“What?” he said.
“I said,” she repeated, clearly impatient with his lack of attention, “can I do my report on you?”
“OK,” he said, “but it might have been better if you had asked me that first.”
“Why?”
He paused. “I don’t know,” he said. Then: “That’s just usually how it’s done.”
Jennifer had arrived by her daughter’s side, smiling widely. He had initially thought she might be slightly older than he was but now, with her standing before him, it was impossible to tell, her body uniformly smooth and tight and tan as if she was a being constructed entirely of suede.
“Hey neighbor,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
“Is she bothering you?”
“No,” he said. “She asks a lot of questions.”
“Jennifer,” she said, extending her hand and shaking his.
“I remember,” he said. Then he added, “Keith.” Her hand felt smooth and warm.
“I’m afraid I put her up to it,” Jennifer said. “She had this report to do and I just thought you’d be perfect. I mean you’re so close. Right across the street.”
He nodded but did not answer. Smiled.
“The other kids will all have their local mailman or something and Nicole will have our astronaut. That’s pretty special, don’t you think?”
He smiled again, turning his eyes toward the sidewalk. “I guess so,” he said.
“You’re a bit bashful about being famous.”
“I’m not famous.”
“It’s not a very big town.”
“Seems pretty big to me.”
“Well, you’re still new here,” she said. “Small town with big shopping.”
“I guess so.”
“It’s cute that you’re bashful.”
He wondered if he was blushing, hoped in fact that he was not. He glanced down at Nicole, who looked up at him expectantly.
“We’re just headed out so I won’t keep you,” Jennifer said.
“OK,” he said. Then he paused and stammered, “I mean, it’s OK. It’s not a problem.”
She held eye contact with him and he only broke it when Nicole called up at him from the concrete, her words punctuated by a short hop as if the sentence caused a physical reaction: “Will you be here later?”
He wondered if her mother might intervene but Jennifer said nothing. “When later?” he said.
“Mom, when?” Nicole asked.
“Maybe it would be more convenient if we invited Mr. Corcoran over to our house for dinner,” Jennifer said. “That way you can ask him your questions and he can eat something and everyone’s happy.”
“Yeah, Captain Keith can come over!” Nicole said.
“What do you say, Captain Keith?” Jennifer said. “We can’t do tonight. Homeowners association. Maybe you’re going to that too?”
“No, I didn’t know about that.”
“You’re welcome to come, you know. You’re a homeowner, after all, even if you’re selling.”
“Oh,” he said. “No, I don’t want to go to that.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “A lot of busybodies mostly.” She giggled, the sound of a much younger woman, a girl. “I do like your honesty,” she said. Then she giggled again.
He looked at the ground in embarrassment. No words would come.
“How’s Thursday?” She looked at him and smiled and once again did not break the contact and he felt a short surge in his lower gut. The concrete felt warm under his feet even though the air around him was still cool and there was the faintest hint of a breeze. He could feel the little girl looking up at him but he continued to stare into Jennifer’s eyes and she stared back at him, her smile closing into a mischievous grin. He did not know if he should break the contact, knew only that he did not want to do so.
“Thursday?” he said at last. “I think that sounds fine.”
He tried to resume painting but the attention to detail that was nearly automatic when he had first begun the task had become difficult to find, his strokes wobbling and sloppy. At first he was merely distracted because he was thinking of the woman who lived across the street. But there was something else too: a kind of intrusion that overlay those thoughts and would not be ignored. When his phone began to buzz and he looked at it and saw that it was Barb — her timing perfect as always — his irritation reached a pinnacle and he clapped the phone closed and returned it to his pocket. She had continued to call him every day or two, although he could not determine to what purpose. It had not been to share her grief, or at least if that had been her purpose it was unclear. Instead she would simply engage him in some variety of small talk, asking about his day, telling him about her own. At first, when he was still in Houston, he welcomed the calls because her voice was familiar and even though she had already told him that she had moved out of their home and would not return, he needed that familiar contact. Now, though, her telephone calls had come to feel like increasingly futile exercises. Why call him every day if only to remind him that she was gone and that it was, in some way he could not identify, his fault?
“Shit.”
He had dragged the roller against an outlet and stood there surveying the chaos of new paint on the living room wall, a ragged block of eggshell in a field of yellow. Guilt. That was what the intrusion was: simple guilt. It was as if his wife — or ex-wife or whatever she was now — was somehow peering into his thoughts, watching him as he secretly fantasized about the woman across the street. There was no logic to the feeling at all. She had been the one to leave, not him. He had asked her to stay long enough to at least discuss what had happened and how they might proceed into some future neither of them could imagine, but she would not wait for him to return from the mission. Her own return to the house — this house — would be only long enough to collect its contents into a U-Haul to drive back to the Atlanta suburb where she had grown up and where her mother still resided, and this she had done while he was still in orbit, two hundred miles above the surface of Earth. And now a woman had asked him to dinner, a woman who was not Barb. He should have felt elation, triumph, a sense of release from his marriage, but what he felt was guilt. To compound his irritation, there was also a small dull lump of pain at the base of his skull, a fact that he tried not to focus on but which was present nonetheless.
He knew the marriage had been far from perfect. Had it not been for Quinn they might have dissolved their partnership long before. But it could not be denied that there had been a time when she had been by his side, that she had helped press him in the direction of his goals, of their goals. Even what he thought of as their honeymoon — their real honeymoon — had been part of that progress, her excitement at the adventure of their move to Palo Alto for his graduate work fueling his desire to choose that school over MIT. That drive — from Georgia to California — had been a lovers’ journey filled with tiny hotel rooms and gas stations and roadside attractions and Barb paging through the AAA guidebook incessantly, circling things to see, hotels to stay the night in, restaurants that were good and were near enough to the freeway to actually stop at. There had been a trip to Hawaii funded by Barb’s parents but he remembered the road trip as the real honeymoon, and somewhere amidst those long days of gas stations and fields and farms and deserts they had conceived their first and only child, although they would not know that Barb was pregnant for another month, after they had settled into their tiny Palo Alto apartment and Keith’s first semester of graduate school had begun.