Free Secret Language by Monica Wood

dinners at Faith’s. For having this house to come to, Connie is grateful, but there are conditions: it is a place to come to only if you call first; it fills a need only if you don’t need much.
    Before going in, she stands for a moment in Faith’s yard, looking at the house, its neat shutters, its tidy front porch. Bird feeders hang like ornaments among the trees. In the air, warm for April, Connie catches winter’s final waning. Faith’s preparations for spring are everywhere: flower boxes filled with soil; a rose trestle, newly painted, snugged against the end of the house; bits of string and yarn set out for the birds. Connie takes it all in with a sense of wonder; this annual act of hope is one of Faith’s many mysteries.
    Connie had moved back to Portland, into a one-bedroom condominium ringed by rhododendrons and unnaturally green grass, with a notion of setting down roots, and the proximity of Faith fed this notion.
I live a few blocks from my sister
, she pictured herself saying.
Oh yes, we see each other every day
. But it had not turned out this way. For one thing, Connie was never home. For another, their years apart had not made them any better suited to other people’s rituals, and she discovered how inept they were at spontaneous visits. They were no more separate than they had ever been, and no closer, so they stumbled into a ritual that did suit them, another of their silent pacts: Connie began coming here two Saturdays a month, at exactly five o’clock.
    She rings the bell. Joe and Chris appear at the door, on their wayout, Ben and the dog behind them. Tucked under Joe’s arm is a ruffled catalog of auto parts.
    “Hey, Connie,” he says, and kisses her cheek. The boys give her a brief hug, then the three of them seem to wait for her to say something. She looks from one to the other, vaguely uncomfortable.
    “So, what do you think?” Chris says, finally.
    “About what?” Connie looks him over, for a new haircut, the start of a beard, a tattoo.
    “My
car
.” He points to the driveway, to a blue car parked right in front of hers. The car is exceptionally ugly, yet somehow she’d missed it.
    “Well,” she says. “It’s really something.”
    “Careful of your blood pressure, Connie,” Joe says.
    “No, really, it’s nice.” She frowns. “Isn’t it something like that car you used to have, Joe?”
    Chris places his hand on his father’s shoulder, standing up straight. He’s almost as tall as Joe, with Joe’s big build, but he has Faith’s fair hair—Connie’s too, she likes to think—and the Spaulding green eyes. “Very good, Aunt Connie,” he says. “What you see before you is a 1966 Corvair. A classic.”
    “Four on the floor,” Ben says. “We’re putting her back on the road.”
    “
I’m
putting her back on the road,” Chris says. “You’re not even old enough to get a license.”
    “So?” Ben says. He is short and stringy, with his father’s black hair and deep blue eyes. “I didn’t say it was my car.”
    Joe thumps cheerfully on the catalog. “It’s nobody’s car till we get it running.”
    To Connie, the Corvair looks hopeless. “Well,” she says. “Congratulations.”
    Chris and Joe start down the steps, but Ben lingers, waiting while she pets the dog, a sweet-tempered shepherd-retriever mutt.
    “What’s new?” she asks Ben, running her hands over the dog’s golden pelt. She doesn’t want to go inside.
    “I’m playing shortstop.” He always offers her something. Chris is harder to talk to, his mind always somewhere else, his body in perpetual motion. Ben looks right into a person’s eyes, focused, purposeful.To Connie it seems he has made a virtue of the pensiveness he inherited from his mother.
    “Shortstop,” she says. “Baseball, right?”
    He laughs. He thinks she’s kidding.
    “How’s school? Almost out, huh?” She has always felt a little foolish talking to children.
    He smiles politely. “Yup.”
    “What grade will you be