Vigil Harbor: A Novel

by Julia Glass

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Three Junes comes "an engrossing, richly drawn and exquisitely told story of small-town residents grappling with the difficulties of changing times" (People).

“Full of secrets and surprises...A must-read.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Friends and Strangers

When two unexpected visitors arrive in an insular coastal village, they threaten the equilibrium of a community already confronting climate instability, political violence, and domestic upheavals.

A decade from now, in the historic town of Vigil Harbor, there is a rash of divorces among the yacht-club set, a marine biologist despairs at the state of the world, a spurned wife is bent on revenge, and the renowned architect Austin Kepner pursues a passion for building homes designed to withstand the escalating fury of relentless storms. Austin’s stepson, Brecht, has dropped out of college in New York and returned home after narrowly escaping one of the terrorist acts that, like hurricanes, have become increasingly common.

Then two strangers arrive: a stranded traveler with subversive charms and a widow seeking clues about a past lover with ties to Austin—a woman who may have been more than merely human. These strangers and their hidden motives come together unexpectedly in an incident that endangers lives—including Brecht’s—with dramatic repercussions for the entire town.

Vigil Harbor reveals Julia Glass in all her virtuosity, braiding multiple voices and dazzling strands of plot into a story where mortal longings and fears intersect with immortal mysteries of the deep as well as of the heart.

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Pantheon

Print pages: 417

Sample

Brecht

Like every basic Saturday night, the windows in my room are shaking in their frames. Not an earthquake but my stepfather’s music. He stays up way late and plays it so maxed up, basso profundo, that the walls in the living room vibrate clear to the third floor. It pumps through my veins, frazzles my nerves. He gets a river of random heritage tuneshop flowing along, thumpa thumpa thump, everything from Nina Simone to Code Dread, and whether there are guests or it’s just him and Mom or even just him, he dances. Austin is a dance maniac. He says dance is his number one narcotic. But sometimes he also breaks out that champion leaf he gets from he won’t say where. He promises Mom it’s throwback, the kind they swear won’t pickle your judgment, and it does have a smell more like some weirdass tea, less like skunk. He only smokes if it’s just him or he’s only with Mom, though I don’t think she smokes. Austin would never smoke with clients, and all friends, he claims, plus even strangers you pass on the street, are future if not past or present clients. So the whole basic world is a client.

Sometimes I vext him to turn it down. Maybe he does, by a margin that doesn’t matter.

He’ll yell up the stairs, “Earplugs, dude!” in that diluvian-but-who-cares tone, and I’m like, what if I slept through something asteroidal? Austin says don’t be melodramatic. He says I’m a doomseer, too typical of my generation. He says it lightly, in a faux-jokey voice, but when he doesn’t think I’m in earshot, I’ve heard him refer to Generation F: failure, fuckup, fatalist; take your pick. If you want to get poetic, flotsam. Others call us Generation NL (out loud, nil): No Life, as in having no lives worth living, or maybe as in Get a Life, which it’s true a lot of us cannot seem to do, or not according to some fossil definition of “grown-up.” As in, going out there to Be Something. People who are hard on us like that tell us to look at the kids who came of age in the pandemic years, the ones who survived and even, somehow, figured out how to live lives of their own while ducking in and out of lockdown during the surges.

Austin, who has no kids genetically his own, says our allergy to independence (that’s what he calls it) is the fault of our parents, but collectively, not individually—because he wouldn’t want to get Mom too far down. I was twelve when she married Austin, so there wasn’t much he could do, he says, except root from the sidelines. As if me and Mom are some kind of sporting event.

It’s so obviously not her fault that I boomeranged home, that I’m in this state she sees as deep limbo, but she’s always felt responsible for who I am. I think she can’t help feeling guilty about us losing Dad—which is nuts, but I get it. Maybe it’s also middle age and the whole mortality thing, but she’s in this fragile place right now.

