three days, they’re not the right tenants.
That evening, Justin and his friends rollerbladed along the lakeshore’s wide concrete path, racing, picking up speed, and then slowing to catch their breath. As they started back, Justin hesitated.
A white teenage boy stood on the shore with the black fishermen, watching where their lines disappeared against the water. His shoulder muscles ridged a threadbare T-shirt, his arms veined like a man’s. His ratty clothes weren’t jock or prep or even redneck. Justin’s friends glanced over too — the girls a little longer.
On New Year’s Eve, Justin went to a party, squeezing into the packed car of Adam McCaskill, who’d just gotten his license. Though Justin didn’t drink, most of his friends did, and not long after arriving at Douglas Breaux’s house, they were wasted and hollering about the millennium. When a girl told Justin that her older brother was on a retreat in the woods, purifying himself for the Second Coming, he asked why she hadn’t gone with him. She said she believed in Christ already and would be taken to heaven. Not tonight, she specified. The millennium is off by like a few months. The Rapture will probably happen in March.
He realized then that she’d never kiss him, and it was already too late to pair up with another girl, so he called his father for a ride home.
The next morning a small U-Haul truck and battered gray Ford sedan pulled into his driveway and past the garage, behind the hedges to the parking area next to the carriage house. Justin ate his cereal at the window as a lanky man unloaded the U-Haul, his face so full of harrowed lines that his forehead, cheeks, and mouth resembled a series of descending brackets.
A girl got out of the sedan. She looked young enough to go to his school, but like a TV star: dark bangs and shoulder-length hair, a black trench coat belted at the waist. The tall boy from the lakeside loped past her, his shoulders curved as if he might pounce.
Don’t eat standing up, Justin’s father said. He’d come downstairs in his golf clothes, his shirt tight across the chest, his big bones and residual muscle making his body seem lumpy.
Justin sat back down at the table, angled toward the window.
They won’t be here long, his father said. People like that, they’re running away from something.
Why did you rent to them?
It’s hard to find a renter in the middle of the school year, and they didn’t tell me they had a boy. But now I’m seeing the situation clearly, and I have no doubt they’ll be gone before we know it. Just keep your distance. There’s no point making friends.
His father normally rented to graduate students from McNeese State, but the girl who’d lived there had dropped out and moved home, leaving a rhyming handwritten note on the door. He’d ranted about the kind of person who absconds and apologizes with poetry.
He went into the garage. As the door mechanically rose and the Lincoln started up, Justin returned to the window, cradling his cereal bowl.
The carriage house was tiny, just a bathroom, an alcove kitchen, and a single room partially divided by shelves. His father was right. The family would soon be gone.
As the boy came out and walked down the driveway, Justin went to the living room and stood just inside the drapes. The boy stopped at the street. He was now visible in profile, and far bigger than he’d appeared leaning on the railing at the lake.
Justin didn’t think he’d ever seen someone so still — the way he pictured the first woodsmen in America. His friends twitched with energy, rolling their ankles to stand on the edges of their feet or popping their knees in and out. This boy stood like an animal listening in a forest. He set off down the street.
Justin went to his room and read a chapter in a World War II memoir his father had given him for Christmas, his head propped on a pillow so he could look outside each time the screen door clapped.
The lanky man and the girl left with both vehicles and came back in a sedan. The man was so tall he had to stoop to go in the carriage house. The girl wasn’t wearing her jacket, only a black tank top and jeans. Justin put his book down and crouched at the windowsill.
She had tattoos on her shoulders and on the inside of her wrist. There was a hint of another one near her cleavage. In her jeans, her hips were narrow, their curve just wider than her waist. She stood behind the car, opening the trunk, taking out groceries, moving almost dreamily, pausing before each action, as if she were underwater.
THE BOY DEPARTED first thing each morning and didn’t come back until after Justin was in bed. Saturday evening, Justin read, staying up to see when he’d get home. He fell asleep and woke at dawn to the squeal of the sedan’s engine. Ashen light filtered through the pecan tree, the mass of branches transformed into distinct shapes. At the wheel, the lanky man hunched like someone fearing a bullet from behind. The sedan lurched and then accelerated toward the street.
Justin couldn’t get back to sleep. When the boy came out, Justin was watching from the dining room. The boy leveled a long glare in his direction and then walked down the driveway.
At church, Justin’s father elbowed him awake.
I’ll not have this kind of behavior, Justin George Falker.
The grogginess lasted through his chores. His father had long ago made the rule that his weekly tasks had to be completed before dark on Sunday. He quickly trimmed the hedges that ran the perimeter of the yard and had grown up densely on either side of a chain-link fence. He was moving along the hedge’s inside, behind the carriage house, when he felt himself waking up, his peripheral vision expanding. The bathroom window was near his shoulder, the venetians so old and broken their gaps offered glimpses of the tub. The girl lay with her head against its edge, her nipples at the surface of the water.
Justin moved the electric clipper carefully now, catching every protruding leaf, slowing to tug at the extension cord, as if it were snagged on the cinder blocks that supported the corner of the carriage house. Each time he passed in front of the bathroom again, she was still there.
The sun hung low over the neighborhood trees as he gathered the fallen pecans into a bucket, raked leaves and clippings, filled a garbage bag, tied it, and put it by the trashcans.
The lanky man hadn’t come back. A smaller hedge divided the carriage house parking area from the yard, and Justin trimmed it last, in the twilight, making sure the boy wasn’t around.
He left the rake and a box of plastic garbage bags out, along with the bucket of pecans and the clipper. This way he’d appear to have good reason to be wandering around, picking things up. His parents were having dinner with friends.
With the lawn free of leaves, his step was silent. He neared the carriage house wall until his nose almost touched it. The siding’s white paint scaled off. It smelled of decaying wood.
The bathroom window glowed at the crushed edges of the venetian blinds. He lifted his foot and quietly shifted to the right, moving one eye in front of a gap.
The crescents of her lashes lay against her cheeks. Her wet bangs were pushed back and her hair clung to her shoulders like weeds. Her collarbones spread just above the line of water. Her pale breasts floated slightly, the water rippling faintly around them.
A yellow lamp was lit on an end table in the corner. The bathwater had a greenish tinge and no suds. He couldn’t understand why she’d stayed in it for so long.
Her
