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Free preview · read by Jessica

The crew comes Tuesdays and Thursdays. They’re through that gate by ten past seven. In ten years I’ve never once been asleep when they came.

That isn’t insomnia. I’m up at five like everybody else out here. A body that worked thirty-one years doesn’t learn a new trick at sixty-four, and the best two hours of a Florida day come before the heat sits down. So I’m on my lanai with coffee when the flatbed comes up Camellia, trailer swaying behind it. Who else is awake out here at that hour? Nobody but the people getting paid. I’ve watched that truck come up that street about eight hundred times. I could tell you who’s drivin’ by how it takes the turn at the mail cluster.

Mateo takes it wide and slow. Everybody else cuts it and clips that curb. That curb has been rebuilt twice.

Nine years I’ve been getting up at five in this house and watching other people work. I buried my husband at fifty-three and eighteen months after that a man out here taught me what I was worth to him, and what it cost me was nine years of being a woman who watches things and doesn’t put a hand on any of them. Nine years is what the carefulness cost. I had the arithmetic on that done by about six o’clock that Tuesday morning, which is the one piece of luck in this whole business, because by nine forty there was a girl in the water and after that nobody out here got to be careful about anything.

They unload at the end of my street. The board won’t let them park on the pool lot since the Hendersons complained about the noise, which is a thing I sat and listened to a grown woman say out loud in a meeting. Six men startin’ at seven so that woman can have her bougainvillea. Blowers, two mowers, the string trimmers, the little trailer with the mulch. Four of them under thirty. One past sixty, and the toughest human being inside this gate, myself included.

And Mateo Ferrer at the gate of that trailer in the half dark, handing things down.

I’ve been looking at that man for two years. There are eleven kinds of looking out here and this community can tell them apart at forty yards. Mine wasn’t the kind where you make a remark to your girlfriend by the pool and everybody laughs and that’s the end of the matter. Diane does that one. Barbara does it twice a week and means nothing by it whatsoever. Mine was the quiet kind. The kind where a woman says nothin’ to anybody for two years and gets up early on Tuesdays.

Thirty-four years old. Sixty-four and thirty-four.

I know exactly what a thing like that’s called. I’ve watched it happen to other women out here. I’ve had my opinions about it too, from the shade, with a drink in my hand. I used to do a whole routine at that pool about Phyllis Dermott and that tennis pro of hers. It was funny. People laughed. Now I get to eat every word.

He came up the street on foot while the boys set up. He always walks it. He walks the first block before anything runs, so he can see what the weekend did to his beds. He has a way of standing in front of a bed with his hands at his sides, looking at it, that I understand in my bones. That’s what I used to do in front of a room of charts at six in the morning for thirty-one years.

My bougainvillea on the back corner has been dying since March. Three different people have told me three different reasons.

“Morning.”

“Morning, Miss Renee.”

“Do not Miss Renee me at seven in the morning.”

“Renee.” He smiled with half his mouth, the way he does, and came up the drive. “You’re out here early.”

“I’m out here every time you come. You have known that for a while.”

It stopped him four feet short. I watched it land. I watched him decide not to pretend he hadn’t heard me, which is the whole reason I’ve been looking at that man for two years. He doesn’t perform. Everybody out here performs. Three hundred houses in a permanent audition, and this one stands in front of a dying plant with his hands at his sides.

“I know,” he said.

“All right then.”

“Your bougainvillea isn’t getting water.”

“Pat Pruitt says it’s a fungus.”

“Pat Pruitt says a whole lot of things.” He went past me to the corner of the house, crouched, put two fingers down in the mulch. Came up with nothing on them. “Your line is cracked under that corner. The whole zone runs past this bed. Six weeks dry, maybe eight. I told the office in April.”

“Nobody told me.”

“Nah. Nobody tells anybody out here.” He wiped his hand on his thigh and looked up at me from down there in my own mulch, which is a thing I have no defense against. “Omar can be on it Thursday. Forty minutes.”

