On the fourth day, my housemate’s ex left radishes and kale on our stoop. They shouted up at our second-floor porch until my housemate came out. They told her she could have the garden plot they’d sown together. It’s too far from my place, they yelled. I can’t keep it up.
Okay, she yelled. I’ll think about it, she yelled.
After they left, we walked to the community garden. She showed me the chives and the calendula and the bolted kale. This all seemed to be tremendous good luck. The grocery stores were newly to be avoided. This was the time, if ever there was a time, to have a vegetable garden.
They never had the stomach for salting slugs, she said as she plucked one from a strawberry plant.
They had been lovers. We were not lovers, she and I. We were not friends. We were housemates, that category of person both more intimate and more distant than friend. Back at the house, she gave me the radishes and kale.
I can’t eat them, she said.
I can’t even look at them. I can understand that, I said. I ate them.
On the seventh day, they approached her in the parking lot of the Safeway. She had bags, more bags than she could carry, her two-week provisions. She had set the bags down to reposition them when a voice behind her said, Can I help you with that?
Could it have been a coincidence? she asked me when she arrived home. Them being at the same Safeway at the same time?
Could be, I said.
I remember this moment—my housemate at the front door, the sanitizer she’d attempted to make from vodka and xanthan gum glopping off her hands—because right then the best friend texted me. This was a surprise. For six months we had not talked. She had needed space. I had been giving her space.
Hey, how are you doing? her text said. I read it again: Hey. How are you doing? I read it again: Hey. How. Are. You. Doing?
The words inflated in me a helium balloon, which made it impossible to attend to whatever my housemate said next, impossible to eat the potato I’d just baked, impossible to do anything but float around the house on tiptoe for hours, thinking about how I would respond.
I’m okay. How are you? I sent the two statements in separate texts just for the joy of sending them.
At two in the morning on the ninth day, my housemate heard three knocks at her window. Her cat heard them, too. The hair down his spine stood up. She called, Who’s there?
No one answered.
She crept to the kitchen, where she took a knife from the knife block. She crept back to her room. She thrust on the ceiling light. Through her window, the light illuminated the second-floor porch. On the porch, we kept a futon. That night, due to the shadows, it looked like someone was sitting on the futon. She yelled and threw open the window, but no one was
