That’s Miss Lena. She lives across the street. Is she the nice lady you know? Yeah, buddy, she is. Cameron considered this. She brought us food. She did. That was nice. It was. Can we eat it now? I’m really hungry. Ethan laughed and ruffled his son’s hair. Yeah, let’s eat. They heated up the lasagna in the microwave.
The oven would take too long to preheat, and Ethan wasn’t even sure it worked. And ate sitting on the floor of the living room because the dining table was still covered in boxes. Cameron chattered between bites about his new room and the swing set in the backyard and whether they could get a dog now that they had a yard.
“Maybe,” Ethan said, knowing full well that meant yes, but wanting to maintain at least the illusion of parental authority. “We’ll see.” After dinner, he got Cameron ready for bed, a routine that involved brushing teeth, finding pajamas in the chaos of unpacked boxes, and reading three chapters of a picture book about a bear who couldn’t sleep.
By the time Cameron’s eyes finally closed, it was past 9, and Ethan was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical labor. He went back downstairs and sat on the front porch, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood settling in for the night. crickets, a dog barking somewhere down the block, the distant hum of the interstate three miles away.
It was so different from the silence of the desert, where every sound was a potential threat, where you learn to sleep with one eye open and one hand near your weapon. Here, the silence was just silence. It took some getting used to. Across the street, a light was on in Lena’s living room window.
He could see her moving around inside, probably cleaning up from her own dinner. She lived alone, he realized. No husband, no kids, just her in that little house that had belonged to her parents. They’d moved to Florida a few years back, he remembered. Retired down to some golf community near Tampa and left Lena the house.
He wondered what her life was like. Did she date? Was she happy? Did she ever think about him? About the kid who used to watch her from his bedroom window and imagine what it would be like to actually talk to her? Probably not. They’d never been close. Not really. They’d known each other the way everyone in a small town knows everyone else.
Friendly waves, occasional small talk, the kind of superficial familiarity that came from proximity rather than genuine connection. She’d been 2 years behind him in school, part of a different social circle. And by the time he left for the army, she’d been in college somewhere upstate. But she remembered him.
She’d brought him lasagna and offered to help with the house and smiled at him like she actually cared that he was back. That had to count for something. The next morning came too early. Cameron woke him up at 6:00, bouncing on the bed and demanding pancakes. And Ethan dragged himself out of bed with the kind of groggginess that only came from sleeping in an unfamiliar place.
The bedroom he’d chosen, his parents’ old room, still smelled like his mother’s perfume. And every time he rolled over during the night, he’d half expected to see his father’s reading glasses on the nightstand. They didn’t have pancake mix, so breakfast was toast with peanut butter and the last of the orange juice from the cooler Ethan had packed for the drive.
