Next To You

Chapter 1

William Murphy never saw it coming.

The old-fashioned brass bell tinkled above the doorframe. Will looked up from his French toast and watched a woman step inside the diner. Honey-blonde hair skimmed her shoulders and dipped over her face, obscuring her features like a mysterious dame in a forties noir film. The modern day Veronica Lake leaned between the stools at the bar and asked Ray, the chubby owner behind the counter, if there were any cinnamon twists today. He nodded, and she turned to look about for an empty table. Will smiled at her when her gaze skimmed over him and settled on the booth beside his. Well, happy birthday to me!

The man tending to his running nose had looked at her too. Dressed in a black-trimmed chef’s tunic, his disheveled, dark red hair matched the bushy beard poking around the edges of the white handkerchief swabbing his nose. His slender fingers stopped moving. Frozen in an awkward nose-picking pose, he stared at the woman. The handkerchief dropped as the redhead shot to his feet. His thigh joggled the square table, pitching it to the left then right, tipping his mocha. Creamy chocolate slopped onto a slice of pie and a cannon shot of cocoa-laced coffee vaulted across a sea of linoleum tiles. Milky brown starbursts splattered Will’s black shoes.

In three strides, the scruffy man had gripped the woman’s elbows. Tufts of her red sweater welled like blood between his fingers. He jerked her onto her toes and drove her against the counter hard, bending her backwards, snarling fraught, incomprehensible, words into her face.

‘Alex!’ she screamed.

Alex let her go and backed away, shaking, gasping, as Will—and the other café patrons—watched her run from the diner. Shuffling, sniffling, Alex sat back at his table, leaned his elbows into the dripping pale brown mess on top, and dropped his head into his hands.

The moment of WTF shock wore off and Will hurried after the woman. By the time he’d made it outside she’d disappeared. With an irritated huff, he went back into the diner. He wiped chocolate milk from his shoes and dropped the soggy napkin on top of his half-eaten cinnamon French toast. He folded his newspaper, gathered his umbrella, and put on his raincoat with the torn sleeve. The tear was new and had happened during his the walk to the café. His umbrella had been turned inside out by a ferocious gust of Chicago wind, spidery spokes poked through the blue waterproof fabric, snagged the left sleeve of his raincoat, and ripped it on an exposed metal arachnid leg.

The hole in his sleeve should have been a clue that his birthday wasn’t going to turn out very happily. It was barely past ten and events had already spoiled his day: his raincoat, witnessing a public display of near domestic violence, and sitting there gaping as the train wreck played out, doing … nothing.

When did I become a man of inaction?

He glanced back at his napkin-covered breakfast. Did his inertia have anything to do with his French toast? Could he place the culpability for his inaction on the French toast? Was it really fair to hold sugar-dusted, egg-dipped fried bread accountable when his motivation this morning had been all about the French toast? He loved French toast. French toast and coffee were the highlight of his weekend breakfast, and he’d been eager to enjoy himself, and …

You hedonist.

Hedonism had been his downfall. The French toast, the first cup of coffee, the woman and her Veronica Lake hair, he’d enjoyed all of them—until the sniffling nose-picker had entered with the gladiatorial spectacle of woman versus red-maned lion.

William Murphy, hedonist, examined the rip in his coat sleeve and wondered if his birthday had turned him into something sluggish and lame. He wondered if a deeply hidden part of his mind was telling him to slow down, that this birthday meant he wasn’t far off being like his octogenarian neighbor, who’d just moved out and into a gated retirement community.

The thought of retirement living made Will shudder like Homer Simpson. No, it made him shudder like Abe Simpson, Homer’s elderly, crotchety father. Only Will wasn’t old. Old was hunched over, unable to feed himself or wipe his own butt. Old was something like one hundred and seven.

Great. You’ve reached this amazing conclusion that you can’t blame French toast and you’re not an old fart or old coot. Hooray for you. So now tell me again, why did you just sit there and watch?

His mind did the equivalent of a shoulder shrug and, no closer to an answer for his lack of action, he paused at the coffee shop’s door to look again at the man and the sloppy mess the diner staff was mopping up. Will watched the redhead, who still sat with his elbows in a pool of chocolate milk. Alex scowled at the menu above the coffee counter, rubbing the left side of his jaw. Abruptly, his eyes changed direction.

