smelled of Coppertone. Just before the rain began to fall, she heard the crunch of tires—far away but drawing near—on the long, dirt road.

By the time the car pulled up beside her, the rain started in earnest, dappling the windshield, pummeling the earth. June turned her head and, through the streaked window, saw a woman—pale, with a long neck, wearing a raincoat and a black cloche—sitting motionless, staring past the windshield wipers still frantically at work. Somehow, she knew it was Dr. Berganti’s daughter, knew that she, too, had been summoned to the house on the hill.

As if she knew she was being watched, the woman turned her head, held June’s gaze for an instant, waggled the gloved fingers of her right hand. Then she looked toward the house, and June turned to see the porch light come on, the front door opening, her father squinting through the screen into the rain, which was already beginning to let up. In a moment the woman had turned off the ignition and was running, umbrella-less, to meet him on the stoop under an overhang. She hugged herself as June’s father spoke, and then, when he stopped, she nodded slowly, unsmiling, seeming to shiver in her rain-spattered coat. They stood that way for a minute or two until the ambulance pulled onto the property, its beacon casting a lurid glow in the near-darkness, incongruous amid the hilltop’s browns and grays.

June watched as the driver and another man pulled a gurney from the back of the ambulance and hurried into the house. Still hugging herself, the woman, who had stepped back to allow them to pass, met June’s glance again and asked a wordless question with her eyes. June could only shake her head once, having no idea how to respond to such anguish.

The deluge had come to an end. June rolled down the window and breathed in the smell of wet earth ravaged and restored. Her father put his hand on the sorrowful woman’s shoulder. “Have courage, dear,” she heard him say.

At dawn the next morning, the rain had stopped. Under a milk-colored sky, she folded her walker into the trunk of her car, then drove down to the shore. It was nearly empty: just a few well-bundled figures hunting for shells at the water’s edge, one or two on the pier. Even the fishermen had not yet arrived.

She retrieved her walker and slowly, purse dangling from one shoulder, made her way onto the beach. She paused at a washed-up log and sat to remove her shoes and socks, leaving them in a pile as she continued on, the soles of her gnarled and crooked feet—oh, she had once had such beautiful feet!—sinking with each effortful step. She hoisted the walker over the lumps and folds of sand and felt sweat at the back of her neck, despite the cold. Two middle-aged joggers slowed and stared unabashedly. Her heart pounded, but she ignored them and inched along.

Finally at the shoreline, panting, knees throbbing, she paused. Once she caught her breath, she opened her purse and pulled out her phone. There was still a charge. Her thick fingers trembled as she held it at eye level, the viewfinder framing the field of gray sea, speckled with whitecaps, under the lowering sky. She snapped the picture quickly (not realizing she would show it to Barry later that day when he knocked on her door, bearing two of his wife’s homemade scones and a photo of his tow-headed daughters flying kites, their upward gazes rapt and joyous). She held to her walker, standing tall as the water bit and numbed her toes. Wisps of red ogo and sea lettuce flicked her ankles. Then the ebb tide, lacy with foam, pulled the ground back under the waves. A stiff wind blew into her face, carrying the smell of salt, of things dying and being born. Overhead gulls circled and cawed.

Gina Willner-Pardo’s work has been published or will appear in South Carolina Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Louisiana Literature, Subnivean, and other journals. She has also written seventeen books for children, all published by Clarion or Albert Whitman. She has a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.