The way they spilled out across the porch. The way a single lamp on the porch rail glowed like something you'd see in a painting of somewhere you used to belong. Marcus told himself he was just tired. He got out of the van and went inside. He didn't meet his new neighbor that first week.
He heard her a few times footsteps on the porch. The occasional sound of a door, the quiet hum of a car engine starting in the morning, but she kept to herself and Marcus was fine with that. He had Darius. He had work. He had the rhythm of his days.
And he wasn't looking to disrupt it. But Darius noticed her first. It was a Saturday afternoon about 10 days after she moved in. Marcus was underneath the kitchen sink trying to track down a slow leak. His head in the cabinet and his knees on the lenolium.
Darius walked in from outside. Hey, Dad. Hand me the channel lock. It's on the counter. A pause.
Then the sound of the pliers being set in his hand. There's a lady next door, Darius said. I know. She was carrying a box from her car. It looked heavy.
"Okay, another pause. " Marcus could feel his son standing there. Doing that thing where he was about to say something and was working up the courage to say it. You didn't help her. Marcus stopped working. He pulled his head out from under the cabinet and looked up at his son.
Darius was 12 years old, already getting tall, already starting to develop the watchful, careful stillness that Marcus recognized because he had worn it himself at that age. He had his mother's eyes big and dark and perceptive in a way that sometimes felt unfair, like being studied by someone who already knew the answer. "I didn't see it," Marcus said. "Because you were under the sink, right? You're always under something," Darius said simply and walked back outside.
Marcus lay there for a moment, wrench in hand, staring at the pipes above him. "You're always under something. " He tightened the fitting harder than it needed to be. He met Clare Whitmore for the first time on a Wednesday. It was just after 6:00 in the evening. Marcus had gotten home early rare for him because the appointment he'd had in Greensboro canled and for once he had nothing he urgently needed to do.
He decided to fix the fence. The section along the property line between his yard and the Kowalsski place had two boards that had been loose since spring and he'd been putting it off because something in him resisted fixing things that faced in that direction. He couldn't have explained why exactly. But he grabbed the hammer in the box of nails and went out anyway because the fence wasn't going to fix itself and neither was anything else. He was halfway through the second board when he heard her back door open.
He didn't look up. He heard footsteps on the porch light ones. Careful. And then the sound of liquid being poured into something ceramic. He could smell it a second later.