Page 3 of Down Bad

Grease-spotted tank top. Old jeans, sagging slightly. Shoulders broad and shiny with sweat, hunched under the hood of some sad piece of junk, tinkering away.

He’s my age. Thirty-something.

A detail I perhaps forgot to mention.

A thirty-something-year-old nephew of my neighbors who is, more or less, between jobs, between houses, or between lives. His nose buried in the guts of a junk car at four in the morning with a surgeon’s focus. There’s no telling if he never went to bed, or if he wakes up this early. Either answer annoys me.

I remind myself that this is the nephew my sweet and loving former neighbors adore. Then I take a breath and go back to bed.

Twenty minutes later, another ear-splitting roar.

Then another.

I dream of that car’s slow, sweet demise in a landfill far away.

Next morning, it roars again. Doesn’t he realize people work?

Morning after that, too. Kill me now.

By Friday, its floor mats are out on the grass, tools surround it all over the driveway, and all the hubcaps are gone.

Saturday, there’s a crinkled blue tarp involved.

I don’t trust a man whose mess multiplies.

“I miss the Valdezes,” my friend Mindy tells me when we run into each other at the market on my day off picking out potatoes, and I’m so glad she brought it up first, because I feel less whiny when I reply, “Me too. Lottie had such great taste in flowers. I put in a pretty spread of wildflowers under her front window. I’m so sad they moved away, but can’t blame them. Retiring to a cozy life on the coast doesn’t sound half bad right about now.”

“You only liked her ‘cause she was your number one customer.”

Mindy has a point. I run a flower shop.

“How’s her nephew treating the place?” she asks.

I stare at a potato like it might advise me how to answer this. “Aggressively,” I decide to say.

She winces. “That bad?”

“There’s a tarp now.” I move on to the next potato bin, not answering the question left on her face.

The third crime is arguably the worst.

It begins with an act of compassion. My own. In the form of a welcome basket.

Who doesn’t like a welcome basket?

I catch him while he’s outside working on what we’ll politely call the car. I’ve walked the path from my front doorstep to next door a thousand times. But today, it feels like a mile of boiling hot concrete separating our houses that I must tread delicately. I’m a sweaty mess before I’ve said even a single word.

That word being: “Oops.”

Because I accidentally kick one of his tools left on the ground. It skitters across the driveway and stops short at his foot.

He barely gifts me a glance, staying hunched over the engine.

Doesn’t say a word.

“Sorry for kicking your wrench.” I adjust the way I’m gripping the basket. It’s getting heavier the longer I hold it. “I’m Wyatt. Lived next door to your aunt and uncle for … well, forever.” I smile too tightly. My voice keeps dancing all over the place. “Just thought I’d drop by and … and offer you …”

He grunts as he twists something in the engine, scowling.