I guess we are doomseers, me and Noam and the rest of us, but why shouldn’t we be? We’re not Timers, we’re not thatstooge. No way would we flee to the deep woods just because we’re afraid the next bomb will flash-fry our own town square, the next virus turn that town square into an emergency graveyard. Nor are we desperate enough to join the Restitution Corps, forget the army! But we see that the bar’s going up on surviving what’s to come, some of which is certain, some not. Like the growing list of Hot Spots on the Global Climate Watch. (Picture a map punctured with cigarette burns.) I heard one of Austin’s clients saying that his son’s college has a major called survival studies.

Me and Noam have a bet going. It’s about the next tsunami, the one that some seismologists are sure will be set off soon, maybe even tomorrow, by a slip in plates that meet somewhere off the coast of Spain. The projections show it pointed in our direction. So we’ve taken positions on exactly what date the big wave will rise, on how much time it will take to cross the ocean, on how long a stretch of coast will take the max hit, on the number of fatalities. We’re allowed to change our minds as we please. It’s a subject we like what-iffing.

We know that unless there’s some futuristic warning system in place, we might not be alive to see who wins. Our town is bull’s-eye center of the wave’s projected path. (Farewell to Cape Cod, or what’s left of it.) Anyone who thinks that our being up on a cliff will protect us, that the wave will just crash politely into the granite ledge and slither back, is totally stooge. The wave will roar up and over Emmons Head, then horizontalize its King Kong fury, probably even smash off parts of the ledge. All the fine old antique houses? Four centuries’ worth of driftwood in a flash. My stepfather’s clients’ brand-new houses? Lethal sheets of fractured steel and glass turned into shrapnel.

The Big T, as we call it, would make Cunégonde, that monster storm from three years back, look like a fairy princess. On Back Harbor, Cunégonde ripped every dock off Harrow Point, blew out nearly all the windows, toppled a dozen power poles, sent three roofs flying out to sea, and buckled two new houses cardboard flat (houses not designed by Austin, he’ll be quick to tell you). On Ruby Rock, the bunkhouses must’ve vaporized; not even the kiddie toilets remained. The summer camp was toast and lost its insurance. They put a for sale sign on the island, but the sign’s now totally covered in guano. Me and Noam took Austin’s tender out there last summer: what a wasteland. I never went to that camp—we moved here when I was too old for stuff like that—but Noam said it was a cool place if you were little and liked running wild: bows and arrows, camping under the stars, bonfires and ghost stories, dissecting dead fish, Huck Finn stuff. Now the island’s been conquered by seals, refugees from the Cape, which lost miles and miles of beach, megatons of sand. Some afternoons, they make such a ruckus, barking, squabbling, yodeling, you hear it from all over town. Some people think they’re a nuisance, other people say they bring us “closer to nature.” But conservation rules give them squatters’ rights.

Where there are seals, you’re always warned, there will be sharks. Big ones. But Noam says where there are seals, there will be selkies. He says if you hide out and watch super close, and if it’s one of the rare days they strip off their silky fur pelts, all you have to do is poach one on the sly and, jackpot!, you’ve got the naked maiden who owns it. She is yours, so long as you keep hold of her skin and take good care of it. She will do your every basic bidding (though not sure I like the medieval sound of that). And just try to picture the two of us sneaking a pair of feral maidens up to my parents’ third floor. We could do it when Austin’s stoned, but no way would Mom fail to notice.

I told Noam that story’s got to be from a children’s book, and he said it is, okay yeah, but the story in the book is based on a million stories from history, nautical facts recorded in ship’s logs. I asked him when did he ever read a ship’s log, and he said he totally did, in fact he read several, back when he had to do a research paper in American history class for Ms. McCarthy. He went to the town archives and dug up this crazy stuff. No way, I said, would Ms. McCarthy ever let a paper be about mermaids. First of all, Noam told me, selkies aren’t mermaids (those are fictional, he says), and second of all, he wrote about ship’s logs from cod-fishing voyages back like four hundred years ago. Those guys were at sea for months on end, I told him: all sailing and no sex, never mind sanity! But okay, I conceded, we’ll call it history. Besides, what harm is there in looking out for naked girls on Ruby Rock? And if we get lucky, we will pounce. I do like Noam’s brand of eccentric.