Will was used to being stared at. Given his appearance, it happened frequently. This particular time, instead of patiently bearing the gaze, a different idea sparked in his brain, urging him to take action, to retaliate, to shove Alex as brutally as he’d shoved the woman. Yet the preposterous notion of getting into a fistfight, which would have been the first since the numerous he’d had in high school, shut down whatever synapse had fired and told him to be caveman.

With a discontented sigh, he exited the diner, put on blue-tinted sunglasses, his wide-brimmed fedora, and walked home. He dumped his broken umbrella in a trashcan half-full of rainwater along the way, and began splashing in puddles in a Gene Kelly ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ fashion on purpose.

Will started to laugh. The funky idea of a birthday irritating him had nothing to do with the grunting noise he made when he bent over to tie his shoes, or the upset stomach he got when he ate deep-fried fatty foods, or the fact he found it hard to stay up past eleven. It wasn’t about the rain, a broken umbrella tearing his coat, or how his neighbor Reg had moved out. It wasn’t even about failing to come to the defense of an attractive woman.

He reached this not so startling conclusion upon arriving at the front of his toast-colored six-flat apartment building, the same moment as a white and blue Schildkraut’s furniture van. This delivery van replaced the bigger moving truck that had been there when he’d left for breakfast.

And there it was, the core of all his anxiety and dissatisfaction. His sluggish crankiness was completely due to the fact he hadn’t had enough sleep. If Reg hadn’t moved, this morning would have begun quietly, but instead of waking to the lingering scent of Reg’s morning Montecristo, Will had been jarred awake by the insensitive jackass who’d started moving into the vacant apartment at the crack of dawn, on a Saturday morning.

The men in the delivery vehicle were obvious as they stared, pointing at him through the front windscreen. Will was close enough to see their lips move. As he unlocked the entry into the foyer, the van driver rolled down the window and called out to him.

‘Hey, excuse me, do you live in dis building?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what floor apartment E is on? I just want to know how many flights me and Doug are lookin’ at to carry dis couch up.’

Will wondered what else was in the truck for the apartment across the hall from his. ‘Sorry fellas, E’s on the top floor.’

‘Ah, shit.’

‘You owe me ten bucks, Carlo,’ pug-nosed Doug said from the truck’s passenger seat.

‘You owe me ten bucks,’ double-chinned Carlo mimicked in a nasal, high-pitched voice. ‘Would you know if the lady in E’s home?’

So, his Saturday morning sleep-disrupting new neighbor was a woman. ‘Sorry,’ Will said. ‘Don’t have a clue. You’ll have to ring the bell. E’s the apartment at the top left of the building, but the bell’s the last button to the left on the bottom row. Have fun.’

‘Thanks. You wouldn’t want to give us a hand, would you?’ Doug called out.

‘I may be a big strapping lad, but my real strength’s up here.’ Will tapped his head, waved and went inside the building.

***

So much for grabbing life by the balls.

Batman stretched his legs and yawned. Mouth open wide, his pink tongue curled out and up. Dogs often yawned when they were stressed. Caroline yawned and wondered if human beings did too. She rummaged around in a cardboard moving box and watched Batman turn in a few circles. He scratched at his pillow and little red flannel blanket, and plopped down, snuggling into his bed to sleep again. Dogs slept a lot.

She’d slept a lot in the last two years. Really she’d been hibernating for the last two years, sheltering in a den of her own making. Now she was waking up, wiping a kind of brittle sleep from her eyes, stretching her unused limbs to take on life again, except she was doing this backward. Hibernating creatures came out in the springtime and this was two weeks into autumn. After such a long, long sleep, she was finally aware the hunger she felt was a literal hunger for food. It had taken a good while before her appetite had returned. This wet morning she’d woken up ravenous, with breakfast the only thing on her mind. Unfortunately, there’d been no slow start, no time to ease back into gentle dawn, because a state of wakefulness kicked in immediately.

The Wellington Diner had been the ultimate food seduction. She’d found the place last week, when she had a walk around to get her bearings of the neighborhood. The place was a cross between the thirties-era corner diner Robert Redford frequented in The Sting and the deli where Meg Ryan did the fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally.

