US DRAMA
Nobody answered her actual question. She noticed that. She wrote it in the notebook: asked the street, 7:14, no one could say who authorized him.
A woman came out onto the porch across the street then — the man was not alone, which Linda noted too — and the two of them stood talking like people at home. Coffee. Easy laughter she could not hear.
Well. People squatting in a house would look at home. That was rather the point, she thought. Or he headed some crew, and they had made themselves comfortable in a dead man's house because nobody on this street had asked a single hard question about it.
She watched the woman go back inside. She watched the man turn his attention back to the tree, unhurried as you please.
In April there had been a break-in two streets over, on Magnolia Court. A back window, a television, a jewelry box, a family that would never feel quite right in their own home again. Linda had gone to the community meeting about it and sat in the second row and listened to a police officer say the sentence she had not been able to put down since.
He had said: somebody, almost always, had seen something first — and decided it was probably nothing.
Linda Kramer was not going to be the somebody who decided it was nothing. Not on her street. Not on her watch.
She picked up the notebook and wrote the morning's entry in her small, exact hand. Date. Time. Description. Third occurrence this week. Chat notified.
Then she put the kettle on for a second cup, because it was barely past seven and there was nothing, yet, that rose to the level of a phone call.
But she kept the curtain where it was, and when the man finally moved from under the tree to the strip of grass along the sidewalk, she was still standing at the window, watching him come closer to the street — closer to her side of it — with the whole bright morning in front of them both.
In the end, it was the mailbox that gave Linda her opening, and Linda was honest enough with herself, later, to admit she had been waiting for one.
She collected her mail the long way that morning — out her front door at the exact minute Terry Coleman reached the strip of lawn by the sidewalk, hose in hand, close enough to the street that a conversation was not just possible but natural.
She had rehearsed it while she dressed. Nothing confrontational. A neighborly question, the kind any responsible resident would ask, with a smile on it.
"Morning," she said, at the curb, her envelopes held against her chest like a small shield.
Terry looked up from the grass. Up close he was bigger than he looked through glass, and older than she had judged — silver at the temples, lines at the eyes that the window had not shown her.
"Morning," he said.
"I'm Linda Kramer. Across the street." She nodded at her house, in case the matter was in doubt. "Neighborhood watch captain."
"Ma'am," he said, and there was something in the way he said it — not mocking, exactly, but complete, the way a man answers a title he has decided to respect on a technicality.
"I don't mean to intrude," she said, which was not true, and they both knew it at about the same time. "But I've been meaning to ask somebody, and there never seems to be anybody to ask. What is it you're doing here, exactly?"
"Watering the lawn," Terry said.
It was said so plainly, with the hose right there in his hand and the water still running in its slow arc onto the grass, that Linda felt the ground of her prepared speech shift under her.
"I can see that," she said. "What I mean is — whose lawn? Who gave you permission to be on this property?"
Terry shut the nozzle off with his thumb. The sudden quiet was very loud. Somewhere down the street a sprinkler ticked.
"This is my lawn," he said. "I live here. I'm the owner."
"The owner," Linda repeated.
"Yes, ma'am."
"The owner of this house is Mr. Coleman." She said it with the patience of a woman correcting a simple error. "He passed away. Last year. Everyone on the street knows that."
"Walter Coleman," Terry said. "He was my father."
For a moment Linda simply looked at him. The statement did not fit the shape she had built for the morning — had built, if she were honest, for the whole summer — and she could feel her mind doing what minds do with a fact that arrives in the wrong shape. It went looking for the flaw in it.
"His son," she said.
"His son," Terry agreed. "Terrence. Terry. We moved in this spring, my wife and daughter and me. House came to me when Dad died."
He said it the way a man gives a report: in order, once, without decorating it. He even smiled a little, like a person who could see exactly how the misunderstanding had happened and was willing to meet it halfway.
"The tree's his too," he added, nodding at the magnolia. "He planted it when I was nine years old. That's why I'm out here with a hose at seven in the morning, in case the neighborhood's been taking bets."
It was, Linda would think later, a moment when the whole business could have ended. A reasonable woman would have laughed at herself, apologized for the confusion, introduced herself properly, and gone home to cross a summer of worry out of a spiral notebook.
Linda Kramer was a reasonable woman in a great many ways. But she had written thirty-one entries about this man. She had raised the matter in a chat of forty-one neighbors. She had stood at her window that very morning and typed the words third time this week.