The New Neighbor Mowed My Lawn the Week My Divorce Went Through novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Garage

By ten on Saturday morning I had dragged eleven of Greg's boxes to the curb, and I was sweating through my tank top.

The garage door was all the way up, because a person cannot haul boxes through a closed door.

Sunlight lay across the whole concrete floor, and the street was right there, bright and ordinary.

A boy of about ten rode past on a bike and looked in at me.

I waved at him with a lamp in my arm.

The box on top of the stack said GOLF in Greg's square marker, and under it was the box that said CABLES / MISC.

I had been married to those boxes for eleven years.

"Morning," said a voice behind me.

I turned around.

Tyler stood at the foot of my driveway in a clean gray T-shirt and work jeans.

He had a paper bag in one hand and a cardboard tray with two coffees in the other.

His hair was still wet from the shower, and the bag had gone translucent with grease.

"I brought you breakfast," he said. "It's egg and sausage. I didn't know if you'd eat sausage."

"Tyler," I said. "It's ten in the morning and the door is up."

"I know."

"Anybody could see you walking in here," I said.

"I know that too," he said, and he kept walking.

He came up the driveway, into the garage, and set the coffees on Greg's old workbench.

I ate the sandwich standing up, in four bites, with grease on my wrist.

He watched me do it with his mouth tucked in at one corner.

"You're laughing at me," I said.

"I'm watching you eat. It's the best thing I've seen all week."

"You saw me naked on Thursday."

"Second best," he said.

I licked my thumb.

His eyes followed it, and then his whole face changed.

Behind him, out on the street, a woman went by with a stroller and a coffee, and she raised her hand to me.

I raised mine back.

Then I reached up and hooked a finger in the collar of his shirt.

I pulled him toward the back of the garage, where the chest freezer sat against the cinderblock wall.

It was shaded back there.

It was also fifteen feet from the open door, and I could see a slice of the street and the mailbox across the way.

"Lena," he said. "The door."

"Leave it up."

"Somebody's going to see."

"Then they'll see," I said. "Do you want me to put it down?"

His throat moved, and he shook his head.

"No."

"Say it."

"Leave it up," he said, rough. "God. Leave it up."

I laughed, low, and I took his wrist and put his hand on my breast over the tank top.

He squeezed.

I leaned back on the wall, and the cinderblock was cool through the cloth.

I took the hem of the shirt in both hands and pulled it off over his head, and dropped it on top of the freezer.

His chest was bare and brown, with a little dark gold hair in the middle, and it rose and fell fast.

I put my mouth on it, on the hard flat place over his heart, and I felt it going.

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