Herbal tea. Something with chamomile in it. He drove another nail into the fence board. He heard the porch chair move. He heard the rustle of a book being opened.
He kept working and then he looked up. He didn't mean to. He genuinely truly did not mean to. His eyes just moved. The way they do when something enters the edge of your vision and your brain pulls your attention toward it before you have a chance to intervene.
She was sitting in a wooden porch chair about 20 ft away on the other side of the fence. She had a white mug in her left hand and a paperback open in her right and she was reading or trying to but her eyes were drifting toward the yard. In that way people's eyes do when the light is doing something particular in the late afternoon and the light was doing something particular. There was a lamp on a hook at the corner of her porch, one of those old cast iron shepherd's hook things planted in the ground with a glass encased bulb at the top. It was already on, even though it wasn't quite dark yet.
The amber glow of it mixed with the fading October sun in a way that made the whole scene feel. Marcus stopped hammering. Something moved through him that he hadn't felt in years. He couldn't name it. He didn't want to name it, but it moved through him like a slow current, starting somewhere in the chest and moving outward.
And for a single unguarded moment, he just stood there with the hammer in his hand and let himself feel it. That was when she looked up from her book and her eyes landed directly on him. There are moments in a person's life when time does something strange. This was one of those moments. Marcus did not look away fast enough.
He knew it as it happened. The way you know you've stepped on ice a half second before your feet go out that sick lurch of recognition. Already too late. He was standing there hammer in hand staring across a fence at a woman he had never spoken to. And she was looking right back at him.
He felt heat rise up the back of his neck. He looked down at the fence board. He heard her set her mug down. He heard her footsteps in the grass. And then her voice, calm, measured, and somehow entirely unrled, came from just on the other side of the fence.
Were you watching me? Marcus looked up. She was closer than he expected. Standing maybe 5 ft away on her side of the fence, her arms loose at her sides, she wasn't angry. She wasn't frightened.
She was looking at him with a kind of level curiosity that he hadn't been prepared for. And it threw him completely off balance. No, he said too fast. I know I wasn't. I apologize.
I was fixing the fence and I just I looked up. I'm sorry. She held his gaze for a moment. You didn't answer my question, she said. He blinked.