That sounded about right to Owen, who looked up from Reggie’s paper, tired himself. One school year was getting to be too much like another, the repetition of aspirations and their gradual deflation. He turned in the desk chair to the window onto Whittier Street and saw a woman coming down the sidewalk. The rolling walk that presented slim hips first, long upper body next, the casual angle of elbow and forearm—this was Wilton’s essence in female form. She had to be Anya. Her head, angled slightly up, might have been a kind of overconfidence until she stumbled on an uneven seam of sidewalk hidden under October’s first crisped leaves. Her grace was clumsy, her clumsiness graceful, and she looked at her feet, those long Wiltonesque culprits. She stopped in front of her father’s dark house but didn’t move toward the door. When she crept around to the side porch, Owen went out to the backyard where he could watch her from his garden of puckered tomatoes. If she saw him there, he wouldn’t look like he was spying on her.
