By the standards of the times, the cul-de-sac was practically buzzing with activity. The bump of excitement this gave Trevor made him wonder just how much of a toll the isolation was taking on him. But he smiled while unbuckling his seat belt and gathering to-go coffee cups. Once he was up, he put the cups on the roof of his grandmother’s car, leaving the keys hanging from his jeans pocket as he went around to help his grandma out of the passenger seat.
Across the street in the driveway of the first of three houses on Mulberry Court, Nancy was doing something similar, her arms full of grocery bags and a bundle of paper towels. She seemed harried, probably because she was bringing her kids home in the middle of the day. Nancy had worry lines permanently etched into her nervous face, and her once-short and straightened hair was now back in a wavy and somewhat frizzy ponytail. Although she’d kept her look of perpetually busy soccer mom in pricey yoga pants, she’d added a baggy sweatshirt with a frayed collar.
Comfort over fashion. Trevor could relate.
The twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Princess of Darkness in her black clothes and striped tights emerged from the backseat of her mom’s car holding a bookbag, a laptop, and what was probably her younger brother’s bookbag, while her brother scrambled out of the car behind her staring at a tablet and absently adjusting his sparkly pink hearts-on-springs headband.
“Kids home again,” Trevor’s grandma whispered, not quite clucking her tongue. “Probably another outbreak. Of who knows what this time.” Her disapproval was probably not for Nancy’s choice as much it was acknowledging the stress the kids being home was going to give her. The kids had only returned to in-school instruction at the start of the year.
The little one—Trevor had overheard the Princess of Darkness mockingly call him ‘Bobert’ once but guessed the boy’s name was Robert—had severe asthma and Nancy took no chances with him. Her home’s air filtration system was so good they probably could have invited Bobert’s entire class over. The school relied on open windows, if that.
A few years ago, Trevor would not have imagined himself being this concerned about what his neighbors were up to, but, well, there were only three houses on Mulberry and it had been a long two years of lockdown.
“The Princess is being quiet,” he whispered back to his grandmother. Trevor had hated his middle school years—and most of high school, to be honest—but if there was ever a reason for a tween to be miserable, waiting out a plague with her mom and younger brother was a good one.
“Poor critter,” his grandma agreed, moving her legs so Trevor could get her cane from beneath her seat. He handed it to her, then hovered somewhat anxiously while she used the cane and the handle above the car door to leverage herself to her feet. If she wanted more help, she would ask. In the meantime, Trevor was on standby.
“What a lovely morning!” his grandmother called over to Nancy, shuffling toward the curb.
Trevor gathered up newly filled prescription meds, the notebook he used to keep information from his grandmother’s doctor visits, and the biodegradable bags from the drug store, into which he shoved the wrappers from the food they’d snacked on during the drive home.
He considered the day to come while carrying the garbage over to the trash cans, which he then brought back up the driveway one at a time. His grandmother was chatting merrily about the weather, but despite the coffee, she would want to nap soon. She always did after a doctor visit, just like she’d need probably need help coming up the driveway when she was done talking.
Trevor would let Ellie out into the backyard, get his grandmother’s meds settled, then go back to his work for the day before coming out to deal with the food prep. He wasn’t great in the kitchen but in a few hours, he could at least chop the vegetables so his grandma wouldn’t have to do it.
He returned for their coffee cups next, heading back to the trash cans and holding the prescription bag in his armpit while taking a quick mental inventory of today’s loot haul: new thyroid medication, old cholesterol meds, and the usual vitamins for joint health, which Trevor had started to take too at his grandmother’s insistence even though he was only twenty-eight. In the bag was also an appointment card for future blood tests so the doctor could check to see if the new meds were working. Trevor would put that appointment in his phone, look up the thyroid drug for himself, then call his mom to tell her if she didn’t call first to check on her mother, who was still talking to Nancy—about sunshine now, and how Nancy, pale brown in the winter, would tan much darker in the summertime, which Nancy liked, but she wanted the kids to use sunblock so she was trying to use it more.
That was Nancy trying to encourage Trevor’s grandmother to use the sunblock too, Trevor guessed. His grandma made faces every time anyone offered her some.
For now, Trevor pushed away thoughts of future sunblock battles and the burns his very pale grandmother would inevitably get on her arms and the tip of her nose. A wet spring was slowly giving way to a hot summer. He’d start taking his evening walks even later and his morning runs even earlier.
Nancy asked for growing advice about the petunias in the clay pots by her front door and Trevor’s grandmother chirped like a songbird in response.
Trevor looped one shopping bag around his wrist, then went to get the mail, noticing the Princess of Darkness doing the same across the way. The kid had taken on a lot, even though Nancy probably hadn’t asked her to. The clothes and makeup might be a reaction to that, or maybe the kid liked drama in her wardrobe. Either way, Nancy was surprisingly cool with the goth, or whatever subset of goth it was, look her daughter had adopted last year.
The Princess’ dad might not be, but that asshole never seemed to be home anyway. Not that it was Trevor’s business. It was just that their street and the one house around the corner and up Peacock Lane was basically a very small town at this point. Between the easement and the creek behind Trevor’s grandmother house, and the length of Peacock Lane, Mulberry Court was fairly isolated, and the large trees at the start of the cul-de-sac only further hid it from the rest of the town.
