Excerpt
The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
1HannahHawthorne LaneHannah Wilson stands in the driveway of 5 Hawthorne Lane looking up at her new house. The drive up to Sterling Valley from New York City hadn’t been a long one, yet Hannah feels like she’s arrived in a distant, faraway land. As she and Mark traveled north, the scenery changed from gray to green, cold concrete giving way to lush foliage. Billboards were soon replaced with canopies formed by mature elm trees, and silvery rivers slicing through shorn stone gorges began to flow alongside the highway. As traffic dwindled to a few slow-moving cars trickling down a sinuous stretch of road, they finally reached the town of Sterling Valley. It looked to Hannah like something out of a fairy tale: quaint little shops— a bakery, a florist, a book store—with glittering display windows and carved wooden signs painted with gold; flower boxes brimming with summer blooms and trailing vines beneath open shutters; old-fashioned streetlamps with their long curved necks and ornate lanterns.
Hannah adjusts the moving box in her arms, shifting its weight to her hip. She’s never lived in a place like this before. It all feels so . . .
big. She knows this doesn’t make sense, that she’s coming from Manhattan—a city brimming with millions of people and soaring skyscrapers—but something about this place, about the expanse of blue sky overhead and the thick woods surrounding the cul-de-sac, gives her the impression that they could go on forever. And then there are the houses. Towering over her, stately and dignified with their neat rows of bricks and their white pillars gleaming bright in the summer sunlight.
She tilts back her head, squinting against the sun, to take in the details of the house in front of her. (
Her house, she reminds herself.) The stiff peaks of its roof, the riotous colors blooming in the garden, the wide porch that stretches across the front of the house like a smile. It seems far too large for only two people. Hannah has never even been inside a house this big, never mind lived in one. She imagines what it will be like living here. She imagines herself and Mark wandering the halls, their footsteps echoing in the cold, empty rooms, and then she imagines filling them. It’s why they chose this house, after all. She can vaguely picture the cribs and baby bottles, the soft blankets and impossibly tiny socks, but it all feels so far away. A daydream only half formed.
The box begins to feel heavy in her arms, and Hannah sets it down at her feet. Mark will want to start trying for a family as soon as they’re settled in the new house, and Hannah is ready. At least she
thinks she’s ready. How is she supposed to be sure? How can anyone ever be sure? It’s times like these that she misses her mother the most. If her mother were still alive, Hannah would have asked her. She doesn’t know what her mother might have said. Hannah was too young when she died for them to have had the kind of relationship where they could talk like friends about adult things, about the things that Hannah would someday have to figure out on her own. But she likes to imagine that her mother would have poured them each a cup of tea and told Hannah that she once felt just like Hannah does now. That no one is ever sure about these things, but Hannah should follow her heart. It’s not exactly the most helpful imaginary advice, but it’s all she has to work with.
Hannah’s phone buzzes in her pocket and she checks the screen. There’s a new post in the Hawthorne Lane community forum. She only just joined on the drive up, and already she’s received a notification. It’s from someone named Georgina Pembrook about a festival being held on Halloween. She gathers from the effusive text that the fall festival must be an important event on Hawthorne Lane. Hannah scrolls past this post to find the one below it. This one was also shared by the same Georgina person.
Please welcome our new neighbors at 5 Hawthorne Lane!
That post was Liked by Libby Corbin, Audrey Warrington, and a gaggle of others whose names she doesn’t recognize but that she imagines she’ll soon come to know as her new neighbors. She can already tell that living here is going to be a change. She’d grown accustomed to being another anonymous face in the ever-changing sea of New York City. But she likes the idea that here, she and Mark can belong to something bigger than themselves.
“I think that’s the last of it,” Mark says as he dusts off his hands, rubbing them on his jeans. He hooks an arm around Hannah’s waist and plants a kiss on the side of her head.
She loves the scent of him, clean and crisp, even in the heavy summer heat. In his arms, she feels at home. For a moment she can see it, snapshots of their future here: children learning to ride their bicycles on the lasso-shaped street, tires crunching over piles of burnt-orange leaves; bare feet running across the Technicolor lawn in the summer, melting Popsicles clutched in tiny palms; shucked-off rain boots scattered haphazardly on the porch. A sense of peace washes over her and she closes her eyes, listens to the chirp of the birds, the buzz of a distant lawn mower, breathes in the loamy scent of the surrounding woods. They’d made the right decision coming here. This is the beginning of their Happily Ever After.
“The honeymoon phase,” Kelly, her coworker at the coffee shop, had called it. “The shine wears off all of ’em sooner or later. You’ll see.” But Hannah doesn’t believe that. It’s true that she and Mark are newlyweds, having been married in a small, private ceremony (much to his mother’s dismay) only six weeks ago, but Hannah knows that what they have is real. The kind of love that’s built to last.
She looks up at him now, her husband. She loves that she gets to call him that. She loves
everything about him. She loves the way his hair sticks up at odd angles on the days that he doesn’t wrangle it with wax, and she loves the dated, wire-rimmed glasses he can’t seem to part with. She loves the grays that have started to pepper his temples and the way his eyes crinkle in the corners when he smiles. Which is often. But most of all, she loves how easy it is to love him. From the moment they met—just over a year ago now—falling for Mark felt like the easiest thing in the world for Hannah to do.
Hannah knows that not everyone understands it. After all, she, at twenty-six, is nearly twelve years younger than Mark, the quiet, thirty-eight-year-old accountant she’d chosen to spend her life with, and she’d often heard his friends back in the city teasing him that she was out of his league. Mark would always laugh, play along with the joke: “I don’t know what she sees in me.” But it hurt Hannah’s heart to hear him speak that way. She knows exactly what she sees in Mark: He’s a good man. It’s as simple as that. The easy, uncomplicated love they share is all she’s ever wanted.
“I’ll take this one too,” Mark says now, lifting the last box from the pavement at Hannah’s feet.
She watches him as he trots up the front steps of their new house, the contents of the box jangling in his arms. The memory almost overcomes her then. In her mind, she sees another house. A dusty porch, a single, empty rocking chair creaking in the wind. But she pushes it back into the dark recesses of her memory before it can break the surface.
They’re going to be so happy here on Hawthorne Lane. No matter what it takes.
