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Leave it to Mr. Brown to benicerfirst thing in the morning. I stifle a pre-coffee yawn, and he gives me a curt nod and turns up the driveway to his house.
“Thanks again,” I call.
He raises a hand but doesn’t look back, disappearing from view. I’m turning to drag my empty trash can back when his front door suddenly opens.
“Tell your daughter thank you,” he says.
“Evie? For what?”
He hesitates. “She’ll know.” Then he shuts the door.
What the what?
Chapter Thirteen
Henry
SnippyNeighborisworkingwith some hidden assets.
Or they were hidden until a few minutes ago when she panic-wrestled her trash bin down her driveway. But now that she’s flashed some long and shockingly sexy legs in her brief pajamas, I can’t unsee it.
What is wrong with me? Am I so starved for the company of a woman that I’m now sexualizing the prickly neighbor?
I consider this as I make coffee in my French press.
No, I decide. Any heterosexual male would have had the same reaction. That was a fine-looking pair of legs. And with her hair mussed and sleepy eyes, she was . . .
If she was anyone else, she might be irresistible, but I know too well how sharp her edges get when she’s fully awake.
Still, this is a new facet, and in the privacy of my own mind, I can be as shallow about it as I want to be. Therefore, I freely admit that she is . . . what had the student called the sculpted head of Nefertiti in his essay? Ah, yes. Prickly Neighbor is a smokeshow. Reductive for a rendering of one of the most powerful women in world history but appropriate here.
Although . . .
It’s also reductive to my neighbor. I sigh. I may question her taste based on her lawn decorations, and I doubt her judgment for purchasing that house in a bad bargain, but based on the small gifts her child has left for me, she’s doing a solid job of raising the girl. She’s more than a great pair of legs and pretty eyes.
It’s time to admit that until either of us moves—not likely something that will happen soon—I’m going to have to come to terms with her living next door for the foreseeable future. That being the case, it’s also time I made an effort to learn a bit about her to better form my opinions.
My students would be shocked to learn that I’m on social media, but I am. I don’t use them, really. I opened Facebook and Instagram accounts several years ago but it was driven by anthropological interests rather than social ones.
These networks represented an unprecedented shift in human communication, one which I wished to observe for myself rather than live through without noticing it. That’s the constant danger for anthropologists: preoccupying ourselves with the cultures of ancient times or distant places so deeply that we miss the time and place we’re living in.
I tried for a year, watching the way acquaintances interacted before concluding that society as a whole was trembling on a collapse the scale of which hasn’t been seen since Rome fell. It was quite enough for me.
Every now and then, I’ll log in to get a sense of the prevailing winds when a particular controversy erupts in government, for example, but I don’t post, and I don’t interact.
Today I’m inspired to observe again, particularly the accounts of one Paige Redmond, prickly neighbor.
I settle at the table with my coffee and phone and open Instagram. She’s easy to find, but her profile is locked, and I won’t be requesting it. On Facebook, I have barely more luck. Once again, I find her. Once again, her profile doesn’t reveal much to non-friends. But there is slightly more information since I can look at previous profile pictures.
She doesn’t seem to have updated it in a few years, but in one of her older ones, she holds two balloons that form the number sixteen, and in checking the date that it was posted, a bit of quick math reveals that Paige must be around twenty-six now.
I set my phone down and regret my reaction at the sight of her this morning. She’s nine years younger than me, not too much older than my seniors. It’s indecent.
I may be an easily annoyed man, but I do try to be a decent one. Therefore, next week on trash day, rather than risk a run-in with Paige’s long, bare legs, I’ll bring her trash can to the curb if it hasn’t been done when I leave for my morning run. Because the way my mouth had gone suddenly dry at the sight of her this morning hadn’t been decent at all.
“Hey, Henry,” Leigh says as she breezes into our office after her morning lecture. “Make any more real estate mogul moves lately?”
“Ha,” I say. Leigh startles, and I realize it came out sharper than I meant it to. I clear my throat. “No, failed mogul here. That deal fell through, and that was it for me. Now I have a neighbor.”
