On the first warm Thursday in March, Mara found a book behind the radiator at the town hall. It had slipped into the narrow space between the iron ribs and the wall, where it had collected a gray fur of dust and a single wing from a maple seed. Its cover was the color of old mustard; its title, almost rubbed away, was The Weather at Bell House. There was no library stamp inside, only the name Ada Vale written in blue ink and an address on Willow Street.
Mara was at the town hall to return a borrowed folding table. She had set it down in the corridor outside the meeting room and was waiting for the caretaker, who had gone in search of the key to the storeroom. Someone had propped a window open with a wooden wedge. From the square came the slap of a loose flag against its pole and the smell of onions frying at the café. Mara eased the book out with the handle of a dustpan, brushed it against her coat, and opened it at random.
“By noon,” she read, “the snowman had lost his nose and gained a hat no one recognized.”
She turned back a page. The snowman stood in the yard of a large, untidy house where three sisters were waiting for a letter. One expected news of a voyage, one a payment long overdue, and one refused to say what she hoped for. Mara read until the caretaker returned, swinging his keys on a red cord. When he saw the book, he squinted at the name.
“Ada used to come to the Tuesday card game,” he said. “You might try her house. Yellow door, halfway down Willow.”
Willow Street lay a little out of Mara’s way, but the afternoon had loosened around her. She carried the book there with the dustpan still in her other hand and found the yellow door beneath a porch roof. Beside it stood six empty pots and one pot containing a small, stubborn-looking plant tied to a stick with pink wool. She rang the bell. No one came. She rang again and heard a dog bark somewhere at the back of the house.
A woman opened an upstairs window. Her hair was wound in a scarf, and she held a paintbrush with a dark tip.
“I can’t come down just yet,” she called. “I’ve painted myself into the landing.”
Mara held up the book. “I found this at the town hall. Is it yours?”
The woman leaned out so far that Mara took an involuntary step forward.
“That’s where it went! I thought I’d left it on the bus.” She laughed. “Would you put it in the blue box by the door? And shut the lid properly, or the dog will make a meal of it.”
The box contained two parcels, a folded newspaper, and a pair of shears. Mara placed the book carefully on top. As she closed the lid, the woman called down, “Have you read it?”
Mara hesitated with her hand on the latch. She had meant only to return something, to perform a small and tidy errand. But the woman was already lifting the brush to the window frame, and the dog had begun barking again. Mara took the book from the box and promised she would be careful with it.
At home, she set it on the kitchen table beside a bowl of potatoes with pale shoots curling from their eyes. She made tea, sliced bread, and read the first chapter while the kettle ticked itself quiet. The sisters at Bell House had names that seemed to suit them too well: Grace, who kept accounts; Florence, who sang badly and often; and Nell, the youngest, who put everything she did not wish to discuss into the pocket of her apron. Mara had met women like each of them, though perhaps not in one household. By the time she looked up, the light on the table had shifted from the breadboard to the far wall.
For the next week she carried the book in her coat pocket. She read it on the bus, tilting the pages away from a man’s wet umbrella. She read two paragraphs while waiting for the cobbler to find her ticket, and half a chapter on a bench outside the grocer’s, where a little girl in silver boots asked whether the people in the book were real. Mara told her they were not, and the girl considered this gravely.
Rain lasted three days. Water gathered in the dip outside her gate, and each time a car passed it flung a brown fan against the curb. Mara began to notice the progress of the book by the changing weather beyond its windows. Bell House had a leak above the stairs; her own ceiling had developed a brown thumbprint near the light. The sisters hung a bucket from a hook to catch the drip. Mara put an old mixing bowl beneath hers and called the landlord, who promised to come when the rain stopped.
On Wednesday it stopped. The landlord arrived with a ladder, a roll of tape, and his nephew, who was learning the trade. Mara moved the kitchen chairs out of their way and took her book into the yard. There she discovered that the wooden bench had been left uncovered all winter. Its seat was gritty, and a corner of the slat had lifted. She fetched a cloth and wiped it down, then sat on her folded coat where the wood was driest.
