Caleb
Three weeks ago, I’d signed for a house I hadn’t gone shopping for. This morning, at half past seven, I rolled up Sycamore Row with five Harleys behind me and my father in the passenger seat of the truck.
Curtains moved in two windows on the way in.
The man at the corner with the flagpole — Stars and Stripes one halyard, Lone Star the other, both taut on their halyards, squared off without a half-inch of slack in either line — was on his porch with a mug before we got to the second mailbox.
He didn’t wave, but he didn’t go inside either.
He just drank his coffee and watched a U-Haul and five Harleys ease into my drive.
My drive. The phrase still didn’t quite fit the mouth.
The two-story sat at the south end of the loop. Big front porch, two-car garage off to the right, deep backyard behind a privacy fence. Pale brick under fresh white trim. I made a note to take down the SOLD board before the realtor came to collect it. I cut the engine.
Tuck was off his bike first. Six-three, beard halfway down his chest now, big stupid grin. He drew up next to my window.
“Right, Mad Dog. Where’s the kitchen.”
“Through the front, hang left.”
“And the bedroom. For the redhead from Tulsa.”
“Fuck off, Tuck.”
“What. Got to know whether to put your sheets on now or after the housewarming.”
“There’s no housewarming.”
“There’s a housewarming. Your dad already said he’s bringing the smoker.”
My father, who was getting out of the truck on the passenger side and pretending not to be listening, made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
He came around the front of the truck. Sixty-three, lean as a board, dressed Saturday-morning casual, the way he’d dressed on Saturday mornings my whole life.
The small smile he wore around the shop these days — the one that hadn’t lived on his face for the years I was gone — was on him in the morning light.
I got the keys out. Walked the path to the porch with my father a step behind, the boys coming after him with the kitchen table and the couch and what I was pretty sure was my coffee pot riding loose on top of a tower of three boxes the man at the back was carrying with the dead-eyed efficiency of a man who’d promised himself he wouldn’t take two trips.
“Take two trips,” I called over my shoulder.
“Bite me, Dog.”
I keyed the lock. Pushed the door open. Held it.
Five Harleys in my driveway, my father at my shoulder, six boxes coming up my path on the shoulders of men I’d grown up calling my brothers and would die calling my brothers. A house that three weeks ago I hadn’t even been looking to buy.
I had no idea why I’d written the check.
Maybe it was because I’d heard about the house before it even hit the market from a friend of my father’s, or because it was forty thousand dollars under comparable two stories in tows.
But really, I’d bought the place because I’d been telling myself for two years I was saving for something I’d recognize when I saw it, and on the Tuesday I walked the place, I had.
I couldn’t have told a man why. You didn’t, in my line of work, argue with that kind of read.
Twenty minutes into the unload, with three of them stacking boxes in the kitchen and Tuck doing the running commentary, I came out for the last load and was alone on the porch for the first time since the bikes had pulled in.
One of the bikes had been dieseling on the kickstand for the better part of the morning. I knew what was coming before the screen door across the south property line opened.
He came down his own porch in a flannel two sizes too big for him and slippers he’d had since the second Bush. White hair, wiry build, the set face of a man who’d been rehearsing on his couch for thirty minutes. He drew up at the line where my drive met his side yard.
“What in the damn hell is that noise."
I didn't turn, didn’t brace, didn’t put the tape down. I had heard him coming and made no move to meet him at the line.
He stopped.
A man doesn't spend decades in uniform without learning to read another one.
His eyes went over me once, and with that look his anger came off him.
"How long you in?" he asked.
Different voice now.
“Thirteen years.”
“How long have you been out?”
“Three years.”
He lifted his hand to chest height and let it down again. Then he stepped across the line onto my drive and held out the same hand.
“Master Sergeant Frank Murphy. Army. Retired. Three tours, starting in ’71.”
I came across the yard and took it. His grip was a Master Sergeant’s grip — twenty-some years’ worth of younger men’s hands shaken into shape.
“Caleb Maddox.”