“The board will want a form.”

“They’ll want a form,” he agreed. He stood up, and I heard his knee.

“Oh. Your knee, at thirty-four?”

“My knee at thirty-four.”

“You’re thirty-four years old.”

“I’ve carried sod since I was nineteen.” He brushed his hands off. “You wanna know what thirty-four looks like after that, ask my knee. Do not ask my face.”

I laughed. I hadn’t planned on laughing. It got out of me the way a laugh does when a woman hasn’t had a conversation in two days. The sun was coming up over the Danforths’ roof and lighting the whole side of him. And I thought, Renee Calder, sixty-four years old, standing in your own driveway in a nightshirt and a cardigan. What exactly do you think is fixin’ to happen here.

Then I went on and did it anyway.

“Come inside. Let me give you a cup of coffee.”

Six men, four houses down. The blower not running yet. Maria Benavides at her mailbox in a robe, two hundred feet away. She looked. She stood there with her hand still in the mailbox and she looked. Then she went inside.

He stood there.

“Renee.”

“It’s a cup of coffee, Mateo.”

“It isn’t a cup of coffee.”

There it was, out in my driveway at seven in the morning, said by a man with mulch on his hands. Nothing in his voice was pleased with itself. That’s what got me. A younger man gets handed a thing like that out here and he gets real pleased with himself. I’ve watched it happen at that pool to boys who deliver furniture.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

He looked down the street at his crew. Then back at me. And I stood in my own driveway with my heart going like I was nineteen, waiting on a thirty-four year old man to decide about me. I promised myself a long time ago I was finished waiting on anybody’s decision.

“I have to get them started,” he said.

“I know you do.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Mine is the door that’s open.”

It took him twenty-five. I’ve never in my life been so aware of a kitchen. I started the coffee. Then I stood in the middle of my own floor with no idea what to do with my hands. I thought about going back there for something better. Then I thought, if I change out of this and come back in the good one, I’m a woman who changed. He will know. I’ll know. So I stayed in the nightshirt and the cardigan, pushed my hair back one time, and that was the whole of the preparation.

I’d already decided one thing standing there. If he wanted it to be a cup of coffee, a cup of coffee is what it would be. I’m sixty-four. I haven’t been anybody’s emergency since the Clinton administration. I wasn’t about to start begging in my own kitchen.

Then the screen door went. He came in with his boots off, which I hadn’t asked him to do, and set them side by side on the mat the way a man does in his mother’s house. The second I saw him do that, I was finished.

He washed his hands at my sink without being told. I handed him the cup. Our fingers went past each other, and neither one of us took hold of anything. He drank one swallow and set it down on my counter. Then we looked at each other across about three feet of my kitchen for what felt like a week.

“You have been out there Tuesdays for two years,” he said.

“I have.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

“Why you never said nothin’?”

“Because I’m sixty-four years old. Because you work for this community. Because I’ve watched what this community can do to a person.” I had my back on the counter and both hands behind me, holding the edge. “And because if I said it and I’d it wrong, I would have had to stop coming out at seven. I like coming out at seven.”

“You had the wrong part wrong,” he said.

“Say the right part, then.”

He came across that kitchen.

He didn’t grab me. He put one hand flat on the counter beside my hip and leaned in slow. Slow enough that I could have turned my face. He would have stopped, gone back to the mat, laced his boots, and left. The both of us knew the purpose of the slowness. I didn’t turn my face. He smelled like cut grass, diesel, clean cotton. His mouth went to the side of my neck first, under the ear, not the lips, which is what a man does when he has decided he has got time. My whole body came up off that counter.

“Mateo.”

“Mm.”

“Do not be careful with me.”

He came back and looked at me from four inches away.

“Why would I be careful with you?”

“Because I’m sixty-four.”

“I’ve been careful with you for two years,” he said. “It was never about that.”

Then he kissed me.

