The first thing my neighbor tried to hit me with was a ceramic birdbath, and the second was the truth she could not bear to hear.
I had lived beside Gloria Vance for three years without seeing her raise a hand against anyone.
She was sixty-seven, a retired school cafeteria supervisor who planted white petunias in coffee cans and knew the names of every stray cat on our street.
On the Thursday she attacked me, she came running across my front yard in slippers, clutching the heavy blue basin of her birdbath against her chest.
Her eyes were wild, her silver hair had escaped its pins, and she was screaming a name that did not belong to me.
“Molly!”
I stepped backward beside my garage, dropping the coils of microphone cable I had carried out to my car.
Gloria raised the basin over one shoulder.
“Where is she, Evan?”
“Who’s where?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know!”
The basin slipped from her hands and shattered across the sidewalk, sending blue fragments under my parked car.
I would later be grateful that she lost her grip before she could throw it.
At the time, I barely registered the crash because she had lunged at me and caught the front of my jacket with both fists.
“I heard her voice in your house.”
Her face was inches from mine.
“You brought her back, and you never told me.”
I caught her wrists without squeezing and tried to turn us away from the broken ceramic.
“Gloria, please stop.
You’re going to get hurt.”
“You already hurt her.”
Then she slapped me hard enough to knock my glasses onto the lawn.
A car stopped in the street.
Someone shouted from a porch.
I let go of her wrists, lifted both hands, and said the only thing I was certain of.
“Call the police.”
Gloria’s expression changed at once.
For a second I thought she had heard me.
Instead she stepped back and pointed at my garage.
“Good.
Tell them to search in there.”
The garage door was open, revealing a folding table, a pair of speakers, a recording console, and the yellow raincoat hanging on a hook beside the utility sink.
Gloria looked at the coat as if the sight might stop her heart.
“That’s hers.”
It wasn’t.
I had bought it the previous week at a secondhand store for a theater company that needed a raincoat for its production of Our Town.
There were dozens like it in northern Ohio.