“You’re at the shop down on Route 9. Hank’s boy.”
“Yes.”
“Navy?”
“Yes sir”
He looked at me a long beat. “Which teams?”
“Two. Then six.”
His mouth did something that on another man might have been a smile.
“Don’t sir me, son. I’m two doors down and tired.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Master Sergeant.”
“Don’t Master Sergeant me either.”
“What do I call you?”
“Murph.”
His eyes went past me to the bike that wouldn’t stop coughing. “That one yours?”
“No.”
“Get the man to fix it.”
“I will.”
He nodded once. Turned. Went back across his own yard to his own porch in those slippers and shut his door behind him.
I went to the bike and put the knack on the cut. The cylinder gave one last cough and went quiet. The cul-de-sac eased. And that was when I heard the car door close across the road.
I didn’t look. I went into the garage instead.
The garage was the next problem on the list. Two-cars deep, the bench down the back wall, empty.
I left the roller door up. Walked to the bench.
Pulled the pegboard out from where I’d leaned it against the wall last night, lifted it up to head height, set the level on top, marked four points with a pencil between my teeth.
Drove the first screw into the stud. The bit caught.
The screw went in. I had been hanging pegboards since I was twelve and could do it without thinking, which was the point. I didn’t want to think for ten minutes.
I looked up across the road.
She was at her mailbox.
What the actual fuck.
The dark hair twisted up at her nape. The scrubs — faded teal, drawstring loose at the waist where her hand had pulled it that morning and not pulled it back.
Scuffed sneakers. Travel mug under one elbow, sheaf of envelopes in her hand, the loose piece of hair hanging at her jaw the way it had hung at her jaw at one in the morning four nights ago when she’d looked up at me from over Tuck’s hand.
My hand stopped on the screw.
I’d stood at a wall in a trauma bay four nights ago and watched her lavender hair tie on the nape of a stranger and thought don’t.
Watched the line of her neck where her hairline ran above the tie.
Watched her shoulders move when she set a stitch.
Watched the curve of her under the scrubs while she worked and was glad, twice, that my hands were in my pockets.
That lavender tie had stayed in the back of my mind ever since.
The tie was here. The nurse was here.
She was on her own path on the other side of my road sorting her mail without looking up, and she was the woman I’d thought about for ninety-six hours.
My stomach dropped.
I didn’t move. Held the screw in my fingers — something had just registered as live — and watched her the way you watched a thing you didn’t want to startle.
She didn’t look up.
She thumbed through the stack and tucked it under her elbow.
Lifted the mug. Drank. The entire block was looking at her — or would have been, if the block had been looking — and she had not the slightest idea anyone was.
She was as visible at twenty feet, in the morning light, as a woman could be. She had no idea.
Heaven had heard a prayer I hadn’t put words to and was answering it the funny way.
I’d said “I’ll see you soon” at the threshold of that bay four nights ago and I’d meant it as the promise a man makes to himself on the way out a door — that I’d find a way back. I was planning on going back to that hospital, maybe surprising her with coffee in that fluorescent corridor.
I hadn’t had moving in across from her in mind.
I closed my hand on the screw. Didn’t step out of the garage. Didn’t call across.
She still hadn’t seen me, which meant the next move was still mine.
By Tuesday night I’d been on Sycamore Row three nights and at the shop three days. I came home from the shop at seven with the sun down and found Tuck’s truck in my drive.
He was on the porch in the second rocker. Boots up on the rail. Beer in one hand, a second one on the boards beside the chair.
“Took you long enough.”
“You broke into my fridge.”
“Side door’s open. You ought to fix that.”
“Didn’t know we had a thing.”
“We don’t. I had a thing in the neighborhood. Thought I’d see how the housewarming was coming.”
“There’s no housewarming.”
“There’s a housewarming, Dog.”
I came up the steps. Took the first rocker — my father’s chair, technically, but my father had given it to me by leaving it on the porch the morning I moved in. I picked up the beer. Cracked it.
