From across the road Martha Earnshaw watched the moving-van men. The fog was a blending machine turning the edges of the truck into an amorphous mist and entwining the dogwoods and locusts so that they melted into one another in marbleized swirls. Enmeshed in forsythia bushes, late-blooming phlox and black-eyed Susans turned the garden into a web. One victim had fallen. Dragged from the edge of the road by the men’s boots, a stalk of goldenrod lay crushed and bleeding yellow.
Martha could only see quick slides of the objects being carried into the cottage. Most of them were shrouded with tarpaulin. A wide bed was the symbol, to her, of a married couple. A single chest of drawers meant, perhaps, that the new neighbors were poor. Unless, of course, they were a wealthy couple who were taking
