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One
Eloise’s new neighbor was probably going to be the death of her. Admittedly, having a confrontation, even an unpleasant one, wasn’t typically a death sentence but in less than twenty-four hours, he had already disrupted the carefully cultivated order and tranquility of her life. Even worse, he was rude, insulting, and showed no signs of remorse.
They had made a scene.
In front of the whole neighborhood.
While she was wearing her pajamas.
The indecency of such a confrontation might have been embarrassing if she hadn’t been so livid about the fact that it was entirely his fault. The whole thing could have been avoided if he showed even the slightest sign of maturity or responsibility. This would never have happened with any of her other neighbors.
They knew how to behave. They had manners. She had chosen her house—a fully restored, one hundred-year-old Craftsman not far from the French Quarter in New Orleans—because it was in a quiet, well-tended neighborhood. Eloise knew she was careful, studious, and unflinchingly dependable and she expected her environment to reflect those things as well. It soothed her, made her feel like her life was finally her own to control.
She liked the older, well-kept homes and the wide sidewalks that were always swept. Like all her other neighbors, Eloise worked hard to make her home look nice. She kept the lawn neatly cut and the hedges trimmed. Her front yard beds had been professionally designed and all her flowers were fertilized at precise intervals to give her the biggest and brightest blooms on the block.
She did her part to adhere to the unspoken rules of neighborly behavior and, until this man had showed up, so had everyone else on her block. There had never been problems with anyone else before he moved in.
In fact, she had gotten along fabulously well with the neighbor who had previously lived in that particular house. Mr. Callaghan had been a lonely old man without family, and he’d appreciated her flowers, her baked goods, and her frequent visits. It had been an odd friendship. It wasn’t often that a lonely old widower and his young, career driven neighbor found much to talk about, but it had worked very well for them. She’d been genuinely upset to learn about his death—once a week visits for a chat and cookies were more than she’d ever managed to pull from her own father, after all—but it had never occurred to her to be nervous about the new occupants.
It hadn’t taken long at all for the house to lose its comfortable, lived-in appearance, whoever was handling his estate apparently coming in during the day while she was at work to deal with his belongings. She’d waited for the ‘For Sale’ sign to appear in the yard, but it never came, and the vacant windows looked out over the growing lawn for only a few short weeks before she’d seen the moving truck out front.
There had been no sign of whoever was moving in and a quick glance at the inside of the truck hadn’t shown her anything of interest, most of what remained were sealed cardboard boxes of various sizes and shapes. The organized nature of the move had seemed like a good sign, an indication her new neighbors would be tolerable, if perhaps less charming than Mr. Callaghan. In her limited experience, delinquents didn’t usually hire professional movers.
She’d smoothed the wrinkles out of her black pencil skirt, checked that none of the golden blonde hair she’d pulled up into a loose up-do had slipped free of its pins, and looked in her mirrors twice before backing out of the driveway and onto the street.
When she’d arrived home and found the moving truck gone, she’d been unpleasantly surprised to see a black motorcycle and a cherry red sports car in its place. The glaringly disruptive color of the car, and what she assumed would be an equally obnoxious amount of disruptive noise from the motorcycle, would have been bad enough, but the owner of the two vehicles had decided to park the bike in the driveway and the car on the front lawn.
More precisely, it was on the grass of the shared front lawn between her driveway on the left and his driveway on the right. His front tires were clearly on her side. It would leave ruts in the soil, flatten the grass, leave a large and unsightly dead spot in the center of her lawn if he did it with any regularity. Surely, he could not imagine that it would be acceptable to ruin the curb appeal of her home by parking that monstrosity of a vehicle on the lawn.
She would have to say something about it when she saw him, she’d decided, glaring at the car as she unlocked her front door. Her keys clattered as she dropped them with uncharacteristic force into the bowl by the door before kicking her shoes off and hitting the button on the remote that filled the downstairs with the soft sound of classical music. With any luck, it would help soothe her frazzled nerves.
It was easy to put the neighbor and his car aside, to settle into her usual routine of heating up a cup of fragrant tea while she prepared the vegetables for dinner on the cutting board that protected her pristine kitchen counter. She fell into the familiar routine of cooking as she sliced zucchini, artichoke hearts, and small heirloom tomatoes that she’d grown herself in the small garden in the backyard, layered it in the casserole dish over chicken breast, added the seasonings and the cheese, the crumbled bacon that was left over from breakfast, and slid it into the oven. There would be enough there for dinner and for leftovers. It wasn’t easy to cook for one, even with her love for all things culinary, but she managed.
Cooking was a comfort to her, a leftover warmth from her time in college when her part time restaurant job had been all that kept her spirits up as she worked toward a degree in a field she was mostly indifferent about. She’d mentioned the idea of culinary school to her parents once and the meltdown that had followed had been enough to make sure she kept her passions to her own kitchen. Still, it was nice to see what she could do for herself, even if no one else ever tasted it.
Dinner would take a while to bake, and, in the meantime, she could ignore the series of texts she’d received from her mother—yes, she did know how long it had been since her last promotion, thank you very much—and instead settle down in her favorite chair and read the last few chapters of her most recent book.
She hadn’t made it through the first page when the noise started.
It began with the rumble of motorcycle engines, the slamming of car doors, men shouting and laughing at decibels that seemed likely to rattle the windows. She resisted the urge to get up, to peek through the curtains like a stereotypically nosy neighbor. She already knew who was responsible, certainly no one else on this street would have guests that behaved like this, especially on a weeknight of all things, and she wouldn’t stoop to his level by becoming a rude neighbor herself.
The music started soon after, drowning out the familiar melody created by talented fingers on the keys of a piano and subjecting her to the erratic beat of a drum and what she thought might possibly be an electric guitar. Whatever speakers they were pumping it from had to be nearing their capacity for noise making disruption, because this time the windows at the side of her house were rattling their frames. The lead singer, if indeed screaming profanities into the microphone could qualify him as a singer, was obviously oblivious to things like pitch and tone, rhythm, and tempo.
The skin on her knuckles turned white as she wrapped her fingers around her teacup too tightly, but she didn’t make a scene.
It wasn’t until well past ten, when she had already changed into her favorite set of soft pajamas, that she reached her limit.
She heard it first—the rev of a motorcycle engine that was much too loud and went on much too long to be necessary, then the squeal of tires and the hideous scrape of metal on concrete. By the time she made it to the window, the bike had been set upright again and the fool riding it was standing on the sidewalk looking sadly at the scratched paint and busted lights. In the dim glow of the streetlight, she could see that he had lost control pulling too quickly out of the driveway and slid straight into her hydrangeas.
That was quite enough for one day.
There were several men gathered around the bike and its rider when she stalked barefooted across her front yard. Tattooed, pierced, and dressed to the last man in unrelenting black, there was a dangerous look to them that she consciously ignored, the adrenaline in her system overriding her well-honed self-preservation instinct.
They all turned their heads to look at her—a series of marionettes being controlled by the same puppet master—and said nothing as she stared down at stripped blooms and broken stalks where the bike had crashed into her flowers. The plants were mangled and quite possibly beyond saving.
She sighed heavily and looked around until she spotted what she thought was the guilty party. “Are you responsible for this?”
The one that had done the damage was young and dark eyed, a kid with tousled brown curls and skin that was a few shades too pale as what little color had remained in his face drained away when he saw the look on hers. He swallowed hard, the act visible even in the dark and across the distance that separated them. “I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
