Vigilantes of Love Read Free

day of the month, I could have yelled through an open screen. She loved to feel the air slide across her at night, she said. Her windows were almost never closed in the spring, summer and fall. But last night belonged to the moon, and Eva hid from her hand. The hand that I now believed I had felt.
    “I hope it’s hot,” she demanded, when she finally opened the door to my knocking, still in her long faded floral nightgown. She passed the back of her hand across her eyes and rubbed. “I barely caught a wink last night, but I don’t intend to waste the day abed.”
    She pushed the screen door open and motioned me inside. “Come in, come in. Sometimes you’re slower than my auntie Jane’s molasses.”
    I set the coffee on the kitchen table and turned to leave.
    “What’s the matter?” she asked, holding my shoulder. “You don’t feel right.”
    “Just a dream,” I shrugged and grabbed for the latch.
    “Sit down, boy,” she insisted, and dragged me over to the kitchen table.
    “It’s nothing, Eva, really. An overactive imagination is all.”
    Her eyes bored into me and accepted no excuses. So I told her my story of walking by the bay in the moonlight. And of feeling the moon trying to push me in.
    She nodded knowingly, then grinned. “I knew you could hear her, if you only listened,” she said. As if this were a good thing. “Now you won’t think I’m a crazy for drawing my shutters.”
    I didn’t say anything. She took my hands in her own. “I’ve been telling her no for so long, sometimes I wonder myself why. I’ve spent these past weeks enjoying your company, but sooner or later, I have to answer her. She may have pushed your shoulder, but it’s my attention she’s trying to get.”
    I didn’t say anything as she sipped a loud slurp of coffee through the plastic spout.
    “You stay in on the night of the full moon from now on, you hear?”
    I agreed. Then she turned the conversation to her daughter in Des Moines. Eventually she shooed me out to my painting, as if I had been the one insisting on dawdling at her table.
    * * * * *
    Not long after that, I bought myself a secondhand pair of Dockers and a button-down pale blue shirt that didn’t have five or six stains down the middle, and got myself a part-time job at the Chinese grocery down on Hyde.
    They didn’t say anything about my coming to work in the same clothes every day since I was careful to wash out my shirt every night in the sink. I used my first paycheck to buy three more outfits.
    Two more paychecks and I moved into a tiny studio apartment. It was south of Market, but I was off the street and out of the tuberculosis hotels. I hung my meager wardrobe in the single closet off the kitchen, with hangers from Eva, and scrubbed the floors clean of grease and mold with wire mesh and a towel I found in a dumpster out back. There wasn’t much to boast about in the place – it had no air conditioning (a noticeable detraction as the heat began to rise and the fog disappear), no bed (I slept on the floor on a rolled-up pair of jeans) and the kitchen was really just a sink and a half-sized refrigerator sitting on scuffed tan tile in the corner of the room. The refrigerator rattled dangerously whenever the cooling element kicked on.
    But it was mine.
    And while the lock was less secure than the two rusted hinges on the front door, I didn’t have anything I was worried about the street boys stealing. It was hard to believe, but life was actually looking up.
    It was a Wednesday afternoon, weeks later, when I finally finished all the painting on her house and garage that Eva could possibly devise. The air was scented with salt and longing. Long rays of sunshine colored the ground in tints of amber and yellow, and the roses on Eva’s porch smelled stronger than bottled musk.
    The day before, a girl who I’d seen before eyeing me along with the lettuce heads at the grocery finally braved the fates to talk to me.
    “Where is the soy sauce?” she