At Bell House, a letter finally arrived. It was addressed to Grace, but the envelope contained only a bill. She folded it once and put it beneath the sugar bowl. Florence was furious on her behalf; Nell suggested they sell the silver spoons. Grace said she would manage. Mara closed the book on a finger and looked toward the kitchen, where the nephew was holding the ladder steady with both hands. She had been waiting for a revelation, but she recognized the small disappointment of a bill instead. She went back to reading.
By the following Saturday the plant in Ada Vale’s porch pot had opened three white flowers. Mara noticed them when she returned the book. This time Ada answered the door in slippers, with no paintbrush in sight. She was shorter than Mara had expected, and her scarf had been replaced by a pair of spectacles on a chain.
“Did you like it?” Ada asked, taking the book.
“Very much. Though I wanted Grace to be angrier.”
“She is angry. She just won’t give the others the satisfaction.” Ada examined the cover, then ran her thumb along the spine. “I was seventeen when I bought this. The shopkeeper wrapped it in brown paper because it had started to rain. I remember standing under an awning and trying to keep the paper dry.”
She invited Mara in for tea. The landing floor was a rich green, still marked off with a strip of newspaper at the foot of the stairs. On the kitchen table stood a shallow tray of seedlings, each row labeled with a wooden stick. One label said beans; another said more beans; a third had been crossed out so many times that the wood was nearly black.
The dog, a broad brown creature with one white eyebrow, thumped his tail under the table. Ada brought out a tin of biscuits. Mara chose one with a chocolate stripe and asked why Ada had brought the novel to a card game.
“I’d been lending it to Ruth. She gave it back, and I put it on the radiator while I dealt the cards. Then I forgot it.” Ada poured the tea. “Ruth moved away in January. We used to take turns bringing books. Not for the whole group, just whichever one of us had found something the other might like.”
Mara thought of the book behind the radiator, held there through weeks of coats being buttoned and chairs being stacked. “Would you like me to bring you one?” she asked.
Ada smiled. “Only if I may complain about it afterward.”
Mara returned the next week with a slim collection of stories she had bought years before and reread so often that the corners curled outward. She chose it because the first story contained a woman who kept a goose in her pantry and because Ada, she suspected, would have something to say about that arrangement. Ada took the book and sent her away with a paper bag of bean seeds and a warning not to plant them yet. Mara placed the bag on her mantel, where she could see it from the chair.
On a bright Friday, Ada appeared at Mara’s gate with the story collection and a loaf wrapped in a dish towel. “The goose was wasted on that woman,” she announced. “Also, I made too much bread.”
They ate thick slices with butter at the kitchen table. Ada had liked four of the stories, disliked two, and could not decide about the last. She had tucked a scrap of paper into the book to mark a sentence she wanted Mara to explain. Mara read it twice and admitted she did not know what it meant. They tried several possibilities, each less convincing than the one before, until Ada laughed so hard she had to put down her cup.
Afterward they took their tea into the yard. A bulb Mara had planted in autumn had flowered: a yellow tulip, narrow and slightly bent, with a dark smudge on one petal. Ada crouched to examine the others. Mara fetched the bag of seeds from the mantel, and together they found a place for a short row along the fence. The soil clung to their fingers. Ada made the holes with the handle of the trowel; Mara dropped a seed into each and covered it. When they had finished, Ada pushed the empty packet onto a stick as a marker. The dog, who had accompanied her and spent the visit watching the gate, came over to inspect their work.
Before she left, Ada asked what Mara was reading now. Mara showed her a thick novel she had borrowed from her sister, with a train on the cover and a ribbon marking a place near the beginning. Ada read the first sentence over her shoulder and asked if the journey in it ever actually began.
“Everyone is still packing,” Mara said.
“Good. There’s plenty to go wrong before a person reaches the station.”
Later, after Ada and the dog had gone, Mara washed the cups and carried the novel outside. A neighbor’s cat had claimed the bench, so she brought out a kitchen chair and set it beside the row they had planted. The tulip nodded when she brushed past it. From the open window came the faint smell of the loaf, and beyond the fence someone was beating a rug, each blow followed by a brief pause.
She read until the woman in the novel missed her train. Then Mara went back to the beginning of the chapter to see where she might have left sooner. She found three chances: at the breakfast table, on the stairs, and at the door, where she had stopped to find a glove. Mara was still considering the glove when a breeze turned the page for her. She let it settle, smoothed the paper with her palm, and read on.
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