Noam is a year older than me. We both went to the High, and we lucked out on being young enough that we didn’t have to yo-yo on and off screen through those years, but we didn’t hang out. Maybe we had a math class together; we can’t quite remember. Afternoons, I ran cross-country or track, though I was no star; he played basketball in winter (he was a star), took after-school marine tech in spring. He thought he’d go to a maritime college, maybe get to be a naval mechanic, but he had a GPA blowout. I only found this stuff out much later, when we became friends.

I went to college for almost three semesters, but now I honestly wonder, what’s the logical point of it, really? It was a college with a major price tag, and Austin joked once too often about “potential ROI.” Also? I was in New York and my sophomore year was the year of the Union Square attack. All those innocent people just buying roses and pumpkins and fancy beeswax candles, or playing in the playground with their kids; I heard the explosions from my dorm. When I decided to take a break, go home for a while, Mom didn’t argue. She said I could return to school when I felt ready, but it’s been a year and a half and I’m pretty sure I lost my place.

What throws us together now, me and Noam, is that Noam wound up back at home, too, but his mother had turned his old room into an office. So Mom offered to put him up here. She doesn’t even charge him rent, and it’s not hard to guess why. She doesn’t like my being alone too much. So now I am practically the opposite of alone, because Noam hardly ever leaves the house. He reads a lot, and he says he’s boning up for tests to get him back on track for the maritime college, the Coast Guard, anything that will send him to a job at sea. That’s where he’s happiest, he says—out on the water—which would help explain why he has fantasies of bagging a selkie.

He would drive me crazy, except that I’m out working most days—since no way was Austin going to let me come home without getting a job, so he made sure that happened. I work for this guy who does landscaping and tree work, a lot of it for Austin’s firm. I know my stepfather hopes I’ll go berserk with boredom and decide to finish my degree, maybe somewhere close, maybe just the remote-classroom thing, and while the job can be boring, and it doesn’t offer what Austin calls prospects,there’s a basic sense to it, like even a “goodness.” We plant and transplant things. We keep living things from dying, fight the blight. (To put it biblically, the blights are legion: beetles, moths, fungal shit, bacteria and microscopic worms carried by alien birds blown astray from their migratory groove.) We organize stones into walls—garden walls, property walls, walls to hold back water. (You sleep like a champ after a day of walls, even through Austin’s house-quaking music.) We’re “doing no harm,” you might say. And there is plenty of harm going on out there. Plenty.

Celestino, as bosses go, is pax. I told Noam one time, “That man has the patience of moss.” Noam just about choked on his beer. We were blowing my pay at The Jetty. He asked if maybe I should go back to writing poetry, the way I did at the High, when I had Mrs. Tattersall for creative writing. I said I just might! I still keep my word book, my random thoughts on the nutzoid pretzeling of English. Like take the word match: how can it mean, all at once, a sports competition; a way to start a fire; and the perfect partner or twin, like your soul mate? How can tender—the word for Austin’s little boat—also refer to both softness and money?

But for now I’m an apprentice at something more or less unwordly.

Celestino likes teaching the things he knows to other people, which is not something you can ever assume in a boss. He’s maybe more serious than ideal: doesn’t joke around or even take much time off. He doesn’t seem to put much stock in conversation (no wordplay for him), and it’s got nothing to do with his English, which is practically perfect when you listen past his accent. Not that he says a lot. But if he’s fitzed about something, he lets you know, even calmly. The air is always clear.

He seems like a great dad, too. Once in a while, if we have a loophole in the day, we stop by his house, where Connie, his wife, runs a home school with a bunch of other families. Celestino’s there to sneak a hit of his kid, Raul, who would be in third grade if he went to normal school. The house is pretty small, and even eight or nine kids fill it up fast, like a flock of ducklings. There’s this big glassed-in porch set up like a classroom, with an actual olden-days blackboard, baskets of paper books and wooden puzzles; the museumy smell of chalk! But most of the time, no tronics allowed. Which is either genius or totally not.

