He lives across the street, Bob's five foot six I'd say at the most. Little guy, and I'll tell you up front, a little of Bob goes a long way. He’s cocky, and loud. He works outside in his yard all the time, and his phone’s always with him. I probably hear most of what Bob has to say.
I go outside for a smoke and he's there. Across the street, I see him and hear him. For years, I have smoked four cigarettes a day. I know I should stop. But I know that I won’t. So I sit outside with my cancer stick, and I can hear Bob. Over the power saw. Over the lawn mower.
Bob moved here about three years ago. He bought the house where Jim and Nedra lived. An elderly couple, I loved Jim and Nedra. They were Midwestern stock, plain, simple folks. Jim liked to fish and he brought catfish home. He cleaned it and fried it and my parents and I would go over for dinner. I made hush puppies. Nedra would make a strawberry pie.
Their house was blue, a green shade of blue but in moonlight the color of old sanitariums, and there was a huge oak tree in their yard on the left. Older than God. They named it Fat Albert.
Jim passed away, and Nedra moved in with one of their children. Bob bought the house and the first thing he did was paint it brown. And not like a warm sort of gingerbread brown. A cold flat brown, like chocolate that’s bloomed.
After that, he cut down Fat Albert. We looked at each other, my parents and I, dumbfounded, bewildered. What in God’s name was he thinking, we wondered.
I do not know. Don't have the first clue. I have no idea what goes on in Bob’s head. What he thinks, what he feels. What lives in his heart.
But I know, just now, I was smoking my fourth cigarette of the day, and Bob was outside. On his porch, on his phone. Please, he said. Please, Trisha. Don't.
I will tell you up front that my heart has been broken. My husband left me, at Christmas, no less. I will never forget what a black hell it was. I thought I would die, and I said to my soon-to-be ex-husband then, everything Bob said to Trisha tonight.
I don’t know why he chose that shade of brown. Or why he cut Fat Albert down. I don’t know why it never survives, if love really does make the world go round.
I only know that it’s dark out here. And a grown man cries; he wants it to stop and I know that it won't. The flame rises up. Our hearts are all broken and yet we’re all strangers. My cigarette glows and I know this makes five.