Chapter 2 — The Interview

The house was in one of those neighborhoods the city had grown around and then forgotten, big old houses gone slightly soft at the edges, and Enid Kirkland answered the door before I finished knocking, as though she’d been standing behind it deciding whether to.

She was small and straight-backed and seventy-four, in a cardigan buttoned to the throat, and she looked at me the way you’d look at produce you suspected of being overpriced.

“You’re late,” she said.

I was four minutes late.

She glanced down at the nonprofit’s form in her hand.

“Cassidy.” “Cass,” I said.

“Nobody’s called me Cassidy since the third grade.” “Cass, then.

You’re the design one.” She stood aside to let me in, not warmly.

“The nonprofit sent three.

One smelled of cigarettes and one wouldn’t stop talking about her feelings.” She looked me over once more.

“I’ll give you the tour, and then I’ll decide.” The house was too big for her, that was plain even to me, a house built for a family and occupied now by one woman and a great deal of silence.

Everything in it was clean and dated and cared-for in the specific way of a house where someone has time and no one to spend it on.

There was a chair in the front room, a man’s chair, worn and angled toward the window, that she walked us around rather than past.