Jeb laughed again and sighed and looked at her through the fence. His shock of white hair gleamed in a single ray of light falling from the girl’s yard into his. His strange, spotted face and bulbous nose made the girl look away. White strands of loose thread hung down from her jean shorts and fluttered around her thighs. Her breasts, Jeb noticed, were untethered—no bra. What color were her eyes? Jeb looked down at them, perplexed to find that they were of different colors, one a strange, violet shade of blue, the other green with flecks of black and honey. Coils of green rubber hose snaked through the mess in the yard behind her. He was glad, he told the girl, to have a new neighbor, and relieved that the property was being cared for after so long. The previous owners of the house had ripped out its walls, banged around all day, left busted garbage bags of broken plaster on the curb, chalking up the blacktop. The bank had taken it over in a terrible state of disrepair, then sold it to the girl for next to nothing.
“How are you and your husband liking the neighborhood?” Jeb asked through the fence. But he already knew that the boy was gone. Over the last few weeks, Jeb had watched the boy and the girl through the scrim of brown paper covering their den windows. He’d heard their spats and squabbles. The boy’s motorcycle had been missing from its spot under the garage awning for days.
“Trevor left,” the girl said, crossing her arms. She looked down at the ground, hid her toes behind a tall tuft of crabgrass.
“He’s at work,” Jeb said, nodding, pretending to misinterpret her. “What is his profession, if I may ask?”
“No, I mean he’s gone,” the girl said. “For good this time.”
“He’s left you all alone?” Jeb hooked the fingers of one hand into the chain-link fence and took a step toward her. He placed his other hand over his heart and let his strange, sagging mandible soften into a deep frown. “That’s just awful. Poor dear.” He shook his head.
“Whatever, you know,” the girl said. She made fists of her hands, then spread her fingers out like bombs exploding. “That’s life.”
“I do know,” Jeb said gravely, his thick lips trembling in false sympathy. That was one way he knew to affect women—to seem overcome by his own unruly emotions, and then to apologize for them. “I’m sorry,” he said, gasping and frowning again. Jeb saw that there was no ring on the girl’s finger. She wasn’t a widow or a divorcée; she was only newly single, and not for long, Jeb supposed. “I just know the feeling all too well,” he said.
“Shit, don’t cry,” the girl said. Despite being pretty and soft of flesh, there was something harsh about her, Jeb thought. Something crude.
In the silence, he felt the girl’s gaze shift across his narrow torso, the crepey, spotted skin on his thin arms. She was assessing him, he knew. He cleared his throat and brought his hands together, clapped them twice as though he’d just finished a difficult task. He corrected his slumped posture. “Our houses are mirror images, you know,” he said. He held up his palms side by side in front of him. “La destra. And la sinistra, that’s me. I know a little Italian,” he added. “I took a class once, years and years ago.” Then his voice took on a bright, folksy twang as he said, as if the girl had prompted him to, “Well, come on over sometime if you get lonesome. Have a cup of coffee with your old next-door neighbor. You’re welcome anytime.”
“Are you southern?” the girl asked, ignoring his invitation. She looked snooty. She looked distrustful.
“I’m an Alabama boy,” Jeb answered. “But I’ve lived here forever. Too long. Seven presidents, if you can believe that,” he said, laughing at the repeated joke as though to cheer her with his senility. When he smiled he exposed the deep rot of his clawlike teeth. They were nearly black along the gums. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He put out his hand to mime a handshake through the chain link. The girl sniggered.
“We can shake E.T. style,” she said and extended her index finger through the fence. Jeb met the tip of it with his. He marked the moment in his mind, the feel of her finger—hot, dry, resilient. “Bye,” she said.
Jeb watched her round bouncing calves, brown from summer and flecked with mud, as she crossed the yard and went up her steps. “If you ever need a hand,” he began, but the girl didn’t hear him. Her silhouette passed behind the gray screens of the back porch, and then she was inside and her kitchen door was shut and her radio was on. She’d had the radio on a lot, Jeb had noticed, since the boy had left her. Jeb could hear almost everything that went on in her house, he’d figured out, if he listened carefully from his basement window.
? ? ?
That night, Jeb ate his dinner in the basement, listening to the sounds the girl made alone in her house. Her radio was tuned to old folk singers. Women’s music, Jeb thought, spearing his food with a heavy silver fork. He chewed thoroughly, gagging now and then on the tough, pan-fried steak, the few raw strands of carrot and green bell pepper. He thought that drinking while you ate diluted the stomach’s acids, so he rarely drank more than his morning coffee and an occasional tumbler of Kenny May whiskey when he had something to celebrate or mourn. Otherwise he was dumb to the pleasures of consumption. He did, however, enjoy the thrill of frugality in stocking large quantities of meat, purchased on sale, in his storage freezer, which he now used as a dinner table in the basement. He liked to buy his vegetables at a discount, too, usually off the sale rack in the supermarket. He’d been doing it for so long that the very sight of that neon orange discount sticker could make his mouth water.
He was glad the girl didn’t try to emulate the singer’s flourishes when she song along. He would have been embarrassed to hear that. She sang a sad song—clearly she knew all the words—and in the rests he thought he detected the faint swish of a magazine. He imagined her sitting on a colorful quilt, yellow lamplight glazing her bare arms and glinting off the vertebrae of her neck as she peered down at the pictures of everything she coveted. He felt that he was getting to know the girl by the sounds she made—her foul mouth on the phone with her girlfriends, the violent slams of her bureau drawers as she dressed, her quick steps up and down the stairs in the morning, her slow steps up and down at night. Jeb had even heard her passing gas a few times, and he hoped one day to tell her so. “And yet my affection for you did not diminish,” he imagined saying. “In fact, it only endeared you to me more.”
Before Trevor left, Jeb hadn’t liked to listen very closely. The two were always yelling at each other. “Where’re my shoes?” “Ready?” “What?” “Babe?” And then there was “Babe, come talk to me” and “Babe, look at this” and “Babe, get down here.” And the worst, “I love you, babe.” Babe. No one in Jeb’s life had ever called him that. “Jeb” was as sweet a name as he’d ever gone by, and still it had an ugly, rubbery ring to it, like a name for dishwashing detergent or soap used to mop prison floors. Jeb. It was short for Jebediah. But nobody ever asked him to explain it. Nobody could bear to look at him, he thought, much less sit and listen to him talk.