The New Neighbor by Leah Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

on the folder. “That should say Margaret,” I said. “Not Maggie Jean.”
    But you told me Maggie Jean , she should have said. Or, Don’t take that tone with me . She just crossed out the name, neat as you please, and wrote Margaret in small letters above it. Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they’d let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more. A few years ago one of my grandnieces tried her hand at my dead sister’s recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie. I was allowed only one bite before she called for my verdict. “I’ve had better,” I said. No one slapped me, or snatched the pie away, as I deserved. They laughed.
    I insisted on paying Jennifer Young up front, even though she said people usually did it after. I wouldn’t let her bring me my checkbook either. I made her watch me cane into the study to get it and cane my way back once I had it. So excruciatingly slow! When she could have popped there and back with time to grab a smoke besides. When you’re young you have to invent tasks to fill the time, while I can kill an hour just making myself some tea.
    She had to help me onto the table. I took off my clothes by myself in the room. She said I could take my underwear off if I wanted to. This was a strange thing to be told. I left it on. I wanted to get on the table by myself, but I couldn’t manage it, probably because I tried to do it too fast, trying to outrun her threatened knock. I wrapped myself in the sheet, as she’d instructed, and she came in and helped me up. This was all so humiliating that I wanted to weep. It’s not as though I’m unaccustomed to being poked and prodded. I accept medical treatment with the not-quite-there dignity the sick and the elderly do their best to master. I suppose I just hadn’t wanted her first knowledge of me to be knowledge of my fragile, frustrating body. I hired her to do exactly what she was doing without expecting her to do it. Perhaps I imagined she’d recognize all I’d wanted was a pretext for meeting her.
    Lying facedown on that table I was so tense I must have looked like a prisoner awaiting torture. I could feel her presence behind me, although she didn’t speak. I braced against her touch. After a moment I felt her lay her two palms flat on me, one on each of my shoulders. I thought she would begin to move them, but she didn’t. Then I thought she might say something, but she didn’t. I could feel the heat in her hands. I waited for her to do something. I opened my eyes and looked at my carpet and closed my eyes again. I watched each second pass like you watch each single, persistent drop from a leaky faucet form and fall. Suddenly the strangest thing happened—something in my shoulders let go. It was like caving in. It was like my shoulders had been brick and now they were pudding. I had had no idea.
    She exhaled. “Good,” she said, and I felt as pleased as a child to have done what she wanted. “You keep a lot of tension there,” she said.
    “You have to keep it somewhere,” I said, trying for insouciance.
    She didn’t answer. She began to move her hands, gently, down my back. I must have drifted, honestly, because I don’t remember much else until she pressed a spot in my lower back, and a shock went through me, some kind of electrical pulse. I startled. “Hmmm,” she said. She rubbed a series of circles around that spot.
    “You remind me of someone,” I said. I blurted it, stupidly, like the place on my back had been a button that released that thought. She stilled. I felt the wariness in her body, even without being able to see her. “An old friend,” I said. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”
    “Oh,” she said, but flatly. It was another moment before her hands resumed their ministrations.
    It’s intriguing, isn’t it, that that comment frightened her? I don’t know what that means but I’d like to. At any rate I see now why I’ve taken such an interest in her, from the moment I saw