At 7:10 every morning, I opened my blue curtains and looked across the alley at Irene’s yellow house. That Tuesday, I didn’t open mine right away because I had a roast in the oven and was trying to find my reading glasses. When I finally looked out, her curtains were shut, her porch light blinked twice, and I knew she wasn’t just sleeping in.
Irene and I had lived across from each other for eleven years in a small city on the Hudson. She was 69, tiny, and neat enough to make the rest of us look careless. Her hair was always pinned up. Her blouse was always tucked in. She kept plastic swans by her steps, even in January, when their necks got wrapped in ice. Leonard drove a brown Buick and backed it into the carport each morning like he was lining up a tractor in a barn.
I didn’t like Leonard. I called him stern because that sounded nicer than mean, and because I didn’t want to be the neighbor who made trouble. Women my age are good at sanding sharp words down. We call a man controlling when we mean he scares us. We call him private when we mean nobody can get close enough to help.
The curtain thing started as a joke. Open meant Leonard was gone.
Half-open meant his sister was visiting. Closed meant Irene was resting. That was what she told me the first time I asked. She smiled too hard and asked whether my tomato plants had blight. I answered her, but I watched those curtains after that.
Every other Tuesday, Leonard drove to the VA clinic in Monroe. Irene opened the curtains, then came over with some silly reason to knock on my door. A cup of flour. A stamp. Two bay leaves, which I gave her even though I had four plants growing behind the shed. Each time, she left something behind. A pharmacy printout folded inside a recipe card. A bank statement tucked into a church bulletin. A list of dates written on the back of a seed packet.
I put all of it in a Danish butter cookie tin. That was my idea. Nobody looks in those tins for anything but buttons and old screws.
Irene knew where I kept it, but she never asked me to read the papers. I read them anyway. Not every word. Enough to see withdrawals, late notices, and Leonard’s name beside accounts Irene said she didn’t use.
One Tuesday, she came over with the flour bowl in both hands. Her knuckles were covered with makeup. It didn’t match her skin, and I knew it was covering something. She set the bowl down and said, “He found one.”
I asked which one, and she just shook her head. “The bank one.” She’d put a folded statement under my church bulletin the week before, showing $14,682 moved out of her savings. I told her to sit down. She said, “I can’t sit long.” That was when I saw the bruise above her wrist.
When her curtains stayed closed that Tuesday and the porch light blinked twice, she called me from the Save-A-Lot phone. “If he asks, you never saw me.” Dana got her through the deli’s back door, but I didn’t send Irene home with Dana.
I called Mavis, the secretary at First Baptist, and put Irene in Mavis’s car behind the church. Irene had a Walmart bag, her pills, and the picture of her daughter who died in 1998. That was all.
At 9:17, Leonard pulled into my driveway. Three slow knocks came at my back door. He asked where Irene was, then looked past me toward my kitchen. “Give me the phone and those papers.” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He smiled like I was a child being difficult. “Don’t make this worse.” I called 911 while he was still on my porch.
The officer found nothing in my house because the cookie tin was already in Mavis’s trunk with Irene. Before sunset, Irene showed the bruised photos, the pharmacy printouts, and the bank records to the judge. The emergency order had Leonard’s name on it. Mavis called me afterward and said Irene was sitting in her passenger seat, holding that picture of her daughter. “She said the curtains worked,” Mavis told me.
