Page 8 of Challenged By the Next-Door Veteran

She yawns, wide and unselfconscious, and stands. The swing swings back to me, empty, still warm on one side. She picks up the mug I've set on the boards and tucks the quilt around her. At her door she turns and looks at me over her shoulder with the porch light in her hair.

"Thank you for the not-asking," she says.

"Thank you for the tea," I say. "It was terrible."

She laughs, a real one that goes up and out into the cold. Then she goes in, and the screen door doesn't scream behind her. I'm left on a swing with her warmth cooling into the boards.

I don't go back to bed. There's no point. I shower in the dark and pull on running gear by feel, and a little after five I'm lacing my boots on the porch steps with the sky still full dark.

The air is cold enough to see. Somewhere down the block, a porch light clicks off. I think about her light, still burning in the window behind me, and I think about the fact that I've been up since the dream and my hands are steady.

I run. I take the whole length of Larkspur Lane under the streetlamps, past porches hung with bundles of corn and unlit jack-o'-lanterns, past a yard where somebody has already staked a hand-lettered sign that says GATHER, SETTLE, STAY.

Mist lies in the low places. The town opens out around me in pieces: a church with a white steeple and a clock that's four minutes slow, a green with a bandstand and a cannon on a stone plinth that I note and file and do not look at twice. A corner café called Maple & Main with its lights coming on one by one.

In the big window, somebody has drawn a sandwich board in chalk. PIE TILL YOU'RE SORRY, it says, in letters that curl and swell with a sure, loose hand. A tree beside it, its leaves in four colors of chalk. In the corner, in tiny script: H.B.

I stand and look at it with my chest heaving and my breath smoking and I think, Oh.

Then I go home.

The duplex is still quiet when I let myself in. I take the stairs carefully, listening without meaning to for any sound from the other side of the wall. Nothing. She's still asleep, or she's lying there the way I was a few hours ago, staring at the ceiling and thinking about a weekend that has an ending written into it. I strip out of the running gear in the half-dark and stand under the shower until the hot water runs cold.

When I get out, I can hear her moving next door. A drawer. The soft thump of feet on old floorboards. The pipes shudder when she turns on her own shower, and I stand there with a towel around my waist and my palm flat on the tile, listening to the water run on the other side of the wall.

By seven I've made coffee in a kitchen that's the exact mirror of hers. Her counter's on the other side of the wall from mine. I'm leaning against it with my mug when her voice comes through the plaster, bright and clear.

"Grant! Lacey! Congratulations. I'm just so, so happy for you both."

It's a good voice. Warm and breezy, with a little laugh tucked in the end like a flower in a buttonhole. There's a pause. I hear her breathe out. Then she tries again.

"Congratulations! Honestly, I couldn't be happier. You look wonderful."

Slightly lower. Slightly slower. The laugh is gone. A third time, and a fourth, and by the fifth I've put my coffee down because I've stopped drinking it. She keeps adjusting. Brighter. Lower. A smile you can hear. Each one is better than the last and each one is farther from her.

"I'm so happy for you," she says on the sixth try, and her voice cracks on happy.

A short silence. Then a wet laugh and the sound of a hand slapping a counter. "Oh, for God's sake, Hollis."

I'm at her door before I've thought about it. I knock once, low, at an hour when I know better.

She opens it with a mug in one hand and her hair half up in a clip. She's wearing a white terry robe, belted at her waist over the wide curve of her hips. Thick bare calves. Orange polish chipped on her toes. Behind her, I can see a mirror in the hall and a black dress hung on the door.

She goes pink from the neck up. "You heard that."

"Wall's thin."

"I was practicing."

"I know. The sixth one was worse than the first."

Her mouth falls open. "I'm sorry, you're critiquing my—"

"You sound like someone practicing," I say. "Nobody believes the practiced one. Including you."

"Oh, and you'd know."

"I used one for eleven months," I say. "I had a very good one. Everyone bought it. It didn't help."