Content Disclosure: Sexual Innuendo
The garage light flips on like a flashbulb, freezing me in a mug shot.
“Del, you out here?” my wife says sleepily as she steps down the cement riser.
She looks at me standing before the window; then her attention is diverted to the patio chair, the newspaper and coffee mug at its feet, its angle to the glass. She seems puzzled at first but focuses her gaze through the window, over the fence, and into our neighbor’s bathroom, our windows strategically placed like both ends of a telescope, and her drowsiness dissipates.
The girl stands there naked and exposed.
I see dawning suspicion in my wife’s eyes as they harden.
Then I hear the girl’s boyfriend exclaim from the bathroom, “Hey, I know that guy.”
I have an ear for the bathroom door: the click of the knob, the squeak of the hinges, the bang as it stops against the wall. It’s not that I always hear these things because, like everything else in my body, my hearing is not as sharp as it used to be, but I can sense them like a change in the atmospheric pressure. From my garage, however, where I spend much of my time during the weekends, I can see as well as hear, for it’s from my garage that I watch her.
She doesn’t know I’m here, sitting in the broken patio chair that faces the window at the back and looks across four feet of fenced side yard into the bathroom of a small cottage behind a main house. I presume the man rents, and she visits on the weekends.
I haven’t seen her for a while, though, and I’m beginning to envision all sorts of horrible things. It’s a dangerous world out there these days. What if she never returns? What if he was stupid enough to let her go? I’m going to have to find out whether she’s safe, or it might be the death of me.
I first saw her last August. There had been others
