The New Neighbor by Leah Stewart Read Free Book Online

“Across the pond.”
    “I saw you out on your deck the other day,” I said. “I waved.”
    “That’s right,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you close up.”
    “And you as well,” I said. I’d been hoping, I realize, for more reaction than she gave me to the news of this connection between us, but she stayed calm and businesslike. Only now does it strike me I’m lucky she didn’t ask how I knew the distant woman on the porch had been she, since my story was that I’d contacted her only because I’d seen her flyer and wanted a massage. One doesn’t want to tell a new acquaintance that one poked through her mail.
    “So,” she said, glancing around, “if you’ll tell me where to set up, I’ll do that, and then we can talk.”
    “Where to set up?” I repeated blankly.
    “The massage table,” she said, indicating the contraption with a nod.
    “Oh. Oh, yes, of course,” I said. I experienced a startling moment of panic. In employing this ruse to meet her, I had failed to consider the necessity of committing to it. In what room of my house was I willing to take off my clothes and have a stranger touch me? In no room at all. I must have looked as dumbfounded as I felt, because, trying to help, she asked, “The bedroom?”
    When you live alone your bedroom becomes a sacred space. As if to stop her from insisting, I said, “The guest room,” and pointed to the hallway off the right side of the living room. She obediently went that way. “Be right back!” she called out in a cheerful voice that didn’t suit her.
    I eased myself into one of my mother’s uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. When I’m alone I sit in my armchair and put my feet up on the ottoman, but it takes me a little while to get back up from that position, and the maneuvering involved is not something I’d care to perform in front of a witness. The armchair did not belong to my parents, unlike most of the furniture in the house. When my parents died in 1982, first one, then the other, I inherited many things—the antique couch with its carved crown and spiral arms, the looming, majestic sideboard in the dining room. At the time I still lived in Nashville, in a house fully furnished by my own things. I bought this house more or less to contain their furniture, and when I moved into it, selling my furniture and keeping theirs seemed the easiest choice. But my parents owned heavy, dark pieces, mournful and grand, and so my house never seems to have enough light in it, despite the skylight I had installed in the living room.
    When she reemerged she had divested herself of everything but a folder and a pen. She gave me a professional smile and came over to sit in the straight-backed chair next to mine. I realize now that I was expecting her to pay me some polite compliment on the house or its furnishings and that the fact that she didn’t accounted for the slight irritation I felt as she perched beside me with the folder on her knees. The folder, I saw, had my name on it. Maggie Jean Riley , it said. I must have given her that name when she was asking all those questions on the phone—whether I was on medications (of course), whether I’d had a massage before (of course not). She opened the folder and poised her pen over the form inside. “I started filling this out when we talked earlier,” she said, “but some things I like to discuss in person.”
    “Wouldn’t you rather work at a table?”
    “I’m fine, thank you,” she said, but as she asked me questions about my aches and pains and I answered them she didn’t look fine, awkwardly repositioning form and folder on her knee, the pen pressing too far into the paper. This stubbornness increased my irritation. And why had I called myself Maggie Jean ? That hadn’t been my name in many years.
    “You can change that to Margaret,” I said, interrupting whatever question she’d been asking.
    “I’m sorry, what?” she asked. Her voice so very polite.
    I pointed at my name