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happened the first time she’d answered with the truth:
I’m not really from anywhere.
“We can’t stay here,” she told Shelley now. “I can’t
afford the city. And you wouldn’t believe the pitying looks I get from people in the building.” She didn’t share that
the lasagna lady kicked her or that Henry had stopped
speaking in school. Like their parents, Shelley was quick
to assume Lane’s life was on the brink of disaster and Lane didn’t want to give her any evidence that this assumption was true. “I found a great little town. Henry and I
went there for lunch yesterday. He liked it a lot, so that clinched it. Team Henry is on the move.”
“Do they have Widow and Widowers in the States?
The dating app?”
“I’m not interested in dating. I’m fine with Team
Henry being a two-person team.”
“Do you really think it’s wise to make a big decision
in the midst of a traumatic event.”
“I’m not in the midst of a traumatic event. And since when is moving a big decision?”
Shelley cleared her throat, a nervous tic she’d had for
as long as Lane could remember. “Take a leave of ab-
sence. Come here. Move here. Quinn has a friend who’s
perfect for you. He’s called Patrick. If I weren’t married, I’d marry Patrick.”
It was nothing new, Shelley trying to convince Lane
to move to England. In Lane’s opinion it was because
her sister had never stopped feeling guilty about leaving
her behind.
“No thank you,” Lane said. “Not taking a leave. Not
moving to England. Not marrying Patrick.” She waited.
“Shelley?”
“I’m here.” Shelley cleared her throat again. “Turtle?”
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“I’m here.”
Neither of them had anything more to say. Neither
of them wanted to be the one to end the call. But Henry
was waiting. “I have to go,” Lane said.
“Okay. On the count of one—” Her sister hung up.
Shelley always hated to say goodbye.
h h
h h
The day they tackled the kitchen, Henry stood on a stool,
reached up high and carefully took down two tumblers.
“One for you. One for me.”
“I don’t know, buddy. Maybe it would be a good idea
to take a few more. For when you have friends over. You
know you’re going to make a lot of new friends, right?”
“Are you going to make a lot of new friends?” Henry
waited. She nodded. He reached for two more. “Okay,
four. One friend for you. One friend for me. One friend
is all we need.”
Had she told him that her mother always said that,
one friend is all you need? It was dizzying hearing her
mother’s words come out of Henry’s mouth. “I think
you’re going to make way more than one new friend.
What about if we take six glasses?”
“Six glasses we love?”
Another wave of dizziness. She knew he wasn’t in-
tentionally challenging her mother’s rules. It was more
like he was holding up a mirror that made her see the
rules made no sense.
No. This was not a good time to think about that. She
needed to stay focused on Henry. The school counselor
and the therapist agreed. Her only mission was to listen
and respond to whatever he said.
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“We don’t have to love our glasses,” she told him.
“Liking them is good enough. And you know what?
Let’s take eight. I think you’re going to end up with a
lot of friends.”
h h
h h
After Henry fell asleep, Lane went back to culling the
kitchen cabinets, sorting as she went. Donate donate keep.
Donate donate throw. As her hands worked, her mind
flicked through a slideshow of moving days past.
The day they moved out of New Jersey—the first
time they lived there—Shelley overheard an argument
between their parents. “It think it’s about whether or not Uncle Albie is moving with us,” she reported to Lane. “I
say he’s not. What do you say?” Lane said nothing. She
had no idea.
Later that day when it was time to go, after their par-
ents got into the front of the car and Lane and Shelley got in the back, Shelley leaned over and whispered to Lane,
“See? He’s not coming. I’m right. I win.”
But her victory ended a moment later when their
mother turned around and said, “Scoot over. Don’t make
your uncle sit in the middle. It’s a long drive.”
There was a kerfuffle when they moved into the house
in Rochester, their father calling them into the living
room that first night to chastise them for leaving the
front door open.
“Your uncle got out again,” he said. “Is it that hard
to close a door?”
As usual, it was left to Shelley to explain the details to Lane once their father left the room. Shortly after their arrival in Rochester, Uncle Albie had left the house without 128
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telling anyone where he was going. Lane knew this had
happened once before, in New Jersey. That time Uncle Albie went out in the morning and didn’t come back till night.
“Remember how worried Mom was last time he did
that?” Shelley asked and Lane nodded. “Remember how
when he finally showed up his face was red as an apple
and he was all out of breath?”
