So much for her peaceful morning on the porch.
But Ann isn’t irritated. In fact, she couldn’t be happier that Roy has started working again.
As she heads into her house, it occurs to her that Roy never mentioned paying her back for the work on his side of the porch. She wonders if she’ll ever see that money. As long as Roy fixes his side of the row house into something halfway decent, she decides, she won’t press him about the payment.
It seems like a small price to pay to finally have the house next door looking livable.
CHAPTER 8
“WHAT A STORM,” Ann remarks. She’s on the phone with her neighbor, Marjorie Wilson, and cradles the receiver in the crook of her neck as she pulls back the curtain to look outside.
Rain pours down in thick streaks, shimmering in the light from the streetlamps. The roadway is a stream of water, and as a car drives by, it sends waves into the air on both sides.
“Forecasters are predicting rain all week,” Marjorie tells her.
Ann’s downspout gushes water, creating a small pond in her front yard. On Roy’s side of the porch, where there are no rain gutters, the water falls from the roof in sheets. His yard is full of junk—garbage bags, piles of broken two-by-fours, the Sheetrock he ripped out months ago—and all of it is getting soaked.
Ann says, “We’ll be lucky if we don’t lose elect—”
Before she can finish the sentence, lightning flashes and thunder cracks so loudly that she flinches, almost dropping the receiver.
“Wow!” Marjorie says. “That one made me jump.”
Ann walks into her kitchen. She switches the cordless telephone to her other ear and begins tidying up. She wipes the counter down and puts the dishes in the drying rack away.
Marjorie changes the subject from the weather to the reason she called.
“Do you know if the association is meeting this week?” Marjorie asks.
Ann takes a deep, exasperated breath. “I have no idea,” she says.
Roy canceled the last meeting, and there’s been no word yet if the next scheduled meeting is going to happen. Because Ann is Roy’s neighbor—and she’s the one who brought him to that first meeting—everyone keeps asking her for updates, as if she’s become his personal secretary. Her enthusiasm over him becoming president four months ago has long since abated.
“I say we meet with or without Roy,” Ann says. “We didn’t have a president before. So what if our president isn’t around now?”
“Do you think he’ll be mad if we meet without him?”
“How can he be mad?” Ann says. “He hasn’t done anything as president. Does he expect us to sit around and wait for him?”
Ann doesn’t say what she’s really thinking, that having Roy as president has actually been worse than having no one at all. Before, someone would step up and do the work. Things got done. Now that everyone assumes Roy will take care of things, nothing ever gets done.
“I’m sure Roy’s busy,” Marjorie says. “He’s got eight houses, after all.”
“I just wish he’d focus on one thing and get it done,” Ann says, thinking specifically of the house next door.
“Has he been working on the house at all?” Marjorie asks.
“He’s over there all the time now,” she says, “but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere fast.”
It’s true—Roy is often next door. She sees his truck parked out front, and she’ll hear the occasional banging noise or whine of a power saw. One day he showed up hefting a new porcelain toilet into the house. Another day he had a bundle of bricks delivered to the front yard, which he has yet to touch. He set two bags of cement next to the stack, leaving them out in the elements to get rained on. They must be hard as rocks by now.
Most days she sees his truck, yet she hears nothing coming from next door.
“I don’t know what he’s doing over there,” Ann says. “He’s spent all this time tearing out wet and rotting wood, but I bet this storm is soaking everything all over again.”
“I feel bad for the guy,” Marjorie says.
“Me, too,” Ann says. “I think he’s in over his head and just doesn’t want to admit it. But if the guy can afford to buy eight houses, he should be able to afford to hire a contractor to do the work for him.”
After they hang up, Ann decides to make it an early night. It’s the kind of miserable weather that begs a person to climb into bed, get cozy, and read a good book before drifting off to sleep.
Upstairs, the sound of the rain is louder, pummeling the roof. She walks to the corner to turn on her bedside lamp.
She yelps when her feet step in cold water.
“What the …?”
A puddle the size of her kitchen table is growing on her hardwood floor. A drip falls from the ceiling and splashes into the puddle with a soft plop. She stares at the ceiling. Sure enough, a wet spot close to the wall that she shares with Roy is discernible in the plaster.
Her roof is practically brand-new. It’s Roy’s roof that looks like a dog with mange. The water must be leaking in from his side and pooling atop the ceiling, spreading over to her side.
Her heart pounding, she picks up the phone in her bedroom. She tells herself to remain calm. Be polite. Don’t let Roy know how angry you are about this.
But he doesn’t pick up the phone, and she’s unable to leave a message, either.
“Damn it, Roy!”
She stomps downstairs and grabs a pan from the kitchen and a beach towel from her linen closet. She mops up the puddle and places the pan under the drip.
As the water pings into the pan over and over, she can’t sleep. Her mind races, and she can feel her blood pressure rising.
She wishes Roy Kirk had never bought the house next door.
CHAPTER 9
THE NEXT MORNING, ANN peeks out her front window and sees Roy’s truck sitting at the curb. She steps out onto the porch. The gutters have finally emptied, but the grass and pavement are still wet. The air is cold, but there’s a hint of blue breaking through the gray sky.
The familiar extension cord runs up the wet sidewalk and into Roy’s front door, ajar as always.
Ann knocks on the door. When there’s no answer, she pokes her head inside.
The one previous time she was in the house, when Roy began working, she thought it was in disrepair—but it looks ten times worse now. The hallway is cluttered with both construction debris and tools, so jumbled together that she wonders how he can keep track of them all.
She hears some kind of rustling noise upstairs.
“Roy!” she calls out, trying to make her voice sound as friendly as possible. “Are you home?”
“Who is it?” Roy says, his voice not particularly friendly.
“It’s Ann,” she says. There’s a pause, and she has the weird feeling that maybe he’s forgotten her name. “Your neighbor,” she adds.
“Be right down,” he says.
She hears the clatter of some kind of tool—it sounds like he threw it down—and then his feet clomp down the stairs. He emerges from the darkness so quickly that she wonders if he’s hurrying because he doesn’t want her to walk into the house.