Page 6 of Challenged By the Next-Door Veteran

She doesn't say oh. She doesn't say I'm sorry. She takes a sip.

"Does it work?"

"Usually by about nine."

"Mine was my grandmother," she says. "When I was little. I lived with her. My mother went to Arizona when I was nine, with a man named Doug and a plan. The plan was for me to come out when things settled."

She shrugs, a motion under the quilt. "Things are still settling. I get birthday cards in a very nice hand. Anyway, I used to wake up, and I'd lie in the dark, and then Grandma Ruth would knock on the wall between our rooms. Three times. That was all. She never opened the door. It just meant I'm here, and you don't have to explain anything."

"That's a long time to be nine," I say.

She turns her head then and looks at me. I watch her face, quick and surprised, like a person who handed over a coin and was given back the right change.

"Yeah," she says softly. "It was."

The swing creaks. She pushes off the porch boards with one bare foot, and the whole thing sways toward my side. She doesn't say anything.

I take a swallow of the tea. It's honestly terrible. It's also the first warm thing I've had in my mouth since six o'clock, and I drink all of it.

"My father was a machinist," I say. "Never said much. When I came home after curfew, he'd leave the light on in the garage. That was all. Light on meant the door was open."

"Light on," she repeats. "That's a good one."

"I didn't know it was a language until I was grown."

"They never tell us that." She looks at the chains above her head. "I'm sorry I knocked. I thought about it for a long time first. It wasn't a trespass, I hope. You just sounded like you were holding a door shut by yourself."

My hand goes tight around the empty mug. For eleven months I've been the one holding the door, and no one has ever put a shoulder to the other side of it. It would be easier if she'd been awful about it.

"I didn't mind," I say.

"Good." She breathes out. "Okay. Good."

The wind comes up the street and rattles the mums on her side of the porch. A whole row of them in terra-cotta pots, fat and rust-colored and wildly out of proportion to the size of the porch. Somewhere down the block a dog barks twice, thinks better of it, stops.

I think about how much of this town I haven't seen, and how I don't mind the idea.

"You hum," I say.

She groans into her mug. "You said that in the basement. I'm choosing to hear it as 'you hum beautifully.'"

"I said 'not bad.'"

"It was an excellent 'not bad.'"

"You hum in tune," I say. "Three hours, and not once did you go flat. It's an odd thing to find through a wall."

She goes pink right to the tops of her ears, even in the yellow streetlight. I put the thought of making it happen again somewhere I can't reach.

"You tilt your head," she says. "When people talk. To the right."

I don't say anything for a second. "Left ear's about half of what the right one is."

"Right. That's why I walked around you in the basement."

"I noticed."

"I figured you did." She tips her head against the swing chain. "It didn't seem like something you should have to do."