Nothing to see here. Keep moving.
He steps toward the window. One large stomp forward. Then he shields his eyes with a palm at his brow and rests the edge of his hand against the glass.
“I see you,” he states.
For some reason, my eyes leap to Tripper on the screen, about to reveal a finished kitchen. If only he could see me and help me out by getting rid of this poser on my porch. I’m ridiculous. What I should be is frightened. I should scream, but who would hear me? I’m alone in this big house with acres of distance to the next property.
If a person screams with no one around to hear it, is there really a sound?
“Go away,” I bellow toward the window. “Howard isn’t here.”
A pause passes as he observes me, and I look back at him. If I were to romanticize the moment, I’d be certain our eyes lock, but they don’t, and I’m no romantic.
“Beverly?”
My throat clogs. How could he know my name? “What do you want?” My voice comes out a screech like an owl. Who are you?
“I’m looking for Bev.” No one except family calls me Bev. Ever. Nicknames are stupid.
“Then why did you ask for Howard?” I yell. He retracts his hand from the window and shakes his head.
“I’m looking for Howard’s wife.” Howard’s wife. After all these years, it’s strange to hear the label, and it proves this man doesn’t really know me or us. Howard’s been gone for seventeen years. Disappeared.
“Howard isn’t here, but…but I have a gun.” I reach for the nearest large object and hold it up, aiming it toward the window as though I intend to shoot.
A deep chuckle ripples through the glass. “That’s the oddest shaped gun I’ve ever seen, and you’re holding it wrong.” He chuckles a second time. “It looks like a baseball bat.”
Darn it. He’s observant albeit incorrect. The large needle used for chunky yarn knitting is one of Hannah’s attempts to find me a hobby. Chunky knit—it’s all the rage. Hannah’s encouraging me to make blankets. I’m not very good at it.
“Bet my swing is better than yours.” He laughs at his baseball joke and holds up his left arm. Ignoring his guffawing, my eyes trace the outline of his appendage, thinner and leaner than the opposite one. A glint flashes from the metal in his hand.
He has a gun.
He definitely has a gun!
“Go away,” I shout again, sitting up straighter, finding boldness I don’t feel. “If you’re with the Wraiths, I apologize. If you’re a bill collector, we don’t have any money.” My daughter has taken over our finances. I won’t consider selling. I don’t want to leave, but I can’t answer why.
Waiting.
So much waiting.
“I don’t know who the Wraiths are, and I’m not here collecting on a debt.” He pauses again, lowering his hand with the gun and lifting his other hand to shield his eye for the window. “Well, not exactly.”
I don’t have the slightest idea what he means. All I do know is I want him off my porch.
“We don’t have anything of value,” I holler, finding it strangely comical that we are caterwauling at each other through double panes of glass. What I stated is the truth, though. All the pretty items women would have received from a wedding—china, crystal, silver—I don’t own. “Being pregnant out of wedlock does not garner a girl a trousseau,” my mother told me after I’d informed her of my impending nuptials and motherhood. Real love, I’d told my parents. A dream come true.
What a nightmare in reality.
“That isn’t true.” His voice is deep, sergeant worthy, and it takes me a moment to realize he means items of value and not my nightmare. He pulls back from the window, facing the front property, twisting his neck to survey the land with a slow sweeping crane of his head. Then he spins for the window, curling his forefinger and thumb around an eye like a monocular, observing me once again. “Everything of value is within my line of sight.”
My skin prickles like a sleeping limb fighting to awaken, and I have so many dormant body parts left restless and yearning for too long. It’s longer than I care to remember since I’ve been with a man. And something in what he said and how he said it in that too-loud lumberjack voice makes me shiver.
My eyes flick to the television set just as Tripper kisses his wife’s temple. Then my sight lowers to my left leg, thinner than the right, withered like a wilted tomato vine. No man is going to be interested in me. The thought pisses me off. Even my own husband wasn’t interested after the first few years.
“You were never going to be enough for me, Beverly,” Howard had said.
“Leave my porch,” I squawk, my ire growing. I hold the knitting needle higher as if I’ll javelin throw it at him if he comes closer, which is preposterous as he’s behind the barrier of the window.
Or am I the one barred inside?
“I think I’m getting off on the wrong foot here,” he mutters loud enough I can still make out the depth of his voice through the window.
“Is that a joke?” I hiss. Wrong foot? Is he implying how I can’t effectively use mine?
You’ll walk again.
Doctors. All liars. I’d been vain enough back at thirty-five to consider a limp a weakness, but at almost forty-five, I couldn't care less. No one sees me anyway.
My eyes narrow at the stranger as the weight of his glare presses back at me. He’s taking me in, assessing me. No one has really looked at me—seen me—in years. People either consider me old and senile or they feel sorry for me. Moreover, they pity Hannah—stuck with an invalid, homebound mother—as if her plight has been worse than mine. I snort.
“Beverly, may I please come in? Or maybe you could step out?” he questions. “I have a proposal for you.”
The man on the porch pulls back from the window once more and hangs his head when I don’t respond. A hand scrubs over his face while the other dangles at his side. My eyes squint, and when I twist my head for a better view, I realize he isn’t holding a gun. The metal glint coming from his hand, or rather where a hand should be, is a two-pronged claw like a small garden utensil used for raking. Some kind of material wraps up his arm and over his elbow, then tucks under the edge of his T-shirt. The straps I assumed were a gun holster are the supports for a prosthetic arm.
My shoulders slump a bit. Oh my.
While there’s nothing this man could propose that I want to hear, staring at his arm causes all kinds of sensations to conflict in me. My heart races behind my ribs in a way I’ve never felt. Maybe I’m having a heart attack. My stomach twirls like a whirligig. Lowering the knitting needle, I reach for my arm crutches and slowly raise myself from the rocker, pulled by an almost magnetic force to an unsuspecting metal object. Like attracts like, my father-in-law used to say, and even though I don’t know him and it’s preposterous, I sense a familiarity with the porch invader.
After all this time, maneuvering around my living room is still awkward and clumsy at best, and ridiculously robotic. My crutches are the kind that cuff around my forearms; however, it’s been nearly ten years, and Hannah prefers to push me in a wheelchair. Her long strides are constantly in a rush compared to my slow hobble. Plus, I sit most of the day, so my legs don’t work the way they did before the accident. Not to mention, my left leg lags due to the hip injury.