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The facts were simple enough. The house had been unrented for a year, and then it was rented. One April afternoon a large moving van drove up and two men ran in and out, like Keystone Cops, the nearest thing to collision, but always skidding around each other with a fast-action routine of clocks, lamps, chairs, tables, and urns. In what seemed a minute they had driven away. The house was left alone, unoccupied. Mrs. Coles had walked by it four times and peered in, and only seen that the moving men had hung the pictures, spread the rugs, adjusted the furniture, and made everything womanly and neat before they had come running out to go away. There was the nest, waiting for the bird.
And promptly at seven o’clock, just after supper, when everyone could see her, up drove Kit Random in a yellow taxicab, and moved into the waiting house, alone.
“Where’s Mr. Random?” asked everyone.
“There isn’t any.”
“Divorced, that’s what she is, divorced. Or maybe her husband dead. A widow, that’s better. Poor thing.”
But there was Kit Random smiling at every window and every porch, on her way to buy T-bone steaks, tomato soup, and dishwater soap, not looking tired, not looking sad, not looking alone, but looking as if a company of clowns lived with her by day, and a handsome film gentleman with a waxed mustache by night.
“But no one ever comes near her place. At first I thought, well …” Mrs. Coles hesitated. “A woman living alone. Oh, you know. But there hasn’t even been an iceman close. So there’s only one thing to figure: as someone said, she’s that bird that comes out of the clock. Four times an hour,” she added.
At that very moment, Miss Kit Random called to the ladies, now her voice up in the soft green trees, now up in the blue sky on the opposite side of the yard. “Ladies?”
Their heads twisted. Their ears prickled.
“Ladies,” called Miss Kit Random, in flight. “I’ve come to get me a man. That’s it, ladies!”
All the ladies backed off to their houses.
It was the next afternoon that they found Mr. Tiece over in Miss Kit Random’s front yard playing marbles. Mrs. Tiece put up with it for about two minutes and thirty-five seconds and then came across the street, almost on roller skates.
“Well, what’re we doing?” she demanded of the two hunched-down figures.
“Just a moment.” A marble spun bright under Henry Tiece’s thumb. Other marbles spat against each other and clacked away.
“Looks like you won,” said Kit Random. “You’re darned good at mibs, Hank.”
“It’s been years.” Mr. Tiece glanced uneasily at his wife’s ankle. She had veins like runners of light blue ink on her legs. It looked like the map of Illinois. Desplaines River here, Mississippi there. He scanned up as far as Rock Island when his wife said:
“Isn’t it a little strange playing marbles?”
“Strange thing?” Mr. Tiece dusted himself off. “I won!”
“What you going to do with them marbles?”
“It’s not what I do with them, it’s victory that counts.”
Mrs. Tiece glared at them as if they were toadstools. “Thanks for giving Henry a game.”
“Anytime, Clara, anytime,” said Kit Random.
“I’ll just leave these with you.” Henry handed over the marbles hastily. “No room at my place.”
“I want you to cut the grass,” said Mrs. Tiece.
He and Mrs. Tiece sort of walked across the street, he not looking at her, she keeping up so he walked faster, she increasing her pace, he increasing his until they almost leaped up the porch steps. He ran to the door first, she tailed after. The door-slam was such that birds abandoned their nests three houses down.
The next incident occurred exactly an hour later. Mr. Tiece was out mowing the lawn, his eyes fixed to the rotating machine and each of one hundred clover blossoms, all with tiny heads like Mrs. Tiece. He cut furiously east, west, north, south, perspiring and wiping his brow as Mrs. Tiece shouted, “Don’t miss the outer drive! And down the middle, you missed a ridge. Watch that stone, you’ll ruin the cutter!”
Exactly at two o’clock two trucks drove up in front of Miss Kit Random’s house and a couple of laborers began tossing dirt out of Miss Random’s lawn. By four o’clock they poured a solid sheet of cement all over Miss Random’s yard.
At five o’clock, the truck drove off, taking Miss Kit Randpm’s lawn with it, at which point Miss Kit Random waved over to Mr. Tiece. “Won’t have to mow this lawn again for a couple years I guess!” She laughed.
Mr. Tiece started to laugh back when he sensed someone hidden inside the dark screen door. Mr. Tiece ducked inside. This time, with the door-slam, two potted geraniums fell off the porch rail.
“The nerve of that woman.”
