PART 2:

“Men like you don’t complain. Men like you don’t ask for help. Men like you certainly don’t stand on their porch at 44 years old getting emotional because a neighbor fixed a fact situation.” He was fine. He was absolutely, completely fine. The second time he really talked to Claire was 3 weeks later and it started with a lie.

Hers, not his. He was in the backyard on a Saturday afternoon trying to fix the latch on the gate. The same gate she had used. When she appeared on her side of the fence and said, “I don’t suppose you know anything about water pressure.” Michael looked up. “Some. Why?” “My kitchen faucet has been doing something.

” She paused. “I don’t know the technical term. Complaining, maybe.” He almost laughed. “Complaining how? Like it’s personally offended every time I turn it on. There’s this shuddering. It didn’t do it when I moved in.” He put down his screwdriver. “Could be the pressure regulator. Could be air in the line. Can I take a look?” “If you want.

I don’t want to take up your Saturday.” “Emma’s at her mom’s this weekend,” he said. and he said it the way he always said it, clean, informational, no weight to it. He had practiced the no weight version. “I’m not doing anything that matters.” Claire looked at him when he said that matters, and he saw something flicker across her face.

Not pity, which he would have hated, but something more careful than that. Recognition, maybe. “Come over,” she said. Her kitchen was clean in the way that said someone had recently made an effort, but not obsessively so. There were books stacked on the small table by the window. A coffee mug with a drawing on it that looked like Emma’s age group’s work, though he’d find out later it was from a nephew.

The faucet was indeed making a sound that was less shudder and more complaint. A low vibration on full blast. “Pressure regulator,” he said after 30 seconds. “Almost definitely. It’s a fix, but it’s not a today fix. You’d need the part.” “So, it’s not going to explode?” “Not today.” “Then I’ll take that as a win.

” She was already moving to the coffee maker. “Coffee? Since you came all the way next door.” He almost said I should get back. The reflex was immediate. Decline, retreat, maintain distance, avoid the thing that felt like it might be the beginning of something, because beginnings were also the beginnings of endings, and Michael Carter had been through enough endings.

“Sure,” he said. He sat at her kitchen table for 2 hours. They talked about Gerald Whitmore and the history of the neighborhood and Emma’s permission slip chaos and the hardware store where Michael had worked so long the owner had started leaving the opening to him three mornings a week. They talked about Claire’s work.

She was a medical illustrator, which he had never known was a profession, and she explained it with the patient clarity of someone who was used to the question. They talked about the oak tree and whose problem it was eventually going to be. They didn’t talk about Rebecca. They didn’t talk about whatever had pulled Claire to this quiet neighborhood from wherever she’d been before.

There was an unspoken agreement that certain rooms were not yet open. But 2 hours. He had not sat in someone’s kitchen and talked for 2 hours in longer than he could immediately calculate. When he stood to leave, she handed him a book from the stack on her table. “You mentioned you’d been trying to read more.” She said.

“This one’s worth the time.” He looked at the cover. A Man Called Ove. He’d heard of it. “There’s a note inside.” She said. “Don’t read it until you’re home.” He walked next door carrying a novel with a note inside it and he did not open it until he was sitting at his own kitchen table alone in his quiet house. And when he did, it said only, “The guy gets it wrong a lot.

Still worth knowing.” See. Michael sat with that for a long time. He couldn’t have said why it hit him the way it did. Something about still worth knowing. The way it was phrased. Not still worth reading. Worth knowing. He read the book in 4 days. He didn’t have four free days. He made them. Reading in the car before work.

Reading in the lunch hour he usually spent organizing the stockroom. Reading until 12:30 in the morning twice, which he hadn’t done since his early 30s. He did not immediately say anything to Claire about it. He wasn’t ready to examine why. It was his daughter who noticed first, which should not have surprised him because Emma noticed everything.

“You seem different.” She said one Sunday morning eating cereal across from him at the kitchen table. Michael looked up from his coffee. Different how? Emma tilted her head in that way she had, a mannerism so precisely Rebecca’s that it sometimes made his chest seize, and said, “Like you got better at paying attention.

But to stuff that isn’t work or me.” “That’s very philosophical for 8:00 a.m.” “Mrs. Kaplan says I have a gift for observation.” “Mrs. Kaplan is not wrong.” Emma went back to her cereal, then said without looking up, “Is it the neighbor? The one with the paint on her jacket?” Michael put his mug down. “I don’t We’re just neighbors, Em.

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