Good Neighbors Read Free Page A

there would be early-morning showers?
    She looks at the sky, and though it’s filled with gray clouds illuminated by the light of the moon, they don’t look heavy enough for rain. Not yet. But maybe she’s wrong. If so, she hopes she gets home before the downpour starts.
    She didn’t bring an umbrella.

3
    Kat turns her car onto Austin Street.
    She can see her apartment complex now.
    She can also see one of her neighbors – she forgets his name, a colored man who’s always been very nice, who once even jump-started her car for her – pulling his Buick Skylark out of the Long Island Railroad parking lot, turning his car toward her, heading in the opposite direction.
    As their cars pass each other, the two neighbors wave.
    Frank! She thinks his name is Frank. She remembered as soon as she saw his face clearly, the orange glow of his cigarette cherry floating in front of it like a pet firefly.
    She wonders what he’s doing out at four o’clock in the morning. She knows Frank’s wife is a nurse and often works the night shift – Kat has seen the lights in the apartment lit up when she gets home from her shift at the bar – but she has never seen either of them, Frank or his wife, outside at this time of night.
    Kat pulls her car into the Long Island Railroad parking lot, which sits just across the street from her apartment complex, the Hobart Apartments. She pulls the Studebaker into the empty spot Frank’s Buick just pulled out of and kills the engine. The sound of the radio dies with it.
    Only once has her short drive home from the bar lasted longer than a few minutes – the length of a song – and that was because she took a different route home so she could drop off one of the regulars who spent the last of his cash on a drink and couldn’t afford the cab fare. Or to tip her for the drink. Even though nothing bad happened during that drive, it was the one and only time Kat ever gave a customer a ride home. She felt nervous the whole time, her palms sweating as they gripped the steering wheel, but more importantly, she felt it somehow crossed a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
    A breeze blows through the branches of the oak trees lining the street. A few leaves blow away, but most hold fast.
    Kat pushes her way out of the car just in time to see a black-and-white police cruiser roll quietly by, the red light on its roof jutting up like a lipstick. She sees the pale face of the lone policeman inside glancing in her direction, and then he’s gone. She watches the red glow of the taillights until the cruiser turns a corner at the end of the block.
    In the distance, a car horn honks.
    A dog howls at the moon, and then a shout, shuddup , a banging sound, the dog yelps, and then silence.
    She’s tired. Just so gee-dee tired.
    Kat believes that people should hibernate, like bears. Winter wears a soul out. If people could hibernate through it, they could wake in the spring refreshed, ready for the rest of the year. They could face it with hope, maybe even optimism. Instead, by the time spring rolls around, as it is rolling around now, people have been made brittle by winter. Cold and brittle. They’re ready to shatter.
    Kat slams her car door home, sees she forgot to lock it, pulls it open, hammers the lock down, and closes it again.
    She can hardly wait for her bath.
    But only two small steps nearer her apartment’s paintpeeling front door, Kat freezes.
    She swallows, afraid.
    Suddenly her mouth is very dry.
    In the shadows of the night she sees a hulking figure standing near one of the scarred oak trees that guard the front of the Hobart Apartments, that stand between her and her warm bath.
    The hulking figure steps away from the tree and moves toward her.
    It – he – seems to be pulled toward her, like a magnet, like a yo-yo on a string, seems to glide toward her rather than walk. She doesn’t notice the sort of lumbering brokenmachine flump-flump-flump a man walking normally has when he shuffles from one