Years collected around that porch.
Olive began joining us after grocery shopping. Theresa would insist she sit down, then complain that young mothers never ate enough while placing another slice of pie on her plate.
Fanny learned to water the flower beds without drowning them.
Roger, who was five and believed himself to be a detective, searched for Theresa’s missing reading glasses every weekend.
They were always in the same apron pocket. He would pull them out triumphantly.
Years collected around that porch.
“Found them!”
Theresa would gasp. “How extraordinary. Have you considered working for the government?”
Roger never realized she was pretending. Maybe that was why she never changed the hiding place.
Theresa came to school recitals, birthday parties, and one disastrous backyard campout that ended when the sprinklers turned on at midnight.
She baked Fanny a strawberry cake shaped like a heart. She taught Roger how to snap green beans.
“Found them!”
She remembered our wedding anniversary before I did and gave Olive flowers “on behalf of the husband who clearly needs administrative support.”
Somewhere along the way, she stopped being our elderly neighbor.
She simply became Miss Theresa.
Every spring, she planted one sunflower beside the back fence for Harold.
She stopped being our elderly neighbor.
The year Fanny turned six, Theresa pressed a second seed into the soil.
“This one’s so he won’t be lonely,” she said, looking away quickly.
By August, the two flowers leaned toward each other.
There were small things I noticed but never questioned.
Some Saturdays, half the lawn had already been cut before I arrived. Theresa would claim the mower had stalled.
Other Saturdays, the grass barely needed trimming, yet she would stand on her porch with the tea ready and say, “It looks unruly to me.”
Theresa would claim the mower had stalled.
Once, during a week of heavy rain, there was no chance of mowing anything.
I knocked anyway.
Theresa opened the door before my hand fell.
“I suppose you came to admire the mud.”
“I heard it was exceptional,” I said.
We sat on the porch listening to rain strike the gutters.
I knocked anyway.
That morning told me what I should have understood years earlier.
I had never been visiting because the grass was long.
Still, neither of us said it.
***
Then, three weeks ago, Olive went next door early one morning to borrow Theresa’s chicken pot pie recipe.
A few minutes later, she called me from Theresa’s kitchen.
Theresa was sitting peacefully in her favorite chair.
She had died sometime during the night.
No warning.
No long illness.
Her heart simply stopped sometime between turning off the porch light and morning.
She had died sometime during the night.
***
The following Saturday, I stood behind my mower while her house remained silent.
Roger came outside carrying a small plastic cup.
“Miss Theresa’s flowers need water, Daddy,” he said.
We crossed the driveway together.
Fanny watered the two sunflowers.
Olive stood on the porch holding a pie she had baked out of habit.
Nobody knew where to put it.
Fanny watered the two sunflowers.
***
At the funeral, Theresa’s distant relatives filled the first two rows.
They were kind people.
They knew where she had been born and what year she married Harold.
But when the minister mentioned her laugh, they looked down at their programs.
I knew that laugh.
I knew she hated cinnamon in coffee but defended it because Harold had loved it.
I knew that laugh.
I knew she read the final page of every mystery novel first.
I knew she saved the crust of her pie for last.
Legally, I was only the man who lived next door.
After the burial, Olive took the children toward the car.
I remained beside Theresa’s grave, staring at a small arrangement of sunflowers.
A man in a dark suit approached me.
“Justin?”
“Yes.”
A man in a dark suit approached me.
“I’m Mr. Thorne. I handled Theresa’s affairs.”
He reached inside his coat and removed a sealed cream-colored envelope.
My name crossed the front in Theresa’s careful handwriting.
When he placed it in my palm, something small and solid shifted inside.
I looked up.
“What is this?”
Something small and solid shifted inside.
Mr. Thorne glanced toward the road, where Theresa’s house waited two blocks away behind a row of trees.
Then he looked me directly in the eyes.
“She knew this belonged to you.”
***
I did not open the envelope that day.
It felt wrong.
Theresa had given me eight years of Saturdays. The least I could do was wait for one more.
So I placed the envelope on our kitchen table and left it there until morning.
It felt wrong.
At seven, I made coffee.
Olive baked a pie.
Fanny sat beside the window in her robe, watching Theresa’s porch.
Roger climbed onto a chair and whispered, “Do you think the thing inside is for treasure, Daddy?”
I looked at him.
“What thing?”
He tapped the envelope. “The metal thing.”