She’d liked the coffee, the cinnamon twists they had that tasted like the ones her husband used to make, the little booths beside the window, and the fact the establishment, like the local cinema, was only a few blocks from home. Yeah, she was starting over. Yeah, she’d started to grab life by the balls, like Julie said she ought to. Yeah, she’d been about to sit in one of those booths, but that was before everyone in the diner had turned to gape at Alex screaming in her face.

Alex made everyone look at her. The couple closest to the door had tsked and shaken their heads. The yuppie pair watched to see what would happen next, eating their scrambled eggs with their fingers as if it was popcorn, while the older couple looked at each other uncomfortably, and then looked at her.

The big man with satiny, bleached-platinum hair and pretty eyes sat at a booth by himself, holding his newspaper at an angle as if he were examining a Playboy centerfold. He’d given her a smile when she first walked inside. That little smile had lit up his lovely eyes, but then he’d stared too—undoubtedly annoyed by the chocolate milk that had sprayed all over his expensive Italian shoes.

A simple quest to forage for food had turned her into the center-ring act in an embarrassing circus and she did the only thing she could to avoid the unapplauding, unaffected audience.

She ran home like a chicken.

‘Bock-bock-bock,’ she muttered under her breath, as she drew a Tupperware cupcake tray from the box marked bath towels. ‘Bock-bock-bock …’

That’s what she hated most about starting over, about everything that had happened, that she’d turned into a chicken. She hated second-guessing how she felt, hated being tentative, unsure about decisions and the choices she had to make—unless fear reared its head and then she was off like a shot—because one decision had altered so many lives.

The specter of that one choice, the spectacle of her life with Drew and Alex, had been interred in the mausoleum of her past, and she yearned to simply fade into the background like the past. She needed to be average, to have average with a capital A life. Some people strove for greatness, pushed themselves to reach the stratosphere, and craved recognition for the mark they made. What she wanted, more than anything in starting over, was to be in that seventy-fifth percentile, C+, middle of the bell curve.

Yeah, she was almost there. She was close to ordinary, even if she missed being average height by almost three inches. Maybe she was thinner than most women her age, and pushing her way through to the other side of forty-five hadn’t seem to slow her metabolism down; in fact in the last three years it took off sprinting, leaving her skinnier than when she was in her mid-teens, but she had the average cellulite and stretch marks. Those were lines near her mouth, crow’s-feet at her eyes and her skin was losing its elasticity. Those average things were a comfort; she was glad she wasn’t a head-turner who worried about fading prettiness. She knew her looks were average and average meant she could fade into the background. Getting older was a bonus too, since older women often went unnoticed in society.

All right, there was one hitch to aiming for average and she knew it. She dressed well, and although it was problematic when it came to average, it was a distinct advantage for someone in her profession to be chic. I am old-school Hollywood glamor. I am the Jean Louis, Edith Head, Adrian, and Givenchy of personal shopping. Edith Head was stylist to classic Hollywood. I’m stylist to the busy urban professional.

Like Louis and Head, she knew ways to disguise wide hips or play up the best assets of a figure by using colors and styles of clothing best suited to an individual’s frame, and make that person look better than average. While some might remember the fashions she chose for them, or remember the style tips she gave, or possibly the skirt she wore, few would actually remember Caroline. It was that precise the Jane Doe quality she wanted. After all, no one remembered what Jean Louis looked like, but they sure as hell remembered the dress he designed for Rita Hayworth in Gilda.

She sang ‘Put the blame on Mame’ to herself and pulled a waffle iron from the box, instantly perplexed the device was in a carton that was supposed to house towels.

She shrugged, Batman yawned again and made a curious little noise, drawing her attention. Last night, in this new place, camped out on the floor, she’d slept soundly with the dog snuggled under her elbow. It had been months since she’d woken to the imagined sound of crying, and crawled out of bed, bumping, stumbling, believing she had to ease that weedy, distressed infant sound. The auditory hallucination and anxiety had been gone for a long while, but the expectation had plagued her at times. It had taken forever for the stage between sleep and awake to lengthen from a few minutes, to a few hours at stretch, to an uninterrupted night. The last dark traces beneath her eyes had disappeared and a routine, restful sleep pattern had finally emerged.

