LITMIR.BIZ

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picked a good one. It had been taken at her retirement party, hair done (then and now again, expensively, honey-blond), makeup on, the pacific blue of a beautiful silk jacket bringing out the blue of her eyes.

      In combination, she had to admit she and Phyllis were quite the catch. She’d listed their interests: gardening and travel (Jane’s), along with gourmet cooking and golf (Phyllis’s) and, of course, bridge (both). She’d left off a few hobbies, such as watching trashy daytime television (Phyllis’s) and butting into other people’s lives (now apparently Jane’s).

      There had been, as Phyllis said, plenty of interest. Jane scanned the profiles of Phyllis’s potential dates, who were, as her (and Jane’s) preference requested, all men between the ages of 60 and 75. True to their mutual zip code, the men were professors, consultants, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Most were divorced, a few widowed. Many said they were retired, though others said they were “still working, though it’s not the center of my world,” perhaps unwittingly explaining the reason their earlier marriages had failed.

      Their listed interests were pack-like: current events, sports, hiking, music. So many of them claimed a love of art it seemed that Internet dating should be unnecessary. If what they wrote were true, every gallery and museum in the Boston area would be packed with eligible men 24-7.

      A surprising number had indicated their grown children lived with them. Given the men’s ages, these children were most likely in their thirties. Jane wondered if this was some sort of trend—men who didn’t live with their children when they were young now housing them long past their sell-by dates. Or perhaps these men were living in their children’s homes. Either way, Phyllis had wisely ruled these candidates out.

      Phyllis had been busy indeed. Jane had four coffee dates lined up at forty-five-minute intervals on Monday afternoon at Peet’s Coffee in Harvard Square. There had never really been a question of whether Jane would help Phyllis. Of course she would. The bridge players were her oldest and dearest friends. She would do anything for them. Almost.

      Jane printed the profiles and made notes on them much as she would have annotated a résumé before an interview with a job candidate. If Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple understood the whole of human behavior from observing the citizens of the village of St. Mary Mead, Jane had gained her skills toiling in the bowels of corporate America. Offices were like villages in so many ways, and the art of managing people was, in the end, the art of understanding what motivated them.

      Prepared for the dates, Jane checked out Walden Spring. The photos on its website showed groups of smiling seniors, the very definition of “active adults 55+.” People with white hair but improbably perfect skin swung golf clubs, swam in an indoor pool, laughed over a card game, and tucked into gorgeous plates of food in a dining room that looked like it belonged in an expensive country club. Another page of the website showed the floor plans of the various units. Jane didn’t spend much time on them. There was no real information about the cost, just a discrete request to call or e-mail for more information. But it couldn’t be cheap. Not in that location, and not with all those services.

      Jane glanced at the console phone on her desk, still hooked up the landline. She owed Paul Peavey an answer.

      It had been thirteen months since Jane had “taken the package” (an expression that always made her think of a spy swallowing cyanide) and retired as a senior vice president at one of the mutant children of the company that was known, when she joined it, as Ma Bell. Retirement had come earlier than expected, but she’d heeded the advice of her long-dead great-aunt, who said, “Always take cookies when cookies are passing.” The subsequent rounds of layoffs and the diminishing amounts of the inducements confirmed this bit of wisdom.

      In the months since Jane had retired, she’d cleaned out her closets, the basement, and the attic. She’d organized her photographs chronologically, her spices categorically, and her books alphabetically, by author. She’d traveled to Florence, Siena, and the Amalfi Coast. She’d planted a hosta garden on the shady side of the house, along the path Paul Peavey had trod to her office door that morning.

      She exalted in her new freedoms. She didn’t set her alarm clock. She gave her corporate clothes to charity. In other words, she had done the things she’d dreamed of doing during all those years at work.

      She’d stopped herself when she began sticking acid-free labels on the bottoms of her most precious possessions, explaining what they were; where they had come from; and why Jonathan, her only son and heir, should keep them. Trying to control him even from the grave, he would bitterly complain when the time came. Enough, she told herself. You’re not dead yet. If actuarial tables were any guide, she had twenty more years, a quarter of a lifetime.

      The “favors” she had done for friends and neighbors, the little problems she had solved, had filled in her time. She had received flowers, pies, and breads, and even the occasional bottle of bubbly, but no one had thought to pay her.

      Jane’s retirement was a comfortable one. With stubbornness and luck she’d recovered from the financial disaster that had come decades ago with the end of her marriage. A lot of her wealth was in her house; her neighborhood had gone from solid to insanely expensive in the forty years she’d lived there. At some point, the house might have to go, to get the equity out or because she could no longer handle the stairs. Perhaps a place like Walden Spring loomed in her future. But for now, she was fine.

      Still, there was a precariousness that came, not so much with retirement but with age. After she had dug herself out from the debt her husband’s exit had created, she had always said to herself, If I have to, I can do anything. I can wait on tables. I can work in retail. I can . . . The list was endless. But now that wasn’t so certain. Even if she had the strength and stamina required to do those jobs, would anyone hire her?

      Paul Peavey had offered to pay her a good sum. A very tidy sum. Why wouldn’t she take him up on it?

      Before she left her office, Jane called and left a message on Peavey’s office phone. She would be there Monday at ten. She also called Phyllis.

      “All right. I’ll help you screen your dates.”

      “Of course you will. The first one’s at two o’clock on Monday at Peet’s. Don’t be late.”

      Chapter Two

      Monday, August 6

      At a little before ten on Monday, Jane pulled her sturdy, orange Volvo, known as Old Reliable, into the private road that led to Walden Spring. The complex stood high on a hill surrounded by woods and a golf course. Despite her reflexive dislike for these kinds of faux communities, Jane begrudgingly admitted the setting was attractive. She drove up the winding road and parked in one of the spots marked VISITOR. A wide walk led through a two-story archway in the building that bordered the parking lot. She had no idea what to expect.

      Jane been a bit flummoxed about how to prepare for the meeting. She’d updated her résumé, such as it was, constructing a sanitized version of her “cases” in elevated corporate-speak. The hairdresser switch became “supplier reorganization,” and the peeing five-year-old became a problem of “inappropriate territoriality and boundary violation.”

      It would have helped if she’d known what to do about the “community problems” once she got to Walden Spring. She thought her way through all the vapid morale-building seminars she’d gone through with the phone company. Nothing seemed to apply. She didn’t think she could stage trust falls with a group so prone to osteoporosis.

      Although Peavey had appeared to hire her on the spot, she assumed he had other people he needed to account to—a board of directors or some far-off corporate owners—for the kind of expense she’d proposed, if the job lasted more than even a few days.

      She’d taken care with dressing and grooming, too. Should she treat the meeting like a job interview, her first in more than thirty-five years, or should she try to “blend in” with the community? And, given the range of dress she’d seen worn by her age cohort in the wild, what did “blend in” mean?

      In the end, she’d

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