And it had gone and settled on her. A woman with a life and a packed bag and somewhere to be — a place with rooms in it I’d never see, people in it who got to know where she went on her days off, not one of them me. Nothing to solve there. Nobody had asked me to.
I knew all of that, and I went on standing at the glass regardless, until the standing made me angry — not at her; at myself. A week I’d had this house and the better version of me that was supposed to come with it, the one who’d moved to a quiet street to finally let a quiet street be quiet, and instead here I was burning a whole day on surveillance of a slab of empty asphalt, because the woman it belonged to kept her hand pinned at her side like it had tried something on her once, and had looked at me twice now like she’d misplaced a word she usually kept on her person.
I set the broom back in the corner harder than the broom had done a thing to deserve.
“Enough,” I told the kitchen, out loud, to nobody — a habit men who live alone slide into and ought to be warned about ahead of time.
The kitchen had no opinion. I went and found my keys.
I was halfway to the door with the keys in my hand when the hollering started.
It came from over the road, high and carrying, the voice of a small woman with no intention of being small about anything. I should have kept walking. I went back to the glass instead, because a man can lie to himself about a parking space but not about free entertainment.
The old woman from the house beside Sophia's was out on her porch. I'd seen her before — four-foot-nothing, hair the color of seawater, a straight back that dared the years to try something. She had a finger out and it was aimed across the cul-de-sac at my neighbor. Murph. He was at his own fence now with a hose running, watering a strip of grass that already looked like it filed its taxes early.
"You're drowning it, Murph." The finger jabbed. "That lawn has had enough. You'll have it floating off down the gutter and then where's your flag going to stand."
"Mind your own grass."
His jaw worked. The hose stayed exactly where it was, pouring into the bog he'd made of one corner, and he turned his head a slow few degrees to look at her down the length of the cul-de-sac the way you'd look at a wasp you couldn't reach.
"Annoying woman" he said.
"Stubborn ass," she shot back, before he'd finished the second word — she'd seen it coming from a mile off, had it loaded, fired it the instant his cleared the chamber.
Then, a moment later, her voice came over the asphalt in a different register entirely — the jab gone out of it, something with a floor under it.
"Did you eat?"
"I ate."
"What did you eat?"
"None of your business." No heat in it now. He said it the way a man says a thing he's said a hundred times and will go on saying past his own funeral. And as he said it his hand was already moving — the hose swinging up off the drowned grass and over onto the green that didn't need it, slow, like the arm had decided on its own and was waiting for the rest of him to stop noticing. He got it done without once looking at her. A grown man doing the thing she'd told him to do and going to his grave before he'd let her catch him doing it.
I stood at the window with the keys biting into my palm and thought: there’s something there.
I didn’t get any further than that. Thirty-four years old, read by experts and a fair reader myself, and I looked dead at two people who’d plainly been circling each other since before I was born, and the most my head turned up was history — old, complicated, theirs. I left it where it lay.
Murph caught me at the glass. Held it a beat, and then turned the hose on his roses.
I went to find the truck before the street could recruit me into anything else.
The truck turned over on the first ask. It always did. Thirteen years in, I'd come out with a clean record, a tidy balance I'd been careful with, and almost nothing I'd let myself want — and then I'd walked onto a lot and bought this, before the house, before anything. Chosen on purpose. Paid for outright. It started when I told it to and asked nothing back, and for a long time it had been the only thing in my life that did.
I crossed the drive with the keys swinging and my head finally somewhere useful: the lift, the wall, the hour traffic would cost me if I didn't move.
I took another look at her empty driveway and it handed back everything it'd been collecting for three days.
The sedan started on the second turn. Not every time. Just often enough to notice. The driver's-side taillight was out. I'd caught it when she'd pulled her bin back from the curb a couple of days before — one red eye and one dark one. The front passenger tire sat lower than the others. Not flat. Just soft enough to make me wonder if she'd noticed.
I stood with my hand on the truck door and thought about asking her. About the taillight. The tire. The catch in the ignition.
Then I thought about the bin.
About the way she'd thanked me for offering and told me she could manage it herself.
Sophia struck me as a woman who'd say exactly the same thing about her car.
