His mouth did something that on another man might have been a smile.
“Don’t sir me, son. I’m two doors down and tired.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Master Sergeant.”
“Don’t Master Sergeant me either.”
“What do I call you?”
“Murph.”
His eyes went past me to the bike that wouldn’t stop coughing. “That one yours?”
“No.”
“Get the man to fix it.”
“I will.”
He nodded once. Turned. Went back across his own yard to his own porch in those slippers and shut his door behind him.
I went to the bike and put the knack on the cut. The cylinder gave one last cough and went quiet. The cul-de-sac eased. And that was when I heard the car door close across the road.
I didn’t look. I went into the garage instead.
The garage was the next problem on the list. Two-cars deep, the bench down the back wall, empty. I left the roller door up. Walked to the bench. Pulled the pegboard out from where I’dleaned it against the wall last night, lifted it up to head height, set the level on top, marked four points with a pencil between my teeth. Drove the first screw into the stud. The bit caught. The screw went in. I had been hanging pegboards since I was twelve and could do it without thinking, which was the point. I didn’t want to think for ten minutes.
I looked up across the road.
She was at her mailbox.
What the actual fuck.
The dark hair twisted up at her nape. The scrubs — faded teal, drawstring loose at the waist where her hand had pulled it that morning and not pulled it back. Scuffed sneakers. Travel mug under one elbow, sheaf of envelopes in her hand, the loose piece of hair hanging at her jaw the way it had hung at her jaw at one in the morning four nights ago when she’d looked up at me from over Tuck’s hand.
My hand stopped on the screw.
I’d stood at a wall in a trauma bay four nights ago and watched her lavender hair tie on the nape of a stranger and thoughtdon’t. Watched the line of her neck where her hairline ran above the tie. Watched her shoulders move when she set a stitch. Watched the curve of her under the scrubs while she worked and was glad, twice, that my hands were in my pockets. That lavender tie had stayed in the back of my mind ever since.
The tie was here. The nurse was here.
She was on her own path on the other side of my road sorting her mail without looking up, and she was the woman I’d thought about for ninety-six hours.
My stomach dropped.
I didn’t move. Held the screw in my fingers — something had just registered as live — and watched her the way you watched a thing you didn’t want to startle.
She didn’t look up.
She thumbed through the stack and tucked it under her elbow. Lifted the mug. Drank. The entire block was looking at her — or would have been, if the block had been looking — and she had not the slightest idea anyone was. She was as visible at twenty feet, in the morning light, as a woman could be. She had no idea.
Heaven had heard a prayer I hadn’t put words to and was answering it the funny way.
I’d said “I’ll see you soon” at the threshold of that bay four nights ago and I’d meant it as the promise a man makes to himself on the way out a door — that I’d find a way back. I was planning on going back to that hospital, maybe surprising her with coffee in that fluorescent corridor.
I hadn’t had moving in across from her in mind.
I closed my hand on the screw. Didn’t step out of the garage. Didn’t call across.