She found a yellow bath towel—finally a towel. She took it out of the carton only to see that it was wrapped around a ceramic trinket box full of costume jewelry. She sifted through the stuff, hoping to find the ugly mood ring, the one her husband had given her because he said her eyes were green or a weird blue depending on her mood. How she wished she had that silly rock now. The little barometer could tell her how it was she was feeling. She was hungry, but she was also frustrated and some other weird emotion that seeing Alex had triggered. She hoped the ring was stuffed in a jewelry bag and crammed inside a box labeled Pajamas or Winter Clothes.

So much had been in storage for the past eighteen months. No, it had been over eighteen months. It had been over eighteen months away from Alex and even longer without Drew. She took a very deep breath and exhaled as long as she could, trying to push out the lingering fear … and shock, anger, excitement, or whatever else came from thinking that a red-bearded hoodlum was assaulting her in a public place—before she realized it was Alex.

And here comes the self-doubt … Why had she let Julie convince her she was ready for this? Why had she let her uncle talk her into returning to the city to live, instead of staying in the safety of the northern suburbs, working as an assistant for a bachelor rabbi who farted a lot and ate nothing but tuna?

Uncle Sly Fox had lured her from the self-imposed exile, coerced her into buying this palatial twenties-era three-bedroom apartment with water views. And as he persuaded her, she had fanciful images of fixing up the Art Deco place in the swanky style of My Man Godfrey and The Great Gatsby. She ran with that daydream while Uncle Sly made a big deal of saying that she was his only family, and with her parents gone and Drew gone the apartment was a solid investment, which was important to have and blah, blah, blah …

She’d come back to town under the misconception the transition from sleepwalking to bustling would be undemanding and involve painting walls and redecorating. She assumed there would be a settling-in period over a few weeks or couple of months, but in sixteen hours, things went from zero to a hundred before she even got a coffee buzz.

Coffee. She wanted coffee. Where’s the damn coffee maker? How can I grab life by the balls without coffee?

A paw padded softly against her calf and she looked down. The brown eyes on the little dog sitting at her feet peered up at her, his black and white face bat-like and dotted by tan eyebrows. His usually erect, pointy ears lay back against his little head like soft rabbit ears.

Caroline smiled. ‘What do you think, Batman, are we going to find the coffee maker?’

Batman cocked his head. He stood and poked his tongue out of his pointed snout. Then his ears snapped upright as the door buzzer reverberated, a hive of bumblebees humming through the apartment.

Dog at her heels, she went to the intercom for the downstairs entry. ‘Yes, who is it?’

‘Hi. It’s Carlo and Doug from Schildkraut’s. We’re early, but we’ve got your living room suite and bed.’

‘I’ll buzz you up. I’m all the way up at the top on the left.’ She pressed the downstairs buzzer to let the men into the foyer and opened her door. She caught a brief glimpse of her white-haired neighbor as he went into the apartment across the landing.

Her uncle told her two bachelors lived in the building. The nice bachelor neighbor next door had a skin condition and liked to sing. The other guy was a cranky, reclusive crime writer who lived one floor down. The dog darted out through the open door, tracking the unfamiliar scent of the ‘nice’ man next door. Caroline grabbed Batman before he got too far. She tucked him close under an arm and carried him down the hall to the kitchen, pausing to take a dog biscuit from a green jar. Then she moved through the French doors, out on to the partially covered terrace, and set him down outside with a pat to his slender back. ‘Stay,’ she said, giving him the cookie.

The voices of two movers arguing echoed up the hallway and grew louder as they came up the stairs. One of them said, ‘I bet you twenty he is.’

‘You just lost ten and now you want to make it thirty?’

‘I’m telling you he—lift that left side up a little higher or I’m gonna hit the railing—he is. He looks exactly like my cousin’s kid.’

‘Well, if you’re so sure, how come you didn’t ask him out front? What are you gonna do now, knock on all the doors in this place till you come to his, and ask?’

