Grace, dressed in her tennis gear, met him at the front door. She spoke first. “Hector, Hector, we’ve got a problem.”

“Tell me about it!”

“No, really. It’s Mrs. Bowen … Iris.”

“Yeah, I know. I saw her in the gardens sitting—”

“No, she’s back. She’s in the kitchen now. Her cell phone isn’t working so I told her to use my landline. I’ve just heard her speaking with someone. Someone named Tess. When she hung up she was pacing around the kitchen. I’m afraid whatever this Tess said has upset her.” Grace looked at him with those nut brown eyes and whispered, “I think she’s crying, Hector.”

Grace led him into her office where there was a second door into the kitchen. Iris was on the phone again and they could hear her clearly.

“Hello, honey.”

There was a long pause.

Then they heard a kitchen chair scrape against the floor. “Oh, Rosie … honey … I’m so sorry. I thought your master class was next week. Why didn’t you tell me it was changed? Honey? How awful. I would have come. I wanted to come. Rose…” Several long silences followed, punctuated by Iris’s sighs. “Tell me what happened.”

“She’s speaking with someone named Rosie,” whispered Grace.

Under the circumstances it wasn’t right and Hector knew that, but to relieve his own tension he chuckled, “You’re a supersleuth, Grace.”

She shushed him. “Who is Rosie?”

“Sounds like … her daughter?”

Grace’s face lit up in a brief register of understanding but suffused quickly into a frown. Grace and Hector sat side-by-side, listening and half hearing; they were like an old, childless couple, strangers to the language of parental discourse.

From snippets of conversation over the next ten minutes, they pieced together that Iris hadn’t told her daughter she had come to Boston. And that Rose had some kind of master class that seemingly didn’t go well.

“What’s a master class?” Grace whispered.

“Shh.”

“Doesn’t sound good, though, right?”

Hector remembered how Iris had looked the night before, like she was bathed in a quiet sadness, and now whatever was going on was only adding to it. He stood, peeked in through the crack in the door. Sitting, her hand like a vise gripping her forehead, shielding her eyes, with her elbow on the table as a fulcrum, Iris rocked from side to side. She was explaining in that soft Irish cadence—music to his ears—that she was in Boston on a gardening gig. She’d got hired last-minute on an assignment for a UK newspaper, so she said, and she’d tried to ring yesterday but her cell phone wasn’t connected to a network. “As soon as I realized I rang you from here where I’m staying, but it didn’t connect. Yes. That’s right, honey. That’s why I rang Tess at home.”

“Gardening assignment? Hector…?”

“I know. I’m thinking, Grace.” A musician friend of Hector’s once told him that it’s the silence in between where the real stuff is going on.

“Oh … you opened it?”

There was silence.

Then Iris said, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. Honey?… Don’t cry. Please … Rose? I’m sure it’s nothing. Absolutely. Really, I’ll be fine. I will, I promise. Dr. O’Reilly said I shouldn’t be worried. Honestly. Please don’t worry. Rose?” Pause. Sighs. Iris’s voice dropped lower. “I know. I know it was yesterday. I’ll reschedule as soon as I get home. No. It’s the weekend, I can’t ring now. Okay. Okay. I will. I’ll be home in just a few days. I promise.”

Grace’s mouth dropped open, but she covered the startled sound it made with her hand. She whispered, “Oh dear, this—”

“This is no ordinary conversation between mother and daughter,” Hector said.

“I love you, sweetheart.” Another scrape of the chair sounded against the floor, then a clunk of the phone receiver being replaced. Iris passed by the office on her way upstairs, as if she was trying to be invisible. The sound of her footsteps disappeared and a door closed.

“I should go to her, right?” Grace said.

“And say what? ‘I was being nosy and listened to your conversation’? I don’t think so. No. No, Grace. Here’s what we do. I’ll knock on her door under the pretense of returning the envelope. And see how she is.”

After a few moments Hector went upstairs, but just short of reaching the top step he stopped when he heard weeping. It took him by surprise. It was thoughtless of him, perhaps. He was acting from a cavalier notion that he could rescue Iris. But her crying made it suddenly real. He stood a few moments in the hallway outside her door, the green walls, like a forest, closing in on him. He was lost. Way out of his comfort zone.

He tiptoed on by Iris’s door and went to his own room down the hall. He got a blank piece of staff paper from his sheet music and wrote:

Dear Iris,

He crossed that out and wrote:

Hello Iris,

Crossed that out and wrote:

Dear Mrs. Bowen,

Unsure how to put his feelings into words, he put down the pen. He was a musician, for cripes sake, not a man of letters. Like a tourist in lovelorn territory, he was finding his way alone. He got a fresh piece and started again.

Mrs. Bowen,

Hope you enjoyed the concert last night. Thanks for coming. I was happy to see you there.

Here’s the envelope you dropped in the Mapparium. It fell from your bag. I was just arriving as you were leaving yesterday. I saw it. I saw you.

I hope I’ll see you later …

☺

Hector Sherr

Room 12

P.S. I hope everything’s all right …

He folded the letter around the envelope and held it to his chest. He wanted to kiss it and for a moment he was eleven years old on Valentine’s Day in Woodside Elementary School in California, where he grew up.

Outside Iris’s door Hector stood, listening to the quiet on the other side. He brought his fist to within an inch of the door several times, but in the end lost his courage. Finally, he slid the letter under her door and went downstairs, quickly, blushing like a schoolboy, and flew out onto the street.

Had he been too blunt? P.S. I hope everything’s all right? Would she know they had overheard her? Oh. Now he wished he hadn’t added the P.S. Did he always have to go one step too far?

He crossed the plaza. The splash fountain was turned off but a small crowd sat on the gray lip of the reflecting pool and cooled their feet. Thinking about Iris, about Sparrow in Summer, and listening to the summered voices mixing with the midmorning traffic, he stopped and closed his eyes. There was a kind of odd harmony to it all, rainbow-colored even.

“Mr. Sherr?”

A voice, breathless, was calling from behind him. At first he thought he’d imagined it.

“Mr. Sherr?” He turned. His heart, as if separating from springs, leapt from its held place and zipped toward her. Iris. She was holding his letter.

“Thank you. For your note.”

“Anytime.”

She looked at him with surprise.

“I mean—”

“And for…’ She stopped. Iris smiled weakly and what followed was a long pause when neither of them seemed to know what to do. It was the first time Hector was close to her. Her eyes were very clear, with tiny lines that stretched from the corners to her temples. The crying had only just left them. She had a pale patch of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair had been quickly tied up, but strands fell in twirls about her face and neck and she tried to fix them behind her ears. She was in a white cotton blouse and blue jeans. She was gorgeous, he thought. As he looked down he saw she was barefoot.

She turned to go but he caught her arm and blurted, “Stay. Let’s walk. Get a coffee. See the river.” His hands flung to the sides of his head as he stuttered.

Iris didn’t seem to notice his gawkiness, or if she had, it didn’t matter. She looked down to her feet and Hector put his hand on her back and, to his great surprise, she let herself be guided back to Grace’s. While Iris went in to get shoes, Hector waited outside, not wanting to dilute the spell he felt cast under. When she reappeared she was wearing sandals. Sunglasses nestled on top of her head. They walked north and cut through the Prudential Center Plaza, and continued on a few short blocks. Neither of them spoke. They passed onto Gloucester with its ornate streetlamps and old Victorian brownstones with their ancient lead-glass windows and black window frames. Crossing over Comm Ave., the street widened into two-way traffic and was divided down the middle by a tree-lined pedestrian walk. Iris looked into the shaded tunnel carved by the trees.