The note was written in purple ink on a page torn from a spiral notebook, and by the time I reached Dakota’s front steps I had crushed it into a ball in my fist.
I could hear Tony behind me in the street.
“Jennifer! Jen, wait. Please.”
I didn’t wait. I didn’t look back. I walked up her three concrete steps, past the pot of yellow mums she’d set out the week she moved in, and I stood in front of her red door with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
I was fifty-one years old. I had never in my life knocked on a stranger’s door to start a fight.
I raised my hand. It was shaking.
I knocked anyway.
To understand why I was standing there, you need to know about the coffee. And to understand why that note hit me the way it did, you need to know about the twenty-five years before the coffee. I’ll tell you both. But I’ll start with the easy part, because for a while, that’s all it was. Easy. Almost funny.
Dakota moved into the house across the street at the end of August.
It was the little gray rambler that had belonged to old Mr. Petrakis for forty years, until his kids moved him to assisted living in the spring and put the house on the market. Tony and I watched the moving truck pull up from our front porch, drinking iced tea, the way people in our neighborhood watched everything. Maple Court is a small street. Eleven houses in a horseshoe. Everybody knows everybody’s business, and what they don’t know, they make up.
The movers carried in a couch, a drafting table, a few boxes, a bed. That was about it. Then a young woman got out of a little blue Honda with Arizona plates. Late twenties, maybe. Thin. Dark hair pulled back under a knit beanie, even though it was eighty-five degrees. She stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at the house. Then she turned around and looked at ours.
Right at us. Right at Tony.
I remember that because it struck me as odd. Most people look at their new house when they move in. She looked at us for maybe five full seconds before she turned and went inside.
“Friendly,” Tony said.
“Maybe she’s just tired,” I said.
Two days later, she knocked on our door with a plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in plastic.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Dakota. I just moved in across the street. I wanted to introduce myself.”
Up close, she was pretty in a tired way. Big dark eyes. Pale skin. She was still wearing the beanie. A different one, gray this time.
“I’m Jennifer,” I said. “Jennifer Moretti. Come in, come in.”
She hesitated on the doorstep. Then she came in. Tony was in the kitchen fixing the garbage disposal, which he’d been fixing every other month for about fifteen years. He came out wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“This is my husband, Tony,” I said.
Dakota looked at him.
And I want to tell you exactly what I saw, because I’ve thought about it so many times since. She didn’t look at him the way a young woman looks at a man she thinks is attractive. I know that look. I’ve seen waitresses give it to Tony. He’s fifty-four, but he’s still got all his hair, and his arms are still strong from thirty years as an electrician, and he has a good easy smile. Women notice.
This was different. She looked at him like she was trying to memorize him. Like she was looking at a photograph she’d only ever seen in black and white, and suddenly it was in color. 