Yes, I took the pictures. It was like bird-watching—nothing more, nothing less. An animal will always reveal himself inside his natural habitat, won’t he? Cutting through the neighbors’ yards repeatedly after a walk or swim. And then, the pièce de résistance: relieving himself in his own bushes one day.
And calling the head of the Sankaty new membership committee, to tell them that one of their proposed new members was the focus of a criminal investigation, and perhaps they should be moved back to the bottom of the waiting list until this was sorted out?
Well, that was just good, solid committee work. Performed by the outgoing secretary of said committee and very much appreciated by the new members of that committee. Because it was one thing to be a Jew; it was quite another to be a pervert.
What can I say? Some birds don’t know the landscape as well as they should. They build their nests in the wrong place.
The next morning, though, I made a few small mistakes. Like forgetting John had a habit of waking early. Like leaving the scissors and newspaper scattered over the kitchen table when I went outside. The room even smelled of newspaper, the blue tang of ink, but dry and tindery, like the moment before you light a fire. Not that John would notice that; Caroline would, not him.
The pile looked midproject; he would probably think Sydney had made the mess. So I thought afterward. But when I walked in from the porch, my feet still damp, and ran smack into him, well, he startled me. I flushed. I know I did.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, John. I was just…taking out the…recycling.”
He blinked. We both knew the recycling was kept inside, then loaded into the Jeep to be driven to the dump. We didn’t have garbage pickup. No one in the house took out the recycling to anywhere but the car.
“Oh,” he said.
“I guess Sydney can clean her art project mess when she’s up,” I said. “Or I’ll just do it now.”
I went outside toward the garbage cans, put away the scraps in a bucket, used the small tap under the house to wash my hands. When I came back to the stairs, John was drinking coffee on the back porch, looking across the Brownsteins’ property, fingering a pair of binoculars around his neck.
I swallowed hard. At the back of the Brownsteins’ property, on the small lot they’d taken over, the one with the cottage Caroline had always called a hidey-hole for its ivy-colored, hobbit-like cuteness, there was only a giant maw now, gray with concrete. Was there anything uglier than a house under construction?
And now, beside the gaping hole, a new, bright-green Porta-Potty. This addition made me smile—no more public urinating for Mr. Brownstein or his workers! I’d taken care of that!
The wind picked up suddenly, and I heard the paper flapping just as I saw John lift the binoculars to his eyes.
Surely, John couldn’t see it. But even if he did, would he connect it to the newspaper scraps?
I really needed to be more careful in covering my tracks next time.