Tied to the Tracks by Rosina Lippi Page A

and exercise. The perfect shoulders and arms clenching and relaxing in an easy rhythm and then his face coming up, turned toward them. In the distance a train whistle blew, long and plaintive.
     
    Hysterical laughter, Angie told herself firmly, would be a mistake.
     
     
 
Later, John would try to reconstruct for himself how things could go so wrong in the space of a few seconds. A week’s worth of planning, all gone in that single sweep of the oars that had brought him around the bend in the river. His first time on the water since the regrettable incident at Junie Rose’s birthday party. He had been feeling good, and settled, and glad of the morning until he looked up and saw them there: Angie Mangiamele and Caroline Rose standing side by side. It was a sight to put a better man than John Grant off his stroke, but at least the river was running fast. Just as quickly as they had come into view they were gone.
     
    Angie Mangiamele in shorts and a faded, shapeless Nirvana T-shirt that was ten years old at least. He knew this because it had been faded and old when he first saw it, hanging on the bedpost in the tiny bedroom of her apartment near NYU. He still remembered how it smelled.
     
    It had seemed so straightforward, in the last few days of self-imposed house arrest. He had written it out for himself, the things he would say. Just as soon as he fully recovered he would knock on Angie’s office door, and initiate the conversation they obviously had to have. They were both adults, after all, and reasonable people. A few ground rules and they would be able to interact in public without problems.
     
    On another list he made an outline of the things he would tell Caroline, who was the most reasonable and rational of human beings. Just a few facts, put in perspective, and that would be the end of the matter.
     
    Except, of course, he had never imagined that Angie would still own that T-shirt, or what the sight of it might do to him, the memories it could drag up. Such as what Angie smelled like, in the early morning. Angie in the morning. He had not put that on his list, and that, he realized, was a serious flaw in his reasoning.
     
     
 
Rivera had fallen in love with the house on Magnolia Street where the Bragg sisters lived at first drive-by, and was so eager to see the inside of it that she got out of bed without complaint. In Caroline’s car she asked one question after another about the street and the houses on the street, small and neat, a working neighborhood with swing sets in the yards and vegetable gardens. Caroline, animated, answered her questions and volunteered a spontaneous genealogy, naming Miss Zula’s neighbors, many of whom were Bragg cousins. Marilee Bragg, who had come to visit them their first weekend in Ogilvie, waved to them from a front porch littered with toys.
     
    “It’s like Hoboken,” Rivera said. “Angie’s got more than fifty blood relatives on one block.”
     
    “Doesn’t look anything like this,” Angie said.
     
    The man pruning roses in the garden across the street raised a hand and touched his brow in greeting as they got out of the car.
     
    “Wait, let me guess,” Rivera said. “Second cousin three times removed.”
     
    “No, that’s Mr. Jackson. He runs the power plant at the university, but he’s protective of Miss Zula and Miss Maddie. Everyone in the neighborhood is. And there’s Thomasina Chance, do you see there, the woman in the vegetable garden? She owns the restaurant across from campus.” The next few minutes were taken up with a discussion of local restaurants, but Angie didn’t catch much of it; she was too busy sketching a rough map of the neighborhood and writing down names.
     
    The Braggs’ house was set back in a small garden in the full flush of summer, heavy with blossom, alive with bees. There were sunflowers and beans on trellises and young tomato plants tied to stakes with lengths of old nylon stocking. Louie slept in a patch of