Page 21 of Challenged By the Next-Door Veteran

We walk home hand in hand. We don't talk. The streets of Bloomfield are empty now except for the porch lights, the smell of woodsmoke, the lazy clap of my boots on the old sidewalk, her heels dangling from two of her fingers.

At the foot of her steps, she stops.

She climbs them slowly. At the top, she takes her key out, sets it in the lock, and doesn't turn it. She stands with her back to me and her hand flat on the door. Then she looks over her shoulder, the light catching the edge of her glasses. I see she isn't saying goodnight.

"The light's on," she says.

I know what it means. I've been coming home to it since I was sixteen years old, one in the morning, a garage lit up like a promise. It took me half my life to hear what it was saying.

"Hollis," I say. My voice isn't steady. "I know what it means."

Chapter 5 — Hollis

He doesn't come up the steps. That's the first thing that undoes me.

He stands at the bottom with his hands in the pockets of his one good jacket and lantern smoke still in his hair. Two steps and a stretch of porch board between us. Waiting. He's a man who asks first, even now, even after the bridge and the dancing and my life story poured out over a creek like I'd been saving it for him.

"Tell me what you want," he says. "Not what's polite. Not what's easy."

My mouth opens. My first instinct fires like a reflex. I have a joke. I have six of them, lined up like ducks. I want a sandwich. I want a nap. I want you to explain how a person is that tall and moves that quietly.

They crowd up my throat. I can feel my face assembling the old smile, the bright one, the one that makes everything light so no one can see what it weighs.

He doesn't move. He doesn't fill the silence. He just watches me with those tired, steady eyes. The porch light hums. Somewhere down the block a screen door slaps shut.

I put the smile down.

"I want you to come up the steps," I say.

He climbs them slowly. At the top, he's close enough that I have to tip my head back. I can smell cedar and candle wax and the cold October air in his jacket. His boots are on the boards a foot from my stockinged toes. I'd kicked off my heels on the walk home and I'm standing in my stockings. I feel suddenly, gloriously aware of every inch of my own body, from my toes to the tips of my hair.

"And I want you to come in," I say. "I'd like you to stay. All night. Not for..." I stop. "I'd like all night."

"Monday's Monday," he says, and it sounds like a hand held out.

"Tonight's tonight."

He lifts his scarred hand and brushes my hair back from my cheek. His thumb is rough and gentle and not entirely steady.

"All right," he says. "Tell me again when we're inside. And tell me everything after that."

I turn the key. The hall is dark and warm and smells of turpentine and tea and old wood. The black dress is still hanging from the closet door where I left it that morning, a polite shadow with its arms at its sides. I take it down. I put it in the hall closet and shut the door on it with a click.

When I turn, Ben is watching, his mouth lifted.

"Goodnight, Gerald," I tell the ficus as we pass through the living room.

"Gerald."

"He's seen worse."

"I'd imagine he has," Ben says gravely, and I laugh. The laugh helps. It carries us down the hall and through my bedroom door. Then I turn on the lamp, and the room is only a room. A quilt, a stack of paperbacks, the wall at the head of my bed.

"That's the wall," he says.

"That's the wall."

"I can hear my own bed from here."