Thirty-one years I worked. Thirty-six years I was married to a man I buried at fifty-three. Four years I’ve had a Friday arrangement with a widower out of Pennsylvania. And in between those last two there was eighteen months where I was a new widow and a man in this community put his hand on the back of my neck in a parking lot, and I spent nine years afterward carrying what I found out about that, which wasn’t that he was a liar. Everybody knew he was a liar. It was that I hadn’t been chosen. I’d been scheduled. In all of that I don’t know that I’ve ever been kissed like a woman who was wanted that minute. Gene kisses me like a man closing a door behind him. This wasn’t the same animal. This was a mouth that had been thinking about mine for a while and had got tired of thinking.

I had his shirt up out of his belt before I knew my hands had gone. He is built the way a man is built who has never seen the inside of a gym. Thick through the back and the arms, soft across the middle. He took a breath when my hands went flat on his stomach, and I felt the thought go through him about holding that breath.

“Do not do that.”

“Do not do what.”

“Do not hold your stomach in. I’m sixty-four years old, honey. We aren’t doing that in this kitchen.”

He laughed into my mouth. That’s the moment it stopped being two people being brave.

He got the cardigan off my shoulders, down my arms, onto my kitchen floor. I didn’t look at where it went. The nightshirt is cotton, old, washed four hundred times. Nothing goes under that shirt and never has. He found that out with his hand and went still for a second.

“Renee.”

“Mm hm.”

“You came out there with nothing under this.”

“I’ve come out there with nothing under this every Tuesday and every Thursday for two years,” I said. “This is the first time anybody has had a hand on it.”

He took the nightshirt up over my head.

So there I was in my own kitchen at ten past seven in the morning, naked at sixty-four, in front of a man thirty years younger, with the light coming all the way in that east window. That light doesn’t work the way a lamp works. A lamp picks. That light takes the whole woman. The belly, which isn’t from children because I never had any, it’s only what a body does after sixty. The thighs. My tits, which went south a long time ago and went at different speeds, so the right one has been headed off on its own since about 2009. The scar on my knee from a parking lot in Scranton.

I didn’t cover anything. I didn’t say anything cute about it either.

I watched him look. What I was watching for is the thing a woman knows by my age, the half second where a man’s face does arithmetic. It isn’t cruelty. It’s a man reconciling a picture. I’ve seen that half second before and survived the seeing.

It didn’t happen.

He put both hands on my waist. Ran them down over my hips and around behind, took hold of me with both of them, and pulled. Then he said something in Spanish into the side of my throat. I didn’t catch one word of it and didn’t need a translation.

“Say it in English.”

“No.”

“Mateo.”

“No,” he said. He got his mouth on my tit and stayed there, and he wasn’t polite about it, and I had a handful of his hair and my hip against my own kitchen drawer. He got the nipple in his teeth just enough that I heard what came out of me. I quit asking.

He went down on his knees on my kitchen floor.

Women lie about this at that pool and I’ve listened to ten years of the lyin’. At sixty-four it doesn’t work the way it worked at thirty. It wants time and it wants help. There’s a bottle in my nightstand that has been in every nightstand I’ve owned since 2017, and I was two rooms from it with my back on a counter.

“Wait.”

He stopped instantly and looked up.

“Nightstand drawer. The little white bottle. Go and bring it to me.”

That man didn’t make one single thing of the request. No look on his face. He didn’t say something gallant about how I didn’t need it, which is the worst thing a man can say, because he’s gonna find out he was wrong in ninety seconds and then both of you’re disappointed. He got up off my floor, walked out of my kitchen in his socks, came back, put it in my hand.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Good.” He went back down on his knees.

That’s the whole of my position on the matter. Ten years I’ve listened to women out here talk about the body like it betrayed ’em. It’s a sixty-four year old body. It’s the one that got me here. It wants what it wants, the same way Gene wants the little blue one out of his shirt pocket, the same way Ed Mulcahy wants that hearing aid he won’t wear. I’ve never once heard a man at that grill apologize for his pill.

He put my leg up over his shoulder and put his mouth on my pussy. Ten years of women at that pool have called it everything in the world except what it is.

