The light in the apartment over my garage was on when I got to my front yard.
I did not look at it.
I went into my kitchen. I made a cup of tea — Constant Comment, my grandmother’s brand, the only kind I keep in the house — and I put on two sweaters and her afghan and I walked out onto my porch and I sat in the rocking chair and I told myself, very firmly, that I was not going to look at his window.
I looked at his window.
He was a silhouette behind the curtain. Moving. Not pacing — Knox does not pace — but doing something deliberate. A thing. With his hands. Putting something on a counter, maybe. Setting something down. The light made the curtain glow gold the way old curtains glow gold from the inside, like they were holding something luminous. And I sat on my porch in the cold and I drank my tea and I told myself a series of stories that were all variations on the same story, which was that I was just enjoying the snow.
The snow had not gotten any prettier in the last twenty minutes.
Grandma.Grandma.What do I do.
Joan Sutton, dead since April, did not answer. She never answered when the questions got serious. That was how I knew the questions were real.
But the man in the apartment above my garage opened the door at nine-fourteen at night and came down the side stairs with a black trash bag in one hand and stopped at the bottom of the steps when he saw me on the porch.
I had not expected him to look up.
He looked up.
He stopped. His foot was on the third step from the bottom.
The apartment door had drifted shut behind him. He was in a thermal shirt and jeans and no coat. His breath was coming out in clouds that the porch light caught and turned silver. His hand on the trash bag was bare. The cold would be getting to it by now. The kind of cold that burns.
He looked at me for one beat.
Two.
Three.
He said, “You’re going to freeze.”
“I know,” I said.
He said nothing.
He looked at me for one more beat, and then he turned, and he walked back up the side stairs, and he opened the door, and he disappeared inside.
The door clicked shut.
I sat on my porch with my cold tea in my hands and I told myself, in the same firm voice that had been failing me for the last hour, that this wasfine.That this wasvery fine.That I had had a hard day and a confessional morning and a five-year-old had called my tenant Mr.Grumpus to my face and I wasfine.
The door opened again.
He came back down the stairs.
He had his jacket in one hand. The long black one, the one he’d worn the day he came to the diner.
He did not say anything when he reached the porch. He had learned that words were not his language. That his language was actions. That sometimes you showed people what you meant by what you did instead of what you said.
He held the jacket out, looked at it for half a second like he was reconsidering, and then dropped it on my shoulders the way you drop a blanket on a sleeping cat. Gentle. Careful. Trying not to startle.
It was warm.
It was warm because he had been wearing it five minutes ago and now I was.
He picked up the trash bag he had set on my porch step. He turned and walked down my front walk without looking back, opened the lid of my bin at the curb, dropped the bag in, and closed the lid. The sound it made was final. Complete.
