Page 1 of Challenged By the Next-Door Veteran

Chapter 1 — Hollis

The man moving into the other half of my duplex sets things down slowly.

I've been kneeling on a folded quilt for three hours with a fourteen-foot banner spread across my living room floor, and I haven't heard a single thud.

Boxes meet the shared wall with a soft settle. A bookshelf gets lowered an inch at a time. Once there's a long scrape, then a pause so respectful I'd swear he's apologizing to the floorboards.

No music. No television. No phone call while he wrestles with zip ties. Just a big man making a home with the volume all the way down.

On my side of the wall, the volume is up. Ella Fitzgerald plays from the speaker on my bookshelf, the radiator clanks like a tiny drummer with a grudge, and I'm humming around the brush handle between my teeth while I lean in to paint the last orange leaf on the last apple tree.

FOUNDED 1848, the banner says, in letters as tall as my forearm. STILL HERE.

When I lean forward, my belly settles warm against my thighs and my knees file their usual complaint. People who love me say I should buy a kneeling pad. One person who used to love me told me, smiling, that a woman my size shouldn't spend three hours on a floor. I carried that around for years like a stone in my shoe.

I've since come to resent how comfortable the quilt is.

My phone buzzes against the floorboards. I wipe my thumb on my shirt, a men's extra-large that's been mine since college and is now more cadmium than cotton, and read Carmen's text.

Carmen: He's here. Pemberton. Black SUV, quarter-zip. In OCTOBER. To a PARADE.

Then, before I can answer, another one.

Carmen: She's carrying a tote bag with both their initials on it. Joint initials, Hollis.

I type with the one clean knuckle I have left.

Me: Is the tote at least ugly?

Carmen: The tote is tasteful. That's the worst part.

Me: Be nice to the tote.

Carmen: You're still coming tomorrow.

Me: I painted fourteen feet of apple trees, I'm contractually obligated.

Carmen: That is not what I asked.

I turn the phone face down.

Across the room, the black dress is laid over the arm of my reading chair like a well-behaved person waiting to be called on. It's the safe one. The one that has never been looked at twice. Down the hall, at the back of my closet, there's a garment bag I haven't unzipped since Grant and I ended in May. I'm not thinking about what's inside it the same way I'm not thinking about my pulse.

I sit back on my heels and look at the whole banner. The orchard rolls down the canvas in burnt sienna and gold. At the far end the little white Granary sits under a sky I mixed four times to get right.

It's good. It's the biggest thing I've painted in five years.

I would very much like to be a woman who can stand in front of it tomorrow without wondering who's standing behind her.

I reach for the brush, and the world goes black.

Ella cuts off mid-phrase. The work lamps clamped to the chair backs die together, the radiator drummer stops, and the little space heater at my feet makes a sad ticking sound as the coil cools. The dark is total, the thick ink-in-water dark of an old house at night.

"Okay," I say, very reasonably.

Next door, the silence changes. It has stopped being absence and become the quality of a person holding still to listen.

I remember Mr. Alfred's note then. It's been taped to my front door since noon, written in his retired-mailman handwriting: New fella moves in tonight. Quiet sort. Ex-Marine. Be nice. Left breaker is yours, don't run the heater and the lamps together. A.T.