Celestino’s wife calls it “going retro.” Mondays and Wednesdays the kids work onscreen, because how else can they grow into this world, into the connectivity? But every other day they put their tronics in an old wine crate beside the front door. They read from those pulp-and-glue books, write and draw on paper. They make music with real instruments, not audioware. They build real things in real space.

While Celestino gets in time with Raul, maybe fills his thermos or consults on married stuff that’s none of our business, Connie will give me and Finn, who does the gruntwork with me, lemonade or cold tea and some kind of treat she’s made for the kids. Even with all that duckling chaos, the house feels like a good house, a happy house. I get a little jealous, but it’s just my imagining what it would be like to live with parents who don’t wonder why I have no ambition. Never mind parents who are both your original parents. What is your signature passion? was a question on a sheet handed out by my freshman writing professor at college. I wanted to write, I haven’t met her yet, but instead I wrote, Making things that don’t fall apart. It just came to me then and there, like horseshit that’s accidental wisdom. Or maybe I poached it, unconsciously, from Austin. But it felt pretty true.

Here is another thing about Celestino, though nobody would ever say it out loud, or not anymore, not since the visa raids: he’s one of the very few not-white people who actually live and work in Vigil Harbor. Which would have to make anyone self-conscious, especially if you saw that fascist shit unfold around you. I’m guessing he was sponsored, like Samson and Ayeh, the couple who run the bowling alley—but even they don’t live here. They take a bus from somewhere near Boston: let’s be honest, somewhere a whole lot more real than this town.

It’s none of my business, but when I see how much he sticks out, I hope he’s secure. This town, where you will meet any number of people who claim to be thirteenth generation—as if it’s a brag to have loitered forever in the place where your diluvian max-greats settled out of total desperation—has an isolated feel, or more like protective halo, even though we’re only thirty miles from the city. People who live here tend to never really leave—or they come back, even when they swore they never would. (Connie is one of those people.) My parents are unusual: neither one grew up here. So it’s a bit like a Mobius strip, this town.

When you’re somewhere out of state and people ask where you’re from (like when I was in New York) and you say Vigil Harbor, either it means zero to them or they kind of light up, as if you’ve said you’re from Camelot or Palm Springs or Blue Hill: somewhere once-upon-a-timey, somewhere tricky or impossible to find. Or gone. “We live in Brigadoom,” says Mom, whatever that means. Me and Noam joke that, come the tsunami, we just might be the next Atlantis. Vigil Harbor is like a place that’s obsolete but nobody knows it yet. I’m fine with obsolete. Not dead, of course, but outmoded. I’ve never cared about mode. Mode puts you in the crosshairs.

Maybe Noam moving in with us was a bad idea in unexpected ways. Because we have each other, we become stasis. We are a physics problem from Mr. Clevenson’s class: Brecht + Noam x(same politics + shared bathroom) = Inertia. We colonize the third floor of this house, like those seals on Ruby Rock, and even if we dent our heads on the low ceilings and the idiot rafters, we have the best views of the harbor. We even get an eyeful of the VHYC on the opposite shore, its fat-cat porches, its foofy kite-tails of dainty little banners that represent a coded wink-wink system of who’s welcome there from other yacht clubs of the world. (Burgee: there’s a word for you, one meaning only, though not to be confused with bungee.) And all summer, on party nights, I get an earful of the worst wedding bands on the planet. (Austin: “And you complain about my music?”)

We also have a pact, me and Noam: no more gaming. Read, listen to music, debate life, maybe check the news just enough not to be stooge out of touch. I was done with games after that therapist my mother made me see last year prescribed this VR situational thing called Moodroom. I’d stand in the middle of his office and enter this mansion of emotions, one per room, and tell him what images popped into my head as I roamed through the feelings. Horseshit. It reminded me, in fact, of how I feel when Austin’s music is turned up too loud.

