After she left, Irvin said, “She seems lonely.”
“She does,” I said.
“Divorce is hard,” he said. “We should keep inviting her over.”
I agreed. I thought it was a nice thing to say. That’s the kind of man Irvin is.
Then things started to change.
It was small at first.
She knocked on our door on a Saturday morning. Irvin answered. She was standing there in workout clothes, a tight black tank top and leggings, with her hair in a ponytail.
“Irvin, I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. “But the cabinet door in my kitchen came off its hinge. I don’t have any tools. And I don’t know the first thing about cabinets. Could you possibly take a look?”
Irvin looked back at me. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Help her out.”
He went. He was gone for forty-five minutes. A cabinet hinge takes five minutes to fix.
When he came back, he said she’d made him coffee and they’d talked about chemistry. She had a degree in biology. She was interested in his work.
“That’s nice,” I said.
A week later, she knocked on the door again. Irvin answered again. This time it was a heavy package. A box that had been delivered to her porch, and she couldn’t lift it.
“It’s a new bookshelf,” she said. “It weighs a ton. Could you carry it inside for me?”
He did.
The week after that, it was a lightbulb. In the ceiling fixture in her living room. She couldn’t reach it, she said. She was afraid of ladders.
Vanessa was five-foot-ten. Taller than me. She could have reached it standing on a kitchen chair.
Irvin changed the lightbulb.
Each time, she found him. Never me. She knew our schedules. She knew I worked Saturday mornings at the dental office every other week. She always came on those Saturdays.
Each time, she wore something a little tighter. A little lower. A little shorter.
Each time, Irvin came home and told me about it. Every single time. He’d say, “Vanessa needed help with her garbage disposal,” or “Vanessa’s car battery died.”
