“I told you, everything’s fine.”
Reassured, she sat back down and put her feet back up on the railing. I noticed that her phone was facedown on the arm of the wooden chair, holding down a health department flyer headlined, “Does Your Home Have Mold?”
“May I sit?”
She tipped her head toward the chair next to her.
I pointed to the flyer. “Problems with your new place? You show that to Barney and he’ll flip out.”
Cynthia glanced down at the flyer, shook her head. “It’s a new awareness campaign we’re doing. I’ve been talking about household mold so much lately I’m having nightmares where I’m being chased by fungus.”
“Like that movie,” I said. “The Blob.”
“Was that fungus?”
“Fungus from outer space.”
She rested her head on the back of the chair, kept her feet perched on the railing. She sighed. “I never did this at home. Just decompressed at the end of the day.”
“That’s probably because we don’t have a porch with a railing,” I said. “I’ll build you one if you want.”
That prompted a chuckle. “You?”
Construction was not one of the manly arts at which I excelled. “Well, I could have someone build it. What I lack in hammering skills I make up for in writing checks.”
“I just — at home, there’s always something I have to do, right then. But here, when I get home from work, I sit here and watch the cars go by. That’s it. It gives me time to think. You know?”
“I guess.”
“I mean, you’ve got the summer to chill out.” She had me there. As a teacher, I had July and August to recharge my batteries. Cynthia had been working for the city only long enough to get a couple of weeks off every year. “So my holiday is an hour at the end of every day, where I sit here and do nothing.”
“Good,” I said. “If this is working for you, then I’m happy.”
She turned and looked at me. “No, you’re not.”
“I just want what’s good for you.”
“I don’t know anymore what’s good for me. I sit here thinking I’ve removed myself from the source of my anxiety, all the fighting and nonsense at home with Grace, and then I realize I’m the source of my anxiety and I can’t get away from myself.”
“There’s a Garrison Keillor story,” I said, “about the old couple who can’t get along, wondering whether to take a vacation, and the man says, ‘Why pay good money to be miserable someplace else when I can be perfectly miserable at home.’”
She frowned. “You think we’re an old couple?”
“That wasn’t the point of the story.”
“I won’t stay here forever,” Cynthia said, having to raise her voice some as Barney shifted his mowing activity to the front yard. The smell of freshly cut grass wafted our way. “I’m taking it a day at a time.”
As much as I wanted her to come home, I wasn’t going to beg her. She had to do it when she was good and ready.
“What have you told Teresa?” Cynthia asked. Teresa Moretti, the woman who came in to clean our place once a week. Four or five years ago, when Cynthia and I found ourselves so busy we couldn’t seem to get to the most basic household chores, we’d asked around about a cleaning lady and found Teresa. Even though I was off for the summer and possessed the requisite skills to tidy a house, Cynthia thought it was unfair to Teresa to lay her off for July and August.
“She needs that money,” Cynthia’d said at the time.
Normally, I wouldn’t even see Teresa. I’d be at school. But six days ago I was there when she let herself in with the key we provided her. She didn’t miss a trick. After noticing that Cynthia’s makeup and other items were not in evidence, that her robe was not thrown over the chair in our bedroom, she’d asked if Cynthia was away.
Now on the porch with my wife, I said, “I told her you were enjoying a little time on your own. Thought that would do it, but then she wanted to know where you’d gone, whether I’d be joining you, was Grace going, how long would we be gone...”
“She’s just worried we’re going to cut her back to every other week or once a month.”
I nodded. “She comes tomorrow. I’ll put her mind at ease.”
Cynthia tipped the bottle up to her lips. “Did you know those teachers?” she asked.
Those two retired schoolteachers who had been killed in their home a few days ago, not more than a mile from here.
From what I’d read and seen on the TV news, the cops were baffled. Rona Wedmore, the police detective we’d been involved with seven years ago, was the lead investigator and had as much as said they couldn’t come up with a motive and there were no suspects. At least none the local police would talk about.
The idea that a couple of retired folks, with no known connections to any criminal activity whatsoever, could be slaughtered in their own home had led to a sense of unease in Milford. Some — particularly the news shows — were calling this the “Summer of Fear” in this community.
“We never crossed paths,” I told Cynthia. “We didn’t teach in the same schools.”
“It’s a horrible thing,” she said. “Senseless.”
“There’s always a reason,” I said. “Maybe not one that makes much sense, but a reason nonetheless.”
There were beads of sweat on Cynthia’s beer bottle. “Hot one today,” I said. “Wonder if it’s going to be nice this weekend. Maybe we could all do something together.”
I went to reach for her phone so I could open the weather app, check the forecast, the sort of thing I did at home all the time if my phone wasn’t nearby. But before I could grab it, Cynthia moved the phone to the other arm of the chair, beyond my reach.
“I heard it’s going to be nice,” she said. “Why don’t we talk on Saturday.”
Barney went down the other side with the gas mower.
“He said he hopes we work things out,” I said.
Cynthia closed her eyes for two seconds and sighed. “I swear, I really haven’t said a thing. But he puts things together, sees you coming over but not staying. Likes to offer advice. Seize the day, that kind of thing.”
“What’s his story?”
“I don’t know. Mid-sixties, never married, lives alone. Likes to tell everyone how his leg got busted up in a car accident back in the seventies, hasn’t walked right since. He’s kind of sad, actually. He’s okay. I listen to him talk, try not to hurt his feelings. I might have a plugged toilet one night and need him to come over.”
“Does he live here?”
Cynthia shook her head. “No. There’s a young guy across the hall from me — there’s a hell of a story there I’ll tell you sometime. And on the first floor, there’s Winnifred — swear to God, Winnifred — who works for the library, and across the hall from her another sad sack named Orland. Older than Barney, lives alone, hardly anyone ever comes to see him.” She forced a grin. “It’s the House of the Damned, I tell you. They’re all here living alone. They’ve got no one.”
“You do,” I said.
Cynthia looked away. “I didn’t mean it that—”
There was a sudden noise from the house. Someone coming down a flight of stairs, fast.
The door swung open and a man, late twenties to early thirties, slim, dark hair, stepped out. He spotted Cynthia before noticing me.
“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said. “What’s shakin’?”
“Hi, Nate,” Cynthia said, an awkward smile on her face. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
“Oh, hey,” he said, his eyes landing on me. “Another friend dropping by?”
“This is Terry. My husband. Terry, this is Nathaniel. My across-the-hall neighbor.” Her eyebrows popped up briefly as she looked at me. This was the guy there was a hell of a story about.
His face quickly flushed, and it took him maybe a tenth of a second to decide to extend a hand. “Good to meet you. Heard a lot about you.”