Rosemont was a growing suburb—before the plague, anyway—so it didn’t have the big housing developments of other places. There were some blocks of homes around the town center and even some apartments built in the ‘70s. But the rest of the homes in Rosemont were down long, sometimes winding roads with houses on them from the ‘50s or ‘60s—with a few Nineteenth Century farmhouses that randomly popped up. It meant places like Mulberry Court weren’t totally disconnected from the town itself, but were far enough apart to make things like trick-or-treating impossible. Trevor could walk to the nearest corner store-slash-gas station for things like milk or junk food but anything else required a car.
His grandma’s house was the first house on the street, then Nancy’s opposite them, with the largest at the end of the cul-de-sac. That house was two stories but the other two were single-story ranch-style homes. His grandmother’s was the smallest of the three, although it had a huge yard as if to compensate for that. Nancy’s house had an attic space, or looked like it did, but Trevor didn’t think they used it as a spare room.
Sometimes there was a Lexus in Nancy’s driveway. Trevor assumed it belonged to the husband, who must work or travel a lot. He did nothing around the house while he was home. Nancy handled everything by herself, which was why Trevor sometimes tried to help her.
When he’d cleaned out his grandmother’s gutters last fall—disgusting—he’d asked if Nancy would like him to do hers too. She’d hired someone to do it the year before, but this year she’d been out there herself, wobbling on a ladder until Trevor had offered to do the higher places for her. A nervous back-and-forth had followed before she’d allowed it, guilt on her face until Trevor had told her she’d done a good job on the gutters she could reach. Later, Nancy had brought over some lemon curd she’d made herself from the lemons that grew in her backyard.
While Trevor waited and puttered and examined the slim package in the mail addressed to his grandmother—it had a business return address but Trevor could guess who had sent it—he debated a lemon tree for his grandmother’s yard, and if the family would take all the lemons the tree would inevitably produce or if he would end up learning to make curd as well to get rid of them. The front yard had no room for another fruit tree. A pomegranate tree stood on one side of the driveway and then the rest of the space was taken up with hardy native shrubs that bloomed throughout the year and some ornamental flower beds along the brick path leading to the porch steps.
The bricks in the path worried him. Sooner or later, his grandmother’s cane was going to catch on one of the places where the bricks had shifted over the years. He should replace them with something smoother, although then he would have the porch steps to consider.
But all thoughts of steps and bricks disappeared from his mind as a truck went slowly past all of them to enter the driveway of the largest house on the street. It stopped there while the door to the detached garage opened. Trevor vaguely remembered the mail in his hand and made a show of putting it into the bag hanging from his wrist while also glancing surreptitiously down the street.
The remaining resident of Mulberry Court had been reclusive even before Covid, according to Trevor’s grandma. He was also hot as a motherfucker, but that was Trevor’s opinion. If his grandmother agreed, Trevor wasn’t about to ask to find out.
Their most mysterious neighbor appeared on no predictable schedule, occasionally coming outside to mow the small patch of grass that made up his front yard or to unload boxes or timber or metal rods from the back of his serviceable blue truck. He wasn’t incredibly tall—Trevor might have been taller than him but had never been close enough to be sure—and looked strong as hell without being any sort of gym rat. He was broad and soft-bellied, with nicely curving fat over muscle. What some people called ‘farmer strong’ –which probably meant stamina for days.
Trevor had not discovered for himself if that was true because their reclusive neighbor did not have a smiling, welcoming face, although Trevor wouldn’t have described it as frowning. The man’s expression didn’t show much of anything, unless his unexpectedly direct and probably accidentally fierce gaze happened to meet Trevor’s across the way, which did not happen often.
Unfortunate, since Trevor thought the quietly ferocious bear was worth a look or two.
The man’s eyes seemed light from a distance but were probably hazel brown since statistically, most eyes were some shade of brown. He had dark hair with visible grays. In Trevor’s time living with his grandmother, he had seen that hair tied back, then short, and then starting to get long again. Lockdown hair; Trevor was forgiving about that. It was neatly trimmed again now, which Trevor personally preferred since it showed the gray to advantage and looked nice with the man’s short beard. Above the pepper-with-a-hint-of-salt beard were some marks, acne scars, probably, and maybe the odd zit if the man was like Trevor and sometimes got them beneath his face mask. He had to be in his forties, but despite how close in age he must have been to her, he seemed to scare Nancy a little.
But what didn’t scare Nancy a little? The man hadn’t actually done anything intimidating to her that Trevor knew about. The opposite, in fact.
A storm in January had knocked down one of the big trees down near the entrance to the street and the top of the tree had landed on Nancy’s property, blocking the gate in the fence separating her front yard and her backyard. When the weather had cleared for a few hours, Mulberry’s quietest resident had come out with a chainsaw and safety gear and cut that part of the tree into smaller parts. He’d dragged those to the edge of Nancy’s yard, into the area that was probably town property, but possibly attached to the house around the corner and on Peacock.