***

Sharp, vigorous, barking greeted Will the instant he set foot on the terrace. He shifted the basket of damp laundry under his arm and the woofing, or more accurately, the warfing, drowned out the music coming from the tiny hidden speakers on his terrace. The radio was tuned to an oldies station. Will wondered if the dog was barking because of the high-pitched voice of Melanie singing about a pair of brand new roller skates.

The warf-warf-warf followed him as he moved to the clothesline attached to the brick wall and began to hang up his washing. Once he’d pinned up sheets, towels, and a pair of blue and white striped pajamas, he turned to the noisy dog.

He liked dogs. A new neighbor with a dog was preferable to an old neighbor with three cats, especially cats that occasionally performed howling, midnight operas and left putrid smelling urine all over his BBQ.

Outside of his tinkling, yowling kitties, Reginaldi had been a fine neighbor. He had lived in the building since the forties. His wit was quick, and he was full of stories of days with pro golf tours, the Korean War, his two marriages, and his brief foray into television sitcoms, which was how Will placed him when they’d first met nearly five years ago. The man had been a well-known professional golfer. He’d played himself on an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show, which led to appearances The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, and the Western The Big Valley, shows Will had seen countless times on cable. He was going to miss Reginaldi sharing bottles of his home brew with his ‘favorite neighbor.’ He was going to miss the TV gossip, the tales of golfing in the US Open, and all those stories about his family. He’d miss the beer, the stories, and Reg, but not the cats. Despite the dog’s yipping, canine whizz was infinitely easier on the nose than feline cologne.

The day had turned humid and warm as the sun began to shine between wide parted clouds. Will put on his sunglasses. The dog shut up and poked its tiny black nose through the crisscrossing, ivy-covered latticework. ‘Hey there dog,’ he said in a playful voice, moving closer to the lattice, crouching down to have better look.

The dog jerked back and let out double time warf-warf-warf-warf in an obvious display of territoriality.

Will placed the back of his left hand near an open spot in the vines and lattice. The dog growled. The little nose poked through the ivy again, black mouth pulled back over bared, sharp little teeth, but Will didn’t move his hand. ‘Hey there puppy,’ he said in the same friendly tone as before. There was a series of speedy sniffs and his knuckles were licked all over.

A small, white paw with short, black nails scratched and pushed through the lattice. Will stuck his thick fingers through to try to pat the dog’s black head. ‘Hang on, hang, on,’ he said. He stood, looked around the terrace, and grabbed a damp, old dishrag from the clothesline. He tied three knots in it and stuffed one end through to the other side of the terrace, wiggling it. ‘Hey! Over here!’

The dog was eager to play and latched on to the dishrag, pulling hard. For ten minutes, Will played a game of tug-o-war with his new little neighbor before he let the dog win and have the towel.

On the other side of the terrace, the dog shook the knotted rag like a captive rat. On his side Will hung up his laundry, singing ‘Black and White’ along with Three Dog Night on the radio. He caught glimpses of the puppy scampering about with his raggedy rodent and changed the lyrics of the song for the benefit of the dog and sang, ‘Your face is black, your paw is white, you bark all day, but not all night—at least I hope you don’t bark at night, little man.’

Fifteen minutes later, laundry done, music off, he was ready to ride. With his black leather jacket zipped up, he headed out the door, a black helmet in his hand.

He ran into Carlo, the furniture delivery guy he’d met earlier. ‘You two were pretty quick with all that,’ Will said.

Carlo nodded. ‘She didn’t have much, just a couple of big pieces and a lamp. So, you got a bike, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What kind?’

‘A Harley Fat Boy.’

‘You don’t dress like a Harley Guy.’

‘I’m a little more safety conscious than your average middle-aged, bearded Hog rider.’

‘Hey, can I ask you somepin’?’

Here it comes, Will thought. It usually happened shortly after the pointing fingers. ‘Shoot.’

‘Are you …?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, how come you don’t got pink eyes?’

Automatically, Will settled in to educator mode and waited for Carlo’s eyes to glaze over. ‘Most of us have blue or bluish eyes,’ he said. ‘Some have a pink or a pale violet color, and some have brown eyes like yours. It all depends on what category you fall into, oculocutaneous or ocular, and there’re various subdivisions, like Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome, which is pretty rare, but mo—’

‘Those are some big words and I don’t got no doctor’s dictionary at my fingertips.’

