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“Right here, getting these bushes lit.”
“Perfect. Then you can tell me about Bill and Lisa.”
As soon as she’s satisfied that I’m in place at the top, she starts in on her explanation. “Bill and Lisa basically adopted us two years ago. Before that, we lived in an apartment across the hall from my brother, Noah. And before that, I was making poor choices because I became an orphan at eighteen and didn’t feel like dealing with it. So there’s the story.”
She says all this as she alternately messes around with a web of Christmas lights and bear-hugs a shrub.
“Sounds like there’s probably a good deal more details between that beginning, middle, and end.” I’m not going to force anyone to talk about hard things. I certainly don’t. But I’ll listen. I do that fairly well.
“You’re right,” she says.
She doesn’t add anything to this, and I think that may be the end of it as she focuses on her hedge wrestling, but she surprises me a few minutes later. “You didn’t ask me how my parents died or about Evie’s father.”
I’ve placed the third clip, and now I have to get down to move the ladder, so I do, stopping when I reach the ground next to her.
“I don’t love it when people ask me prying questions. Why would I do that to you?”
“Most people do.”
I shrug and move the ladder over, pausing with my foot on the first rung. “I’m not most people.” I climb up again.
I’ve positioned another clip when she calls up, “Do you want to know?”
“Yes.”
Long pause, then, “Okay. I’ll tell you.”
I wait as I get the next section of lights anchored. I’m not hopeless. I’m just not handy. If Paige were doing this, I suspect she’d be picking up speed as she went. I won’t, but what I lack in speed, I’ll make up for in dogged consistency.
“My parents were killed in an accident in March of my senior year.”
“I can’t imagine.” I hadn’t lost people who’d been part of my everyday life. Not my parents.
“It sucked. I didn’t handle the anger well, and I took off.”
Her voice is hard and flat. I’ve seen her irritated plenty of times, but this is an anger that I can feel even eight feet above her on the ladder. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. Perhaps that’s the right thing because she picks up the story.
“Bad decision, bad decision, months pass, more bad decisions, more months. Anyway, I’m not proud of it, but I ended up pregnant. I came home to Noah, who put me back together and helped me with Evie from the day I showed up.”
“Sounds like a good guy.”
“The best,” she says. “Which is why, when he started dating Grace, Bill’s daughter, I knew I had to do whatever I could to get out of his way. She works for NASA, and she couldn’t do that here. She’d come back to take care of Bill when he was sick, but when he got better, NASA hired her back, and she would have gone, and Noah would have let her go to stay and take care of us. So I made sure they got together. And everything worked out.”
I move the ladder and climb again, expecting her to pick up the thread of the story, but after a longer silence than usual, I realize she’s done telling it. But I’m not done listening. I want to hear the section that explains how she ends up as my neighbor.
She’s probably gambling I’ll let it drop, but that won’t happen. I’m not an anthropologist by accident. I’m deeply interested in why people do what they do. I’m fascinated at both a cultural level and an individual one. In general, I prefer studying both with the distance of a scientist, but I’m invested in Paige’s story, and I want to know about this last piece.
“Paige?” I look down between my extended arms, watching her as I attach the next clip. “You skipped the part that’s your superhero origin story.”
“There’s no part like that.”
“Then at least tell me the part where you end up with this house.”
She gives such a deep sigh, I can hear it all the way up by the roof, but she starts talking again. “I knew Noah wouldn’t leave as long as he thought I needed him. He’d take care of us in sneaky ways. Buy Evie new clothes or toys and tell me they were thrifted. Switch our leases with the apartment manager without telling me so that I was paying his one bedroom rent, and he was paying for my two-bedroom.”
“I like him,” I say, without thinking about it.
“Everyone does.” I can hear the smile in her voice.