Noam’s company is therapy enough.

All basic things considered, why would I go anywhere else? And did I say that my mother is a very fine cook?

I did say that she’s fragile, though, and this is something I can only sense. Fragile as in lonely, even when she’s at a party. (I know how to read Mom’s eyes, expressions, ways with her hands.) Which stands to reason, a little anyway, with how hard Austin’s working these days, meaning Celestino works hard, meaning I work hard, meaning Mom’s on her own a lot, since she mostly works from home. Sometimes she leaves meals out for the rest of us before she goes to bed.

I know her better than most people know their moms because we lived together, just the two of us for four years, in a shoebox apartment in the city, before she married Austin and we moved out. For all my complaints about him, she made a good choice. She’s smart; she just hasn’t always been lucky. My actual dad, who I remember but not well, died in the original corona surge. He was young, but he had asthma. (Mom claims the chaos of the hospital is what killed him. She couldn’t get his body back for months.) In photos where he’s holding me on his shoulders or pushing my swing at the playground, he’s almost scarecrow thin, body like a spear, smile so big and bright in his tall skinny face that his head looks like a lantern. I have his bushy black hair, also his long nose and hands, not so much his height. There I’m pretty average.

Austin’s work bonanza happened like this. Last year, suddenly, like so suddenly you could feel the air crackle with it, couples around town fell apart, splitting like trees struck by lightning. Some kind of rise or fall in the atmospheric love pressure, a virus of radical discontent. (You can have an emotional epidemic, I’ve heard. Or maybe it was dormant stress from home repairs after Cunégonde. Mortality panic syndrome: if the jig’s up soon, I am partying NOW.) It started with the Tyrones, who, to spite each other you can be sure, both hired Austin to blueprint their do-over lives or, to be more exact, the places they’d live in to do it all over.

Thaddie Tyrone is easily the richest man in town. He has a papal bank account, so his do-over was your dream house on slam, perched cliffside (prime view of the ocean from which that tsunami will rise!), the kind of work any architect lives for. At the same time, Ex–Mrs. Tyrone (Lucia? Felicia?) asked Austin to perform a luxe gut job on the Federal mansion she held on to in the squalling. A deal with the devil, he admits. He does not like obliterating that kind of history. But some checks, Austin says, you’re stupid not to cash. They’re more than money. And I think he’s salvaging all the details: paneling, floorboards, mantels. He rents an old sail loft by the town landing, just for stockpiling things like that. The woman from the history museum who gives the walking tours claims it’s the loft where the rebels were meeting on the day Sam Thesper saved their lives—and lost his—by distracting the British ship sent to root out the treason. Austin says that’s apocryphal BS, since he’s sure the original part of the building was built after 1800. No harm in coloring a little out of the lines, I told him. Don’t be so sure, said Austin. Of course, to an architect, coloring outside the lines is dangerous. The draftsman’s lines are what keep the buildings from falling down.

All around, though, principles are shakier these days.

High-profile stuff, those two projects, the stuff of both gossip and news, after which word goes out that Austin Kepner is the architect to hire if suddenly you are facing the domestically uprooting shock, whether rude or welcome, of postmarital solitude, and if your attorneys, accountants, therapists, and mediators leave you with a nickel to your name.

So he’s been taking on clients left and right, like the female castoffs of the Vanderhoff-Cho, Rosenberg, and Tattersall splits, also Stanley Guardini (ditched by his younger husband; you could see that one coming) and the poor, totally humiliated good guy Mike Iliescu, whose wife, it turns out, was boffing Mr. Tattersall—yeah, my English teacher’s husband—and is supposedly running off with him to one of those psycho wilderness camps. The Tattersalls and the Iliescus are members of the yacht club, so the whole thing was max tectonic, socially speaking. The kind of thing where you couldn’t not take sides. Or so says Mom. And she is the fairest of the fair.

