The thickest branch of Nana Jean’s copper beech tree was a perfect place to watch the neighborhood. From the ground, you could catch a glimpse here and there: The postman brought the mail. Mr. Moniker took out his garbage, bent forward to arrange the cans, and then hiked up his pants before shuffling back into his house.

From the tree, I saw the fullness of Trowbridge Road — all the normal things that take place without anyone noticing how beautiful they are. I could see the old hollow behind Nana Jean’s house that used to be a farm a hundred years ago when Newton Highlands still had dairy cows. I could see Lucy and Heather Anne Delmato sun-tanning on their porch roof in matching hot-pink Day-Glo string bikinis, Lucy’s boom box blasting that summer’s top hits on the radio — Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, people I always thought looked plastic on TV. I could see the Crowley boys at their house, riding their Huffy bikes over dirt piles, popping wheelies, and jeering at each other. I watched people pulling in and out of their driveways. Mrs. Koning, back from the supermarket with a paper bag filled with groceries. Mrs. Wright off to Crystal Lake for a swim. Mr. Lewis, back from the corner store with a sports magazine and a six-pack of Budweiser beer.

All the comings and goings of life.

Sometimes I imagined that my spying was the magic that tied Trowbridge Road to the world. I imagined that if I stopped watching for some reason, if I stopped noticing all the cars and all the grocery bags, and all the people opening and closing their car doors, everything in the world would come completely unhinged and swirl into a vacuum like Dorothy Gale’s farm in the twister: the tractor, the cow, the shed, Uncle Henry and Auntie Em and the wicked old Miss Gulch on her bicycle, and everything.

After lunch, Nana Jean and Ziggy came back out to the porch and sat quietly, the old woman in the wicker chair, the boy on the concrete step, the ferret bouncing between them like a feather duster. Sometimes she pulled him close, and he sat there, stiff and unmoving, which made me so sad, I almost couldn’t bear it. If Nana Jean belonged to me, she would pet my hair and I would pretend to fall asleep. I would breathe deep, smelling her homey smell, the scent of starched dresses and rising bread.

She filled his afternoon with chitchat about the weather, the meal she would make for their dinner, easy topics that poufed around them like pillows, making a warm hum that I loved so much to hear, I wished I could spy on them forever. It was clear that the one thing in this world Nana Jean most wanted to give Ziggy was the gift of everydayness. If the boy wanted to be stiff, he could be stiff. If he wanted to stay silent, he could stay silent.

“He’s been through a lot lately,” Nana Jean said to Lucy and Heather Anne when they came down the road with a plate of their mother’s homemade Toll House cookies. Lucy held out the plate and smiled, but Ziggy’s idea of a thank-you was to raise both shoulders up to his ears and growl menacingly at her, wiggling his fingers like he was casting an evil spell, and then turn away so all they could see was the back of his scruffy head and the triangular white face of the ferret peeking out from behind the mane of red hair, blinking at them in the sunlight.

Lucy stopped smiling. She made one huge sniff through her nose, smelled the ferret, and made a stink face, handing the plate to Nana Jean in a huff. She grabbed the smaller hand of Heather Anne, who stood blinking beside her, and stormed off the porch, dragging her sister behind her, to stomp back down Trowbridge Road to the Delmato house, her feathered hair so stiff with hair spray, it barely moved at all, despite all that stomping.

In the summer, six o’clock was dinnertime on Trowbridge Road. That’s when the fathers started coming home from work, pulling their brown station wagons into their driveways, walking up their back steps with tired brown shoes to kiss their wives and close their doors behind them.

Six o’clock was also when mothers started calling their kids in for supper, when everyone left whatever they were doing to slump back indoors to wash their hands and faces and sit at the table when all they really wanted was to go back outside to the nicest time of any summer day, the last few hours of sunlight before bed.

At six o’clock, Nana Jean put her arm around Ziggy Karlo’s skinny shoulders and walked him back inside the house with slow, easy steps. Just before he went in, Ziggy turned back around and squinted up into the copper beech tree at me. I stayed perfectly still and hid behind the curtain of leaves.

Ziggy shook his head like he was cleaning cobwebs out of his eyes and followed Nana Jean into the house. Then the screen door slammed, and I was left alone in the copper beech tree looking out on an empty neighborhood filled with closed doors and families inside their houses together, eating on plates with knives and forks and glasses clinking.

At six thirty, when everyone had already been sitting at their dinner table for half an hour, I climbed down the trunk of the copper beech tree, quiet and slow as a sloth so nobody would notice a difference when I walked the one, two, three houses down and across the street to my own sighing house with the gray shutters. The lawn needed mowing. Crabgrass reached its knotty fingers up to my kneecaps, and raspberries grew wild all along the edge.

The kids in the neighborhood thought my house was haunted. It was something about the ivy twirling up to the windows. It didn’t help that most of the time, the curtains were drawn, and no one appeared to come or go from its large locked doors, not even me, June Bug Jordan, quiet as a shadow, slipping off her sandals on the sighing porch, letting herself in at six thirty-two on the dot, and then closing the door very gently behind her.