The Neighbors

“It’s near the end of the month,” she told me. “He just gets like that.”

And like clockwork, the sounds of shattered glass and slamming doors become the soundtrack of our summer.

By the middle of the month, laughter and singing replace the sounds of crashing plates and wailing babes. They sweat on their back deck and wave, drinks flowing, smoke billowing, as we come out to hang our clothes out on the line. The evidence on her skin is the yellowish-green of the pears on their way to ripeness that grow on the tree between our drives. She waves concern away. They’re in love, always have been. Never been a lick of doubt.

I wish she’d leave. In selfish ways, not for her, but for me. For the pears I used to bear. No, I want her to be free of this tantrum-throwing man. For her to know her worth. I want the checks to be enough to last through all the seasons and harvests. But they run out and so does the swill, and her problem becomes a reminder of a tree I used to tend. An heirloom Bartlett all the women of my family carefully pruned. Her trauma becomes mine and theirs and every gardener that can hear.

I thought that I broke free. Burned my tree to the ground. I found myself a man who never screams, or fights, or treats me mean. But 22 years of sweet as can be was not enough to kill those tangled roots. They’re there, strangling. Just waiting for a scream and a smash and “no, please, don’t,” to turn on a siren through every branch of my mind. Go, run, hide. You fight or you die.

I think of breaking in while they sleep. Slipping open the sliding glass they’ve no doubt forgotten to latch in their drunken haze. He’s asleep in the nude, sheets torn from the bed, tangled around one leg as he sleeps, she’s spent beside him. I pick up a pillow, but that’s as far as I ever get. No, sometimes he’s on a recliner, can of Budweiser dangerously close to spilling in his sleeping hand. I scan the room for a tool to protect her. There’s a knife on the avocado green counters, a hammer in a half-opened tool chest, empty bottles, and toys. But she’s always there. And she shakes her head in that desperate way. ‘Just let him sleep. Let him sleep it off. The first is just days away. I know I can survive until then.’

She shouldn’t have to just survive. ‘But I can’t without him. You know how hard it is out there. We have three kids. Three! What man would take on that without a bit of this?’ And I know she’s not wrong. Oh, there are men. Of course, there are, but in a sample, a town’s worth, how many are worse? Between a rock and a hard place, it’s ripe with rot.

“In just a few more days, just you see.” I gird myself. Ticking off the time on the calendar, like a prisoner in a cage, stuck beside them. I could be their accountant by the sounds of the wreckage. They’re down to zero. In the red. She screams and cries. He takes her wages out, with overtime. ‘Just a few more days.’

"Okay, but I’m here for you,” I say.

I can’t help but wish I hadn’t gotten involved, invested in such a diminishing return. But the words fall out of me like tumbles down the stairs. End over end. Unexpectedly, like the doorknobs that jump out in front of her as she bends to put the baby in the bath. ‘It’s such a funny story. I’m always doing things like that.’ I know she has to stay until it’s safe for her to go. But the end of the month is always there, with fresh bruises ripening, blooming, like the pears we share that have gone to seed.