Right after Tyrone showed Austin the site for his new bachelor château, Celestino took me and Finn up there to see the literal lay of the land. “Up there” is right. It’s out near Harrow Point on a spot where a much older house burned down decades ago. The heirs hung on to the land until someone—that would be Tyrone—offered them the right price. So Austin’s building him this total testosterone palace. It’ll look like a massive ship with its prow aimed straight toward the incoming nor’easters. Austin says he’s designed it to cleave a storm like a sailboat’s bow divides a wave when you take it straight on. The wind’s gotta be champion fierce up there, and right now there’s nothing growing but one big-ass oak that Celestino says isn’t long for this world. So plantings will be tricky.

Trees, of course, were one of the “sentinel alarms” Senator Kittredge listed in that stooge convention speech. Like what people who are old enough to vote haven’t seen the years and years of death-watch headlines eulogizing coral reefs, honeybees, songbirds, frogs, bats, and just about all tropical fruits? “Play Noah’s story backward,” he said, “and that is where we are, folks. We are unbuilding the ark!” Clever. Talk Bible and you play to both sides of the room. But listen, rich old boy who gets to geyser on about your platinum ideals, talk about doomseers! After hearing your max-dire prophecies, who wouldn’t rather live in what you call “end-stage denial”? Because what are you supposed to do, adopt a bat? Not like I didn’t vote for the guy myself—I still have that purge or perish biodegradable badge I got at the rally—and not like I didn’t zone on the delusion of him as president, but when you think about it, who sanely thinks some old-money beekeeper-poet, from a part of Maine that’s practically Canada, could begin to run a country as deranged and post-traumatic as this one? So I’m over it. I’m here in Brigadoom. As for Kittredge, he’s back in Maine, CEO of a geothermal energy conglomerate. So much for Cooperate Over Corporate.

The frame on Tyrone’s boff palace started going up last week. So I got the idea I could camp out there some nights and who would know? If Mom and Austin go to bed on the early side, I grab my sleep roll, a couple of beers, and hike on up. I go home at sunrise, and if I run into Austin, who’s always up way before Mom, he’s not going to ask where I’ve been. Not like I have a curfew. We do the hey dude wave and I head straight upstairs.

Clear nights up there, the stars are killer, and even if it’s raining, I’m dry. The surprise is that I’ve got a crow’s nest vantage on the night trawlers, or that’s what I figure they are. You can’t exactly see them—even if you have snipersight, they’re just these voids of space—but I have amazing ears, and the first night I was up there, the surf was satin calm and I became aware of a mechanical hum, way out past Ruby Rock. Next time, I borrowed Austin’s fancy binoculars, and sure enough, I could make out these ghost-boat shapes up top near the horizon, like paper cutouts on the moon-striped water.

Word is that the Coast Guard’s totally overstressed on storm damage and drug traffic, that they’ve given up on policing black-market seafood; as crimes go, it’s trivial. Or they’re looking the other way. Austin says palms are being greased. It’s not like the fish, or the ones everybody wants to eat, are ever coming back south. The notion of quotas is quaint. You hear about these old-world dories they use, heading out in buddy-system pairs, one the operator, one the decoy to fool the enforcers—if they show up. But if the boats are old-school, the diving gear and track-nets are hypermodern. They’re equipped with life-seeking gizmos but undetectable, using some kind of military ghosting technology. Hackers of the sea. So if it’s out there, they will catch it. And of course there’s shark. They’re off-limits, too, even if, thanks to the seals, they’re not so scarce.

First night in my lookout, I stayed up way late just watching the dories slip to and fro, beads on a wire. They run parallel to the coast, sliding way up north for days, or that’s the rumor, to the underwater banks off Labrador where the last fish hang out. Fun to picture the crews on those boats like old-timey pirates in a picture book I had as a kid: rings in their ears, patches on their eyes, pegs for legs, colorful parrots draped on their shoulders. Argh, matey!