Lane nodded and then repeated what Shelley had told
her that time. “Because he got chased by a dog. A dog
with a foaming mouth. Probably rabies.”
“Correct,” Shelley said even though she had deduced
this on her own with no parental corroboration.
In Rochester, Sylvie solved the problem of Uncle Albie
disappearing without telling her by hiring a locksmith to
come and put in a double-keyed lock for the front door,
in addition to the window guards she had him install in
the upstairs bedrooms.
The locksmith had grumbled about the double-keyed
lock. “I’m doing it but it’s a bad idea. You need to be
able get out fast in an emergency. You don’t want to be
running around looking for a key.”
“This is to prevent an emergency,” Sylvie told him
curtly. “And the key will be right there.” She pointed to
the narrow drawer of the small half-moon table that sat
against the wall, one of the few pieces of furniture that
came with them no matter where they moved.
It was on arrival day in the St. Louis house that Shelley
got the idea to spy. Her inspiration came in the shape of
a large hickory tree that stood in the side yard, adjacent to the bedroom assigned to their uncle.
“All we have to do is climb up to the first elbow,”
Shelley explained when they finished unpacking the boxes
in their bedroom. “And we can look right in.”
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It didn’t sound like a good idea to Lane. “I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you interested in what Uncle Albie
does in
his room all day?” Shelley asked.
Lane admitted she was and several days later they
executed the plan. Lane got lookout duty while Shelley
climbed. As soon as she got into position, she shared
what she saw.
“He’s sitting in the La-Z-Boy,” she called down. “His
feet are up. He’s wearing slippers. He’s watching TV.
Wait. No. He’s sleeping. Wait. No. He’s getting up. He’s
going to bed. He’s in his bed. He’s watching TV. Wait.
No. He fell asleep. This is—” She stopped and the rest
came out in a rush. “Mom just walked in, with a tray.
She’s watching him sleep. She’s putting his tray down.
There’s a glass, and a bottle of Coke, and some crackers
and—” She stopped again.
“What is it?” Lane called. “What’s happening?”
Shelley scurried down to a low branch and dropped to
the ground. “She saw me. I thought you were on lookout.”
Lane started to defend herself but Shelley said, “Forget
it,” and marched into the house to take her punishment,
whatever it was.
There was no punishment for her or for Lane. But the
next morning a truck arrived with Manny’s Tree Service
written in big green letters on the side, and three men
wearing helmets and gloves hopped out. With goggles
on, they affixed ropes and cables and set up a bucket lift and the side yard screamed with the sound of chain saws
until, several hours later, the giant hickory was a stump
and their careers as spies were over.
It was in the fourth grade, while doing a math project,
that Lane learned most families didn’t move as frequently
as hers. The math project was meant to teach the difference 130
Rules for Moving
between mean, median and mode. The students were to
interview their parents—Shelley helped with that part—
about how many houses they’d lived in since they were
married and for how long. After that, they were to make
a graph. Lane did the graph herself.
The next day, the teacher pooled everyone’s statistics
and guided them to figure out the mean. As it turned
out, the three-year average for the Meckler family threw
off the average for the class.
When the teacher saw this, she clapped her hands.
“Fantastic! This is a perfect example of why the median
and mode are much more helpful than the mean.”
The difference between mean, median and mode
didn’t stick, but Lane did learn a lesson that she later
shared with Shelley. “In order for Mrs. Goldschlager to
figure out what’s normal, the data from our family has
to be dropped.”
Shelley’s conclusion: “I guess we’re even weirder than
we thought.”
h h
h h
They were packing up the closet in Henry’s room—the
one that used to be Lane and Aaron’s—when Lane found
a large wooden box tucked at the back of the top shelf. It was the kind of box Aaron used to send gifts to clients.
Sometimes a bottle of spirits and a set of whiskey glasses.
Sometimes a bottle of spirits and cigars. She sniffed. It
wasn’t cigars. She sat down on Henry’s bed. “I guess Dad
was going to send this to someone.”
“We can leave it behind,” Henry said.
“We could. Or we could send it to the person he
meant it for. If there’s a card inside.” She slid back the 131
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cover. “There is.” She took out an envelope. “It’s ad-
dressed to you.”
“That’s the letter about the baseball Dad gave me,”
Henry said. “You were there when he read it to me. It’s
about how the baseball for real used to belong to Hank
Aaron. Remember? You said, Don’t believe everything you read. The baseball’s in there too.”