Then the whole morning went away from me. He wasn’t in a hurry. He wasn’t performin’. He didn’t come up one single time to check my face and see how he was doing. That’s the thing. That’s the entire thing. He had both hands up under me holding my hips off the cabinet, taking the weight. No man has done that for me since I was fifty. He had his tongue flat on my clit and then not flat, and he found out inside of a minute which of those two I wanted and gave me the other one anyway, slow, until I said something I’m not gonna put down. He stayed down there through the first one and didn’t stop when I was still going. I had a fistful of that man’s hair in one hand and the edge of my own counter in the other, and I heard myself make a sound at twenty past seven in the morning that hasn’t been made in that house in four years.

Six men were running a blower eighty yards away.

He came up off that floor with his mouth wet and shining and set me on the counter like I weighed something he had already measured. I got his belt open. Then his jeans. Then I had his dick in my hand, and I looked down at it, and then I looked at his face.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You looked at me.”

“I’m sixty-four years old. I haven’t had a dick like that in my hand since 1994,” I said. “I would like a minute.”

He laughed. Dropped his forehead on my shoulder and kept laughing, and then I started, and the two of us were half undressed in my own kitchen carrying on like a couple of fools. Then it stopped being funny. He pushed into me, and the laughing quit on both sides in the same second.

He went slow the first few, watching me. I put my heels in the back of his thighs and told him to quit being gentle and give me the whole thing. He quit being gentle. He gave me the whole thing, and the noise I made wasn’t a ladylike noise and I wasn’t trying for one.

The counter edge was in my back. I didn’t care. A jar went over into the sink and neither one of us turned a head. I had my mouth on his shoulder to keep the noise down, and then I quit bothering with the noise. My house sits forty feet off the next one. The blower was going. I’ve spent sixty-four years being quiet for people who weren’t listening.

When it got close he got an arm all the way around my back and held me up off that counter against him. His other hand came in between us and his thumb went on my clit, without being told and without asking, which isn’t a skill this community’s men have in any quantity. I went up, and he held me there through the whole of it, his face down in my neck, saying something low in Spanish that I still don’t understand.

Then he went, and I felt the whole of it, and I had both arms around that man’s head. The clock on my stove said 7:41.

Neither of us talked for a minute. He stood between my knees with his forehead on mine, his heart going under my hand. The coffee sat on the counter beside us going cold, untouched, which is the only part of that morning that embarrasses me.

“I have to go back out there,” he said.

“I know.”

“They’re gonna know where I was.”

“They’re gonna think they know.”

“Renee.” He pulled his head back. “They’re gonna know.”

He was right and I was wrong, and I knew the whole time I was saying it. I said it anyway, which is what a person does the minute they’ve decided to want a thing more than they want to be sensible.

He got his jeans up, and his belt, and went to the mat for his boots. Sat down on my little bench to do the laces. I came over in the cardigan with nothing under it and stood in front of him while he tied them. He finished the second one, looked up, and put his hands on the backs of my legs.

“Thursday,” he said.

“Thursday.”

“Not in the driveway.”

“No,” I said. “Not out front where the whole street can see it.”

Then he went out my door and down my drive, up the street to six men who had been running a blower for forty minutes. I stood at my kitchen window like a teenager and watched that man the whole way. Which is how I came to see Maria Benavides’s blinds in the front room across Camellia go down about an inch, and then go back.

I made fresh coffee. I sat on my lanai with my legs up on the other chair and drank it, and for about an hour I didn’t have one serious thought in my head. And this next part belongs here, in this order, because for the rest of my life I’m gonna want to move it somewhere else.

At nine forty that same morning Yulisa Arroyo was already in the water back of the maintenance building. She had been since sometime in the night. Nobody had looked yet. It was Tuesday, and on Tuesday that girl was supposed to be at the Vandergriffs’ on Larkspur until one.

At nine forty I was on my lanai with my second cup. I was the happiest I’d been in nine years.