Then, like a cowboy in one of the awful Westerns Trevor’s grandma sometimes watched because his grandpa had loved them, he’d disappeared back into his house without a word, chainsaw in one hand, safety goggles dangling from the other.
Intimidated or not, Nancy had put a bottle of wine into his mailbox to thank him. Trevor had made up reasons to keep an eye on that mailbox until the storms had returned and driven him back inside. The next time he’d ventured out to look, the bottle had been gone.
Trevor had described the whole event in detail to Sky on the phone as it was happening, with Sky laughing warmly at him for a lot of it.
Trevor had no life, he was aware. It could only partially be blamed on lockdown. But though he had the occasional daydream about getting his hands on that body, he wasn’t obsessing over the man. He was just oddly fond of him. Hot Neighbor noticed things, even if he didn’t say anything, and he’d help, even if he apparently didn’t want to talk about it. He was also very probably the only other adult queer on the street, even if he didn’t want to talk about that either. Or talk in general.
Trevor had peeped nipple piercings through the guy’s shirt. It didn’t mean the guy was gay, but it also didn’t not mean it.
He and Trevor’s sole interaction thus far had been when the guy had come home once with a face mask stuck in his shirt collar. He had gone to get his mail and noticed Trevor as Trevor had stood up from dealing with the flowerbeds. Trevor had smiled and gestured to remind the guy the mask was there, since he’d probably thought he’d removed it.
Hot Neighbor had frowned, grabbed the face mask and his mail, given Trevor a curt nod, and then, well, Trevor would like to say the man hadn’t scurried back into his house but… he had moved pretty quickly.
However, if Trevor’s grandmother happened to catch him, she’d get a short greeting.
“G.G.!” she’d call, not making Trevor jealous, and G.G. would turn and acknowledge her.
G.G., Trevor thought without any real resentment, even though the first several times his grandma had said it, Trevor had heard Gigi with g’s so soft they might as well have been made of clouds, as if the possible grump in the big house had a name more suited to a spoiled poodle than the actual spoiled poodle in the neighborhood.
G.G. was currently dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and blue check flannel, canvas bags in each hand and a long box under one arm. Whatever was in the bags had some weight to it. He hefted them as he turned to make sure the garage door closed, probably barely noticing the strain as it carried through his arms to his chest and made his shirt ride up. Not enough to glimpse any skin, but pulling the fabric taut for one riveting moment.
His eyes came up as he turned. Trevor, startled, didn’t think to glance away in time.
Stop staring, Trevor told himself, dimly aware of the suddenly burning heat of the morning sun on his cheeks and the back of his neck and his bare head. But the fierce gaze hadn’t left him.
Trevor’s mouth went dry, his limbs jittery.
Then his grandma hollered, “Good morning, G.G.!” in a voice that could be heard all the way over on Peacock, and Trevor jerked his gaze down to spend a life-saving moment futzing with the bags—life-saving until he saw what he was wearing. He held in a sigh at the sight of his old Inuyasha t-shirt. The details of the design hopefully wouldn’t have been visible at a distance, and the long-sleeved button down he’d worn with it might have hidden most of the images anyway.
“Margaret,” G.G. acknowledged Trevor’s grandmother, his voice husky. From disuse, Trevor imagined. He looked up.
G.G. was already on his way to his front door, his back to Trevor’s nerdy, ogling ass, the heavy canvas bags smacking against his thighs. Not at all like a hermit crab scuttling away… but also exactly like that.
Trevor’s brain might be broken along with his ability to interact with others. He gave himself a mental shake for comparing poor G.G. to both a crab and a poodle, then returned his attention to the others.
Nancy must have brought the last of her groceries out of the car, because she was heading inside as well. Trevor’s grandmother clucked her tongue, muttered something about strengths some women didn’t know they had, then held out the hand not holding tightly to her cane, indicating that she was exhausted.
Trevor hurried over to help her walk along the brick path to the house.
“Nancy seems lonely. Desperate for conversation,” his grandma said thoughtfully. “I wanted to cheer her up.”
She had started the conversation, but Trevor knew better than to say that. His grandma might know it already and want Trevor to comment. She was getting a bit sly and wicked as time went on. Or possibly she always had been and Trevor hadn’t noticed, or she trusted Trevor with that side of herself now that he was an adult and they were roommates. She’d been a widow for five years, and maybe that and everything else going on in the world had led her to decide to have a little fun with people in the nicest possible way.
Trevor nodded along and only looked back down the street when they reached the porch. G.G.’s front door was closed. The plain front yard offered no clues about the homeowner inside. Neither did the high wooden fence around the backyard. A wide window at the front of the house probably looked into a living room, but peering into windows was a line not to be crossed. Idle thoughts and fantasies born of boredom were one thing, but Trevor wasn’t a creep.
“I might take a nap before lunch,” his grandma remarked, bringing Trevor’s full attention back to her.
“Oh yeah?” Trevor asked as if surprised by this announcement. “That sounds good. I have work to do anyway, so I’ll be fine.”
The pat on his arm and the way she said, “Say hello to Sky for me,” suggested she wasn’t entirely fooled, but they both carried on happily in silent agreement to not discuss her health or the predictable routine of their days.