Lane looked inside the box. There was the baseball.
Underneath it were three small flashlights. “Where did
those come from?”
“Dad gave them to me. One of them came by mail
in a box addressed to Mayor Henry Dash. It was in care
of the doorman, from city hall. It wasn’t really from city hall. It was from Dad. He was pretending. He was with me
when it came. The doorman popped out of his standing
place to give it to me. He said it was important.” Henry
leaned in to confess the next. “The doorman thought it
was for real from city hall. Is it bad we never told him
that it wasn’t?”
“No.” Lane stroked Henry’s hair. “Not at all bad. A
hundred percent not bad.” She looked in the box. “Why
did Dad give you flashlights?”
“I like to use them under my blanket. I collect them.
I mean I used to collect them.”
Lane blinked hard at the realization that Henry al-
ready had a used to.
“But I don’t love them,” Henry added. “I don’t love
Hank Aaron’s baseball either.”
Lane put the envelope back in the box and handed
the box to Henry. “You might love them someday. Take
it just in case.”
h h
h h
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It didn’t take long for Lane to see she had not inher-
ited Sylvie’s single-mindedness when it came to pack-
ing. Her mother used to say that given her druthers she
would have left everything behind. As a child Lane won-
since she seemed as unattached to people as she was to
things.
It was in college that Lane really learned what a ruth-
less curator her mother had been. The things the other
students brought with them: frayed childhood blankets,
ratty stuffed animals. She’d arrived with a single small
suitcase and even that wasn’t full. When her roommate
asked where the rest of her things were, she noted the
tone and went with, “It’s coming.” She always was a quick
study. Saying, It’s coming, was safer than saying the truth: This is it. This will always be it.
Aaron had asked the same question the first night he
came into her room but there was something different
when he asked. He was curious without judgment. This
had surprised her. Then again, everything that happened
with Aaron in those days was a surprise. That he was
interested in her, for starters, the girl who always stayed in her room.
Of course she knew who he was. Everyone knew
Aaron. He was the tall, lanky sandy-haired boy from the
other side of the floor who was often in the common area
making people laugh. There was always a crowd around
Aaron in those days, always a girl at his side. A succession of girls. Party girls.
It was Aaron’s roommate who pointed Lane out to
him. The roommate was Lane’s study partner in a class
where having a partner wasn’t optional. The roommate
told Aaron that the girl down the hall, who never came
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out of her room because she was shy, was a good listener
and super smart. Aaron wa
s intrigued.
Later he admitted his own surprise that what started as
a challenge—could he get the girl who was always alone
in her room to laugh?—quickly became something else.
He’d never been with someone like her before, someone
quiet. “Every girl I ever dated was a yakker,” he told her.
“I never got a word in edgewise. Minute I started tell-
ing a story, they would tell one louder. But with you,”
he confessed to her, “I feel like there’s more air in the
air. I can hear myself think for once. I can talk without
shouting.”
As for Lane, she’d never been pursued before, much
less by someone like Aaron. It took her a while to be-
lieve that the charismatic boy on her floor who everyone
wanted as a friend had chosen her. He was her first and
only boyfriend and, as it turned out, he had no problem
making her laugh, back then.
It was the first night in her room when he’d asked
her, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?”
She surprised herself by telling the truth. “This is it. I don’t need much. We moved a lot when I was growing up.”
“Military?”
“Pharmaceutical.” She then performed her single
party trick, reciting the names of the drugs her father
had been in charge of marketing when she and Shelley
were teenagers. They’d decided to memorize them one
day when their father accused them of not being serious
about anything. They ended up turning them into a song,
which they then sang to their father until he yelled at
them to stop. Instead of stopping, they took to singing
it quietly to each other in their room, whenever their
father annoyed them. Lane still caught herself now and
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then, humming the tune they’d made up to go with the
words. The words themselves were always right there, in
the front of her brain: Amoxapine and Trimipramine, you take them every day. Fluoxetine and Sertraline will send you on your way.
h h
h h
The landlord, who was supposed to meet her at his house,
got waylaid. A neighbor, who happened to be a real estate
agent, came instead.
“This is my very favorite house,” the agent told her
as they walked through the living room for the second
time. “Some houses are so dark I pray for a sunny day.
But here…” She pointed to the windows. “The sun isn’t
out and look how bright? I mean, how can that even be?”