The cottage across the road was lit at one window. Kitchen, by my guess. The light was the warm yellow of a low bulb, which I noticed the way I’d been noticing everything about that house for seventy-two hours and hadn’t, until this moment, said anything aloud about.
Tuck took a pull on his beer and said nothing for a minute.
Then he said: “She works the night shift.”
I didn’t turn my head.
“I know.”
“I clocked her at the mailbox Saturday morning, Dog. Same time you did. I came out of your hallway to see why you’d gone into the garage and not come back, and what had taken you out of the move was a woman in scrubs across the road.
I’ve been waiting three days to see if you were going to say one word about her. ”
“Don’t.”
“You haven’t. Which is typical. You haven’t said two words about anything else.”
I drank my beer. Watched the kitchen window.
“How long you been on my porch?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
Dusk fell, the color draining out of the yards.
The streetlamp at the head of the block ticked on.
A woman two houses down called a dog. Across the road a shadow moved past the kitchen window and went out of frame, and my whole body registered a movement at twenty-some feet through a wall and a window as if she had touched the back of my neck — the same as it had every day for four days.
I had once been good at this.
There had been, for years, a register a man like me kept for women — easy, low, the half-grin, the slow hand.
It had been a kind of dialect, fluent for as long as I’d used it because I’d never used it on anyone who was going to ask me to mean it.
Tuck and the boys called me Casanova when the mood took them because that dialect, until last Tuesday at eleven o’clock at night in a trauma bay, had been the language I used when a woman was in the room.
I’d opened my mouth in that bay to use it on her and discovered I’d suddenly forgotten the language.
What had come out had been her name. Once. In three syllables.
Beside me, Tuck took another pull on his beer.
“That one,” he said. Not a question.
“Yeah.”
He whistled low— the long low one a man used when he’d clocked something and was making sure the clocker knew he was clocking it. He let the silence sit a long time. The dusk went the rest of the way out.
“She was the nurse,” he said, in the tone of a man placing a thing on a table the other man already knew.
“She was the nurse.”
“You going to make a move.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Not the way I’ve made one before. This one needs a different play.”
He laughed once — surprised, soft. “Christ, Dog.”
I drank.
Tuck took his boots off the rail, set the empty bottle on the boards, and stood.
"You all right?"
"Yeah."
"You sure?"
"No."
He laughed, soft.
"Casanova."
"Fuck off, Tuck." I was smiling when I said it.
"Just observing."
He headed down the steps. At the bottom, he stopped and looked back.
"Don't screw this one up."
Then he was gone.
I sat in my father's rocker with the bottle cooling against my palm.
A little while later, the porch light across the road came on and the front door opened.
Sophia stepped out in scrubs, her hair up, a travel mug in one hand and keys in the other.
She locked the door behind her, crossed the yard, and climbed into her sedan.
The engine caught on the second turn. The headlights swept across the cul-de-sac, then she was gone.
I watched the empty driveway for another minute before I called myself an idiot and went inside.
I was in the garage before eight the next morning with a mug of coffee and a carburetor spread across the bench. The roller door was up and dawn was working its way into the cul-de-sac.
Her car was back in the driveway.
I hadn't seen her come home. Now the sedan sat where it belonged, silver with dew under the first wash of morning light.
I was halfway through cleaning a jet when the screen door opened and she stepped onto the porch with a mug in both hands.
Dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders, scrubs softened from a long shift.
She still looked beautiful as she stopped at the rail and lifted her face toward the sun, closing her eyes as the warmth found her.
I didn't move.
As she stood there, I could see the tiredness still on her. The quiet too. A breeze shifted a strand of hair across her cheek and left it there. She didn't seem to notice.
I'd seen her under fluorescent lights with blood on her gloves and a trauma patient in front of her. This felt more intimate than those moments when her professional guard was up.
This was different. This was the most undefended face I'd ever looked at.
This was her private face, saved for when she thought no one was watching. I hadn't been invited to it. I had no claim to it.
Still, I sat in the shade of my garage with cooling coffee in my hands and watched her steal five quiet minutes before she headed to bed.