‘Sorry about that. You have to bear in mind that fiction and Hollywood get it wrong. Silas from The Da Vinci Code is pretty much bullshit.’

***

The monstrous roar of a motorcycle leaving the garage sent Batman into a barking frenzy on the terrace. As the bike moved into the alleyway the dog whined, and scratched at the paned glass, wanting to be let in. Caroline hated shutting him outside, but he could get a little aggressive and overprotective, especially when unfamiliar men were around. She didn’t want him snapping or biting the deliverymen from Schildkraut’s.

After the thunderous clatter of the motorcycle took off up the street, Caroline let Batman in. He trotted into the kitchen with a raggedy piece of yellow towel in his mouth.

Well, shit. ‘Where did you get that?’

He played, tossing his head, shaking the rag rat gripped in his teeth.

She looked out to the damp terrace. Another section of torn fabric lay on the terracotta tiles, right next to an old wrought iron table. Gusty wind had accompanied the heavy rain that had fallen about an hour ago. She guessed the cloth had blown onto the terrace from the neighboring apartment.

Outside, she peeked through the ivy-covered lattice that divided her terrace from the one next door. Pillowcases, blue striped pajamas, and towels hung beneath a metal-framed clothesline under the cover of a small, sloping roof like she had.

Caroline bit her thumbnail. Then she took the remains of the towel inside and composed a note to her neighbor.

***

Four minutes into the twelve-minute trip to Quincy’s place, rain pelted down. Will was hot, damp, and annoyed his ride had been washed out again. His irritation faded when he arrived at his friend’s house. Erika took his helmet, kissed his cheek, and led him to the comfortable rumpus room where a group of people shouted, ‘Surprise!’

Will looked down at himself. His leather jacket was open over his red t-shirt. His black leather pants were beaded with rain and unzipped around the ankles of scuffed black boots. He knew his hair was probably plastered to his scalp, and helmet head was not his best look. Despite it all, he ruffled up his hair and laughed. ‘You got me. You got me. Stop in and look at this contract. I can’t believe I fell for that, but you knew I would. Well, there better be cake.’

‘Did you think I’d forget, Murph?’ Quincy grinned. ‘I admit I probably would have if Erika didn’t pester me about it for the last two weeks. If you hadn’t already guessed, there is no contract for you to peruse. Happy birthday, my big white Irish friend.’ Quincy inhaled, his hands poised in mid-air as if he were about to start conducting.

Will interrupted, giving his best friend a back-slapping bear hug, saying, ‘Thanks. Thank you for this, but I beg of you. Please, don’t sing. Howzabout you make that my birthday present?’

Nodding, Quincy began a very loud, out of pitch, tone-deaf version of ‘Happy Birthday to You.’

Guests cried out, some with their hands over their ears, ‘What the hell!’

‘He swore he wasn’t going to do that!’

‘Erika, do something!’

‘Erika, make it stop!’

Making a face, Erika kissed her husband to shut him up. The nine people in the room cheered.

Two hours later, Will went home in a taxi, nicely toasted, with a shopping bag of birthday gifts. He tipped the driver twenty bucks for a twelve-minute ride and climbed out of the cab on slightly tipsy legs. Like this morning, there was a deliveryman at front of the building. The US Postal Service still made Saturday deliveries and the postal worker stood beside the bank of doorbells. Sweat made a wet long line on the back of his shirt.

Oh, yeah, another present for the birthday kid! ‘Who’s that for?’ Will asked.

The postman whirled around, startled. ‘Mrs. Jones, apartment E. Please say you’re Mr. Jones?’

‘Nope, but Mrs. Jones is my neighbor.’

‘Would you mind taking it up for me? I rang the bell already. I mean, if you’re going that direction, can you please save me the trip up the stairs and sign this?’

‘Okey-dokey.’ Hoping he didn’t smell too much like gin or red wine, Will signed the electronic doodad the postman thrust under his nose.

‘Thanks.’

‘You bet,’ he said, taking the yellow, letter-sized envelope he was offered. He went inside, turning the item over in his