I knocked on my neighbour’s door last night. I said: “Sorry John,” I know you’ve only just got home from work I need your help. I can’t get into my house. I was in a rush and my front door key is in my trousers which I’ve left beside the bed. “Okay, so what do you want me to do then?” he asked. I said: “Go upstairs to your bedroom and get them for me please.”
John just stared at me for a second, his hand still on the brass handle of his screen door, the yellow porch light catching the gray at his temples.
He was thirty-eight, worked the early shift down at the grain elevator, and usually kept to himself aside from a polite wave when we were both out pulling weeds in June. We had lived side by side in these identical brick duplexes for four years, sharing a gravel driveway that always needed fresh stone and a hedge of overgrown boxwoods that neither of us trimmed quite often enough.
“My trousers?” John asked, and his voice sounded a bit flat, like he was trying to figure out if I was playing some kind of late-night trick on him. “Why would your trousers be in my bedroom, Clara?”
“Not your trousers,” I said, and I felt my face getting hot right there in the damp evening air, the mosquitoes buzzing around my ankles in the damp grass. “My trousers. I was over there earlier helping your wife, Martha, move that heavy cedar chest out of the spare room.
Remember? You told us to put it against the north wall so it wouldn’t block the floor vent.”
John didn’t move. He kept his shoulder braced against the frame, blocking the view into his hallway where the smell of pot roast and boiled potatoes always hung heavy around suppertime. “Martha went to her sister’s place over in Peoria this morning, Clara. She took the Buick.”
That was the first wrong note. The air between us suddenly felt thin and cold, even though the humidity was hanging thick off the cornfields down the road. I knew Martha’s Buick. I had watched her back it out of the gravel drive at seven that morning while I was standing at my kitchen sink rinsing coffee grounds down the drain. I remembered the blue ribbon tied to the rearview mirror. I rememberedMartha waving a yellow duster at me through the windshield.
“No,” I said, and my voice dropped down lower than I meant it to. “She didn’t take the Buick. Her car is parked right behind yours in the lower turnaround.”
John didn’t blink. He just looked down at his work boots for a second before he looked back up at me, and his eyes didn’t have that tired, neighborly warmth I was used to seeing when we talked about the weather or the county tax hike. “The Buick broke down three days ago, Clara. It’s sitting up at the Shell station on Route 4. I drove her down to the bus depot myself at six this morning so she could catch the express to Peoria.”
A cicada started up loud in the boxwoods, rattling like a tin can full of gravel. My stomach gave a strange, sick twist, the kind you get right before you realize you’ve missed a step on the cellar stairs. If Martha had taken the bus at six, and her car was at the repair shop, then whose dust-covered feet did I see stepping across my kitchen linoleum while I was hanging laundry out back at two this afternoon?
Whose quiet humming was I listening to through the shared brick wall while I sat at my sewing table trying to finish the hem on my sister’s winter coat?
“You’re joking with me,” I said, and I forced a little dry laugh that sounded like dry corn husks rubbing together in the wind. “John, come on. I brought over that peach cobbler just yesterday afternoon. Martha set it right on the counter next to the bread box.”
“We haven’t had a peach cobbler in this house since August,” John said softly. “You know I’m allergic to fresh peaches, Clara. It makes my throat close up.”
He stood there, solid and unmoving in the doorway, while the whole four years we had lived side by side started to tilt sideways like a picture frame hung on a crooked nail. I thought about the quiet footfalls I always assumed were Martha cleaning her pantry on a Tuesday. I thought about the second set of footprints in the fresh mud near our shared spigot last week, the ones with the small, narrow soles that didn’t match Martha’s heavy walking shoes or John’s work boots.
“Let me in,” I said.
John didn’t step aside. He just crossed his arms over his heavy gray flannel work shirt, and the metal snap on his breast pocket clicked against the screen door wire. “No, Clara. I don’t think you need to come in here tonight.”
“My key is in my trousers,” I insisted, though the words sounded hollow even to my own ears. “You said you’d help me get in.”
“I never said that,” John replied, and his voice was completely level now, terrifyingly calm. “You asked me to go upstairs to my bedroom. But you didn’t say why your pants were hanging over the brass rail in the spare room next to my bed.”
The gravel driveway crunched under a car tire out on the road, headlights sweeping a long, white arc across the front of the brick duplexes before fading away into the dark. I stood there on his porch with my hands jammed into the pockets of my cardigan, feeling the cold iron of the house key I actually *did* have in my coat lining, the spare I kept hidden behind the rain barrel just in case of a morning rush. I had remembered where it was the second the words left my mouth. But by then it was already too late to take them back, because the lie was out in the open, sitting between us like a dead weight.
“You knew,” I whispered.
John looked down at the welcome mat, his shoulders sinking just a fraction of an inch, the tough, hard line of his jaw softening into something that looked less like anger and more like sheer, bone-tired exhaustion. “Everybody in this township knew, Clara. We just didn’t figure it was our place to tell you while your husband was still working the night shift over at the limestone quarry.”
Three weeks later, the moving van came and went while the wind was blowing the first dry leaves across the grass, and I didn’t wave to anyone when the truck pulled out of the drive. The house on the left stayed empty, the shades drawn tight against the afternoon sun, and the shared boxwood hedge looked ragged and brown on both sides where nobody had bothered to prune the dead growth away. I sat on my own back porch with a cold cup of coffee in my hand, staring out at the empty turnaround where Martha’s Buick never did come back to park. My husband didn’t mention the move, and I didn’t ask him where he was staying when he packed his canvas duffel bag into the trunk of his Ford. We just let the silence settle between us, heavy and permanent, like the gray dust that lingers in an old barn long after the hay has all been hauled away.
