—1— Wyatt
Wyatt
The curtains are gone.
In their place: a set of ugly-ass lopsided blinds.
That’s the first crime Diego Valdez commits.
I knew about Diego before he arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Valdez—or Marcos and Lottie to anyone lucky enough to live next-door to the two of them—told me their nephew would be staying in their house until it sold.
He’d look after it. Keep it alive. Tend the yard.
Hopefully “get back on his feet” … whatever that meant.
“He’s a bit rough around the edges,” Lottie warned me.
That’s neighbor-speak for: something very bad happened, and despite how long we’ve lived next to each other, we are absolutely not telling you the whole dang story over apple crumble.
So I prepared myself to be kind. To exercise grace. To wear a smile and be my good ol’ neighborly self.
Then he ripped down the curtains.
I used to enjoy the sight of them every morning through my kitchen window, coffee in hand.
Tiny blue flower print. Cheerful without trying too hard.
I even helped Lottie pick them out three summers ago at a store in Fairview while poor Marcos followed us around, grumbling about getting back to Spruce in time for lunch before Biggie’s Bites got too crowded.
Now that window wears uneven blinds with the bottom half all bent and out of whack like some pissed-off cat had beef with it.
I guess everyone has the right to ruin their curb appeal.
Even if those blinds are an offense to God, Texas, and basic fucking geometry.
The second crime happens at four in the morning on Tuesday.
A car engine roars. I’m jolted awake so hard, my soul departs my body in sheer terror before I fall right out of my bed. I stumble to the kitchen window while scraping the sleep out of my eyes.
There he is: Diego.
Grease-spotted tank top. Old jeans, sagging slightly. Shoulders broad and shiny with sweat, hunched under the hood of some sad piece of junk, tinkering away.
He’s my age. Thirty-something.
A detail I perhaps forgot to mention.
A thirty-something-year-old nephew of my neighbors who is, more or less, between jobs, between houses, or between lives.
His nose buried in the guts of a junk car at four in the morning with a surgeon’s focus.
There’s no telling if he never went to bed, or if he wakes up this early. Either answer annoys me.
I remind myself that this is the nephew my sweet and loving former neighbors adore. Then I take a breath and go back to bed.
Twenty minutes later, another ear-splitting roar.
Then another.
I dream of that car’s slow, sweet demise in a landfill far away.
Next morning, it roars again. Doesn’t he realize people work?
Morning after that, too. Kill me now.
By Friday, its floor mats are out on the grass, tools surround it all over the driveway, and all the hubcaps are gone.
Saturday, there’s a crinkled blue tarp involved.
I don’t trust a man whose mess multiplies.
“I miss the Valdezes,” my friend Mindy tells me when we run into each other at the market on my day off picking out potatoes, and I’m so glad she brought it up first, because I feel less whiny when I reply, “Me too. Lottie had such great taste in flowers. I put in a pretty spread of wildflowers under her front window. I’m so sad they moved away, but can’t blame them.
Retiring to a cozy life on the coast doesn’t sound half bad right about now. ”
“You only liked her ‘cause she was your number one customer.”
Mindy has a point. I run a flower shop.
“How’s her nephew treating the place?” she asks.
I stare at a potato like it might advise me how to answer this. “Aggressively,” I decide to say.
She winces. “That bad?”
“There’s a tarp now.” I move on to the next potato bin, not answering the question left on her face.
The third crime is arguably the worst.
It begins with an act of compassion. My own. In the form of a welcome basket.
Who doesn’t like a welcome basket?
I catch him while he’s outside working on what we’ll politely call the car.
I’ve walked the path from my front doorstep to next door a thousand times.
But today, it feels like a mile of boiling hot concrete separating our houses that I must tread delicately.
I’m a sweaty mess before I’ve said even a single word.
That word being: “Oops.”
Because I accidentally kick one of his tools left on the ground. It skitters across the driveway and stops short at his foot.
He barely gifts me a glance, staying hunched over the engine.
Doesn’t say a word.
“Sorry for kicking your wrench.” I adjust the way I’m gripping the basket.
It’s getting heavier the longer I hold it.
“I’m Wyatt. Lived next door to your aunt and uncle for …
well, forever.” I smile too tightly. My voice keeps dancing all over the place.
“Just thought I’d drop by and … and offer you … ”
He grunts as he twists something in the engine, scowling.
It’s the first thing I notice about Diego. Even before the biceps or the illegally perfect cheekbones. That scowl. He never smiles.
I try for a joke to break the tension. Is there tension, or is that just me? “So many things all over the place … maybe I should’ve brought you a toolbox instead. Looks like you need one.”
“I don’t.”
His voice isn’t rude. Not exactly.
But it isn’t kind, either.
That annoys me instantly. “I brought you a welcome basket.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s neighborly.”
“I ain’t your neighbor.”
I shift my feet. Reapply my smile as if the sweat melted it off. “Well, you’re living in their house, and—”
“Only ‘til it sells.”
This basket is growing so, so heavy. “That doesn’t mean you don’t get snacky now and then. I put papaya in here—a favorite of your uncle’s—and two big banana-nut muffins from T&S’s, which are totally to die for, you’ll seriously devour them, baked fresh every morning. And who doesn’t like muffins?”
“Did my tía put you up to this?”
I bristle. He still doesn’t look at me. “No. I’m very well capable of irritating people all on my own.”
“I don’t need any welcome.”
“Well, I’m giving it anyway.”
Diego does an unexpectedly sprightly maneuver with his foot, and in an instant, the tool I kicked across the pavement is in his hand. “This,” he says, “is a ratchet. Not a wrench.” Then he’s right back under the hood with it.
Of all the things I’ve said so far, that’s what he chose to hear?
Me calling the tool by its wrong name?
What is it with this dude? Did his aunt or uncle prepare him at all? Tell him anything about me? Or does he simply not care?
I try to picture him wearing a smile.
And literally can’t even.
Despite still wearing my own. Tightly. Refusing to believe that this is how any decent person treats someone they just met.
He’s their nephew they love and adore … He’s their nephew they love and adore … He’s their nephew—
I plop the basket on top of his folded blue tarp.
His eyes flick to it. “Said I don’t need it.”
“No one needs a welcome basket,” I respond kindly. “They just accept it. You’re free to throw it away after I leave like a normal person.”
He lifts his face from the engine.
Gives me his full attention.
All of it.
All his eyes. All his intensity. None of the car or the ratchet in his hand. All me.
And in that look, I see myself clearly for the first time: sweaty, smiling too hard, and weaponizing muffins.
My niceness has never looked so ugly before.
I step back. I trip over another tool. I won’t make the mistake of calling it another wrench, even if it looks like one. “Seriously. Toolbox. They’re cheap. Hadley’s Hardware, three-minute drive, if this old thing you’re working on even drives.”
The crease between his eyebrows deepens.
Even his shirt seems to tighten, all his muscles tensing up.
I get the feeling he’s holding back.
Maybe so am I. “Welcome to the neighborhood … for however long you decide to stay in it.” Then I take myself and whatever remains of my pride and haul it back home.
I feel his stare between my shoulder blades until the second the door of my house shuts behind me.
My back slams against it.
Silence.
I take a breath, my first real one since crossing that driveway that used to smell of flowers and whatever delicious supper Lottie was cooking up inside, but now only reeks of motor oil.
The smolder of his eyes lingers in my mind.
The loaded silence between his words.
The strength in his clenching hands.
I really fucking miss the Valdezes.