Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
There’s a flat spot in the grass where the bike usually lies. Right now, there’s no bike there.
That’s the first thing I check, every time. Before the cars, before the windows, before anything. The bike tells me where the boy is without my having to see him, and today the bike tells me he’s gone.
He must be with his father.
I’m usually more on top of things than this.
Once, I’d heard his father say something about having custody every other weekend. I’d been standing outside the hardware store, and the father had been loud enough that I didn’t have to work to overhear anything.
People would hand you their whole schedule if you stood close and looked bored.
I stand farther back than usual, deeper in, where the rhododendrons grow thick enough to swallow me. Patience isn’t a virtue to most people. It’s an inconvenience, something to be medicated away or scrolled past.
Those people have never understood that the waiting is the whole art of it—the whole fun of it, for that matter. That a thing rushed is a thing ruined.
I don’t intend to ruin this.
So, even though the boy isn’t here, I wait. I watch. I learn the rhythm of this place.
The house gives me nothing for a long while.
Then the door opens.
A teenager comes out. He moves slowly, carefully. He crosses to the edge of the porch and stops there, looking toward the woods.
Not toward the driveway. Not toward the barn.
Toward me.
I go still.
He scans slowly, working the woods left to right. His eyes pass over the place I’m standing, and they keep going.
Then they come back.
They stop.
Nothing in his face changes. He doesn’t rise. He doesn’t call out.
Nine seconds pass. I count them.
Then he looks away.
I stay where I am and turn that over. It could be nothing. Or he could have seen me.
I’d like very much to know which.
An engine turns onto the road below. It’s climbing, and it’s climbing fast enough that I know the vehicle before it clears the trees.
The blue truck. It’s him again.
The neighbor.
He’s been in this yard twice now that I’ve seen.
He’s going to be a problem.
And I need to decide what to do about him before he ruins everything.