"We love welcoming new families," she told me, looking past my shoulder into the hallway. "Briarwood Glen is a special community, and we try very hard to keep it that way."
I thanked her for the cake. I told her my son would be home that weekend and that we would enjoy it. She asked whether I was retired, and when I said I still worked full-time, she accepted the answer without asking where. Her eyes had already found the open garage behind me, where the Mustang sat beneath a breathable cotton cover.
"What have you got under there?"
"A car my family rebuilt," I told her.
"Something old?"
"Nineteen sixty-eight Mustang."
She stepped toward the garage before I could invite her and lifted a corner of the cover with two fingers. I did not like that. I asked her, politely, not to touch it, and she stepped back with an amused little laugh. She told me her son Bryson loved classic cars and had been begging his father to buy something with character.
"Maybe we can talk about it someday," she said.
"There isn't a sale to discuss," I answered.
It should have ended there. Neighbors ask questions about cars all the time, and most of them mean nothing more than the pleasure of looking. Hadley held my gaze for a moment, smiled again, and told me I would settle into Briarwood Glen once I learned the ways of the neighborhood. She left the cake behind and drove away.
Tate came home from work that afternoon and found me standing in the garage with the cover folded back. He had his mother's dark eyes and the stubborn left eyebrow that rose whenever he thought someone was being ridiculous. I told him about the visit. He asked whether I had mentioned the plaque inside the glove box.
"No," I said. "It isn't any of her business."
He laughed. "Then why do I feel like she's going to make it her business?"
Three weeks later, her son walked up my driveway without asking. Bryson Lockwood was nineteen, broad-shouldered, blond, and dressed in a country-club polo with white tennis shorts. I was replacing a front sway-bar bushing when he stopped at the garage opening and whistled. He asked if the car was a genuine fastback, whether the engine was original, and how much the restoration had cost.
I answered the first two questions and told him the third was private. He wandered around the open threshold, careful not to enter after I asked him to stay back, but his eyes moved from the wheels to the interior to the keys hanging on the wall. He kept talking as if the conversation itself gave him a claim on the car. Finally I said I had work to finish, and he left with an easy wave.