Chapter 1.
Libby still hadn't grown used to the silence next door.
Three weeks had passed since Mavis's buggy had disappeared down the lane with her new husband at the reins and her houseplants wrapped in cloth in the back.
Three weeks since the neighboring house had gone dark and the shared driveway had ceased to be the place where Libby stood in the cold, calling across to ask whether Mavis needed anything from town.
For six years, her best friend Mavis had lived next door. It had been the best kind of arrangement. The trouble was, Libby had taken it for granted, which she realized now had been a mistake.
Rumble, Libby’s large gray cat, was on the windowsill, watching her. He had a permanent expression of disapproval.
Bumble, the younger and more enthusiastic of the two cats, was sitting in the middle of the floor looking up at her.
“It won't be as bad as all that.” She set the kettle to heat and began measuring out oats. “He works at his father's shop. He'll be away during the day. We’ll share a driveway, that's all. People share driveways all the time and it doesn't bother them.”
Bumble blinked.
“I know he's a Kauffman.” She found the jar of dried apple she'd put up in autumn and shook some into the pot. Outside, the cold pressed against the glass. The fields past the fence had gone the color of straw, and the sky above them was the flat gray of winter. “It’s unfortunate, but we can’t control everything in life. We will be civil and keep to ourselves.”
Rumble turned his head toward the window.
“It will be perfectly fine,” Libby told her cats.
With Mavis still away visiting relatives after her wedding, Libby had learned from someone else in the community that Josh Kauffman had bought the house.
Of all the people in all the district who might have bought Mavis's house, it had to be Josh Kauffman. His father's buggy shop had been a splinter in her father's thumb for thirty years.
She had known Josh since they were children; the way you knew everyone when you had grown up in the same close-knit community.
Libby had no grievance with him personally. It was the principle of the thing.
Her family and the Kauffman family had always kept their distance. That's what happened when two families owned two competing buggy making businesses.
Later that morning, she was still at the counter, working through some accounts for her family's business, when the wagon came up the road.
Two horses. A loaded bed, and furniture poking out from under the canvas, and crates stacked at the back.
The canvas at the side of the wagon shifted. What came out first was not a person but a dog: a large, pale, deeply enthusiastic dog who hit the ground at a run and covered the distance to the fence in approximately two seconds, where it planted both front paws on the top rail and announced its arrival with considerable volume.
Surely that wasn't his dog. Surely nobody had bought the house next door and brought a dog without anyone thinking to mention it.
Rumble left the windowsill.
A second dog followed the first out of the wagon. This one was broader and moved slowly.
It moved to the fence, sat down beside the first dog, and also barked. There were two of them.
Bumble, who had no sense whatsoever, walked toward the window for a better look.
“Don't you dare.” Libby crossed the kitchen in four steps and scooped him up before he could reach the sill. He made a sound of protest.
She held him against her chest and looked out over his head at the fence, where the two dogs were still going, the pale one now running a short, agitated loop before returning to bark some more.
Josh Kauffman climbed down from the wagon. He said something to the dogs.
They ignored him.
He said it again, louder.
The pale one briefly stopped, looked at him for a moment, and then resumed.
The broader one sat down, which was perhaps the closest it intended to come to obedience.
He caught the pale one by the collar and steered it back toward the house. As he did so, he glanced across the driveway toward her kitchen window. Libby stepped back into the shadow of the room, where she stood holding Bumble and saying nothing at all.
The dogs barked at intervals. Each time, Josh said something firm, and each time the barking eventually stopped, and then after a period of quiet that never lasted long enough, one or both of them found a new reason to start again.
Sometime later, when the barking next door had gone quiet and the men helping Josh had gone inside the house, she sat back down with the account books.
Bumble had returned to the middle of the floor and was sitting like he knew something had changed. Rumble had not come back from wherever he'd gone.
“It's going to be fine. The fence is solid. We'll make sure the latch is good, and they'll stay on their side and the barking will settle down once they're used to the property,” Libby assured Bumble.
From outside, one of the dogs barked again.
Libby looked at Bumble. “I need you both to stay inside for the foreseeable future. I know it's an inconvenience. I know you like the yard. But this is a temporary situation and the best thing we can do is be sensible about it.”
Bumble blinked and walked toward the window.
“That is not what I meant. If the dogs see you, they might bark again.” She picked him up, tucked him under her arm, and carried him to the other side of the kitchen. It was just a neighbor. The district was full of neighbors. Some of those neighbors had dogs.
None of them, until now, had been on the shared driveway.
If he'd been anyone else, she might have baked a cake and taken it over to be neighborly. But he was a Kauffman, and the best thing she could do was stay on her side of the fence.
As long as he and his dogs stayed on his side, there would be no problem.
She found her place in the column, picked up her pencil, and got back to work.
