She still hadn’t seen me, which meant the next move was still mine.
By Tuesday nightI’d been on Sycamore Row three nights and at the shop three days. I came home from the shop at seven with the sun down and found Tuck’s truck in my drive.
He was on the porch in the second rocker. Boots up on the rail. Beer in one hand, a second one on the boards beside the chair.
“Took you long enough.”
“You broke into my fridge.”
“Side door’s open. You ought to fix that.”
“Didn’t know we had a thing.”
“We don’t. I had a thing in the neighborhood. Thought I’d see how the housewarming was coming.”
“There’s no housewarming.”
“There’s a housewarming, Dog.”
I came up the steps. Took the first rocker — my father’s chair, technically, but my father had given it to me by leaving it on the porch the morning I moved in. I picked up the beer. Cracked it.
The cottage across the road was lit at one window. Kitchen, by my guess. The light was the warm yellow of a low bulb, which I noticed the way I’d been noticing everything about that house for seventy-two hours and hadn’t, until this moment, said anything aloud about.
Tuck took a pull on his beer and said nothing for a minute.
Then he said: “She works the night shift.”
I didn’t turn my head.
“I know.”
“I clocked her at the mailbox Saturday morning, Dog. Same time you did. I came out of your hallway to see why you’d gone into the garage and not come back, and what had taken you out of the move was a woman in scrubs across the road. I’ve been waiting three days to see if you were going to say one word about her.”
“Don’t.”
“You haven’t. Which is typical. You haven’t said two words about anything else.”
I drank my beer. Watched the kitchen window.
“How long you been on my porch?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
Dusk fell, the color draining out of the yards. The streetlamp at the head of the block ticked on. A woman two houses down called a dog. Across the road a shadow moved past the kitchen window and went out of frame, and my whole body registered a movement at twenty-some feet through a wall and a window as ifshe had touched the back of my neck — the same as it had every day for four days.
I had once been good at this.
There had been, for years, a register a man like me kept for women — easy, low, the half-grin, the slow hand. It had been a kind of dialect, fluent for as long as I’d used it because I’d never used it on anyone who was going to ask me to mean it. Tuck and the boys called me Casanova when the mood took them because that dialect, until last Tuesday at eleven o’clock at night in a trauma bay, had been the language I used when a woman was in the room.
I’d opened my mouth in that bay to use it on her and discovered I’d suddenly forgotten the language.
What had come out had been her name. Once. In three syllables.
Beside me, Tuck took another pull on his beer.
“That one,” he said. Not a question.
“Yeah.”