The second night, Noam caught me sneaking out. I told him I was meeting a girl, and when I consider that lie, it’s not a bad idea: I could hook a girl—my own secret fishing expedition—and take her to that place and she’d be totally, if she was worth it, awed and thankful. When the second level’s framed out, I could bring her to the same spot where Tycoon Tyrone plans to plant his king-size bed. My wingmen? The stars above. (Nobody’s figured out how to endanger the stars.)

But some things are better off not shared.

So last night I was up there, eyes on the horizon, eating Mom’s cheesy turnip pudding (the dill from her garden makes it), sipping an ale from Austin’s bougie Bev-rij, and I notice something new. A boat with a light—faint but sure, a tiny beam like a golden pencil. It’s headed my way, in toward shore. Its passage is marked by a seam in the sky that means a naked mast: a sailboat under motor. It’s dark-hulled, not white, so it’s murky. No one on deck that I can see. Then it veers close around the end of the point, out of sight.

Weird. But weird things are the norm. Weird weather, weird politics, weird relationships. Another reason I like my routine, my own not-weird norm, however dull it seems to others. I show gratitude for it when I can. I do stuff I never used to do, voluntarily, like weed Mom’s garden or do my own laundry. I heard Mom telling Austin I’m taking steps toward getting back in the world. But, Mom, I wanted to yell downstairs, I am in the world! This is my world, not some fantasy she might have of my living a “life of the mind” in New York or wherever. I am making this world mine, and I like it. I like it fine. If I were a bird, I’d be lining it with dead leaves and dryer lint and random cozy shit. It’s a version of safe. Wave or no wave, that’s all I basically want, though hell if I’d admit it to anyone. Safe.

I’m hoping work on the palazzo goes slowly. The nights are getting warmer, and maybe I’ll loosen up and invite Noam. I can’t tell if he resents that I’ve been keeping it to myself, claimed it like an alpha dog keeps that bone between his paws.

And then there’s this: Austin’s been a little sidelined by a journalist from some architecture institute who’s following him around to write a profile or tribute. She’s from Texas, says Austin, and though at first he was skeptical, he doesn’t mind her company, and she doesn’t get in his way. She sees him as an overlooked genius, which even though I’m not exactly qualified to judge, I basically doubt. That’s the way she was talking when I met her in the office yesterday morning.

I was picking up my lunch. Mom does that sometimes, packs me lunch and drops it off at the firm or sends it in with Austin, since Celestino usually picks me up way early. He says early hours are the most productive (and, as summer looms, definitely cooler). He’s right, since roads are empty and there’s nobody holding you back with random chitchat, but I think it’s mainly because he likes getting home early, back to Connie and Raul.

So Mom packs healthy food in these little steel containers she got at some Euro kitchen boutique when we still lived in New York. She’s making sure I eat things like seaweed salad and apples and her excellent meatless meatballs, but she puts in cookies or cake, too. Her cardamom blondies if I’m lucky. Last year she bought up all these spices and froze them, right before the new tariffs happened.

So Austin was at the big table in the open area the offices share. He’s not the kind of honcho who takes clients to an inner sanctum for private meetings—even though his office is the best one, giant windows from which you could dive directly into the harbor. But he goes in there pretty much only when he wants to do something solo, regeneration and creativity shit. He likes it when everybody at the firm works together in a “flow.” He’s got this fake-rustic wooden sign by the water machine that says open doors, open minds. So Filene and Troy, the baby architects, leave their doors open, though I notice that Hap, the guy who does all the digital scutwork, tends to close his. (His work, to me, is the definition of dull. And he’s ten years older than me. There is somebody with no life.)

Austin was at the table with this woman, and they looked up when I came in. Austin’s giant laptop was open, on its screen the plans for the new façade to Ex–Madame Tyrone’s Federal mansion. I wondered if he’d take the reporter into the Vroom, this windowless closet-nook with a soft chair where you can put on a headset and tour the house you dream of that hasn’t even been built. Fictional furniture and curtains. Sometimes Austin throws in a virtual pet. It’s Moodroom minus the cheap psychology.

“My stepson, Brecht,” Austin said to the woman when I walked in. “He’s on our landscape team. Out in the field today, ...