The note was written in purple ink on a page torn from a spiral notebook, and by the time I reached Dakota’s front steps I had crushed it into a ball in my fist.
I could hear Tony behind me in the street.
“Jennifer! Jen, wait. Please.”
I didn’t wait. I didn’t look back. I walked up her three concrete steps, past the pot of yellow mums she’d set out the week she moved in, and I stood in front of her red door with my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
I was fifty-one years old. I had never in my life knocked on a stranger’s door to start a fight.
I raised my hand. It was shaking.
I knocked anyway.
To understand why I was standing there, you need to know about the coffee. And to understand why that note hit me the way it did, you need to know about the twenty-five years before the coffee. I’ll tell you both. But I’ll start with the easy part, because for a while, that’s all it was. Easy. Almost funny.
Dakota moved into the house across the street at the end of August.
It was the little gray rambler that had belonged to old Mr. Petrakis for forty years, until his kids moved him to assisted living in the spring and put the house on the market. Tony and I watched the moving truck pull up from our front porch, drinking iced tea, the way people in our neighborhood watched everything. Maple Court is a small street. Eleven houses in a horseshoe. Everybody knows everybody’s business, and what they don’t know, they make up.
The movers carried in a couch, a drafting table, a few boxes, a bed. That was about it. Then a young woman got out of a little blue Honda with Arizona plates. Late twenties, maybe. Thin. Dark hair pulled back under a knit beanie, even though it was eighty-five degrees. She stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at the house. Then she turned around and looked at ours.
Right at us. Right at Tony.
I remember that because it struck me as odd. Most people look at their new house when they move in. She looked at us for maybe five full seconds before she turned and went inside.
“Friendly,” Tony said.
“Maybe she’s just tired,” I said.
Two days later, she knocked on our door with a plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in plastic.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Dakota. I just moved in across the street. I wanted to introduce myself.”
Up close, she was pretty in a tired way. Big dark eyes. Pale skin. She was still wearing the beanie. A different one, gray this time.
“I’m Jennifer,” I said. “Jennifer Moretti. Come in, come in.”
She hesitated on the doorstep. Then she came in. Tony was in the kitchen fixing the garbage disposal, which he’d been fixing every other month for about fifteen years. He came out wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“This is my husband, Tony,” I said.
Dakota looked at him.
And I want to tell you exactly what I saw, because I’ve thought about it so many times since. She didn’t look at him the way a young woman looks at a man she thinks is attractive. I know that look. I’ve seen waitresses give it to Tony. He’s fifty-four, but he’s still got all his hair, and his arms are still strong from thirty years as an electrician, and he has a good easy smile. Women notice.
This was different. She looked at him like she was trying to memorize him. Like she was looking at a photograph she’d only ever seen in black and white, and suddenly it was in color.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice came out a little strange.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” Tony said, and shook her hand. “Where you coming from?”
“Phoenix.”
“Long way. What brings you to Ohio?”
She paused. “Work. I’m a graphic designer. I can work from anywhere. I just. I needed a change.”
“Well, you picked a good street,” Tony said. “Mostly. Watch out for Marlene at number seven. She’ll know your blood type by Friday.”
Dakota laughed. It was a nice laugh. A little rusty, like she didn’t use it much.
She stayed for twenty minutes. She asked a lot of questions. How long we’d lived there. Twenty-three years. What Tony did. Electrician, his own company, Moretti Electric, six guys. What I did. Office manager at a pediatric dental practice. Whether we had kids.
“No,” I said. “No kids.”
She looked down at her hands when I said that. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“It’s alright,” I said. It was a question I’d been answering for twenty years. I’d gotten good at saying it lightly.
After she left, I put the cookies on a plate. They were good. Homemade.
“Nice girl,” Tony said, eating his third one.
“She seemed sad,” I said.
“Everybody’s sad when they move,” Tony said. “It’s the boxes. Boxes make everybody sad.”
At first, she really did seem nice enough.
She waved when she got her mail. She stopped to chat when she saw us in the yard. She asked me where the good grocery store was and whether the farmers market was worth it. She brought Marlene at number seven a loaf of zucchini bread, which was a smart move, because Marlene told everybody on the street that the new girl was “a sweetheart, but too skinny, and why does she always wear that hat?”
Then she started paying more attention to Tony.
It was little things at first. If Tony was out mowing the lawn, Dakota would come out to water her mums. If Tony was washing his truck in the driveway, Dakota would come over to ask him a question about her circuit breaker. If we were sitting on the porch in the evening, she’d walk her recycling bin to the curb very slowly and wave.
I noticed. I’m not blind. But I didn’t think much of it. Tony is the kind of man people come to with questions about circuit breakers.
Then came the coffee.
Tony leaves for work at the same time every morning. Six fifty. He’s done it for thirty years. He kisses me in the kitchen, takes his thermos, and walks out to his truck, and I watch him from the kitchen window while I finish my own coffee. It’s one of those little habits a marriage builds up, like coral. You don’t notice it until something changes.
One Monday in late September, something changed.
Tony stepped outside at six fifty. And at that exact moment, Dakota’s red front door opened, and she came down her steps and across the street carrying two paper cups from the Daily Grind on Main Street.
I stood at the window with my mug halfway to my mouth.
“Morning!” I heard her call. “I bought an extra by mistake. Do you want it? It’ll just go to waste.”
Tony looked surprised. Then he smiled and took it.
“Well, thank you. That’s real nice.”
“Have a good day,” she said, and went back inside.
The next morning, she did it again.
Same time. Same two cups. Same “I bought an extra.” This time Tony laughed. “Twice in a row? You need to talk to those people about their ordering system.”
“I’m terrible at mornings,” she said. “Apparently.”
By Wednesday, I’d stopped finishing my own coffee at the window. I was just standing there, watching.
By Friday, she somehow knew exactly how he liked it.
I heard her through the screen. “Two sugars, no cream, right?”
Tony stopped halfway to his truck. “How’d you know that?”
Dakota smiled. “Lucky guess.”
That evening at dinner, I laughed about it.
“I think our new neighbor has a crush on you,” I said.
Tony shook his head and kept eating his spaghetti. “I think she’s probably just lonely,” he said. “She’s new here. She doesn’t know anybody. Maybe she’s trying to make friends.”
“By bringing my husband coffee every morning?”
He laughed. “Apparently I’m very approachable before eight a.m.”
“Apparently.”
“Jen.” He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. “She’s younger than some of my apprentices. She’s a kid. I’m a fifty-four-year-old man with a bad knee who falls asleep during Jeopardy.”
“You do fall asleep during Jeopardy.”
“Every single night.” He squeezed my hand. “She’s lonely. That’s all.”
After that, it became a joke between us.
Whenever Dakota appeared with another coffee, I’d tease Tony about his “morning delivery.” I’d ask if he was going to leave her a tip. I’d ask if the Daily Grind had made him employee of the month. When he came home in the evening, I’d say, “How was your coffee date?” and he’d say, “She’s starting to talk about our future, Jen. I think she wants a June wedding.”
We laughed. We’d been married twenty-five years. We laughed at almost everything, because the alternative was crying, and we’d done enough of that early on.
I wasn’t worried. That’s the truth. Tony never encouraged her. He was polite and friendly and that was all. He genuinely seemed to believe she was just lonely, and honestly, I mostly believed it too.
But Marlene at number seven did not believe it.
She caught me at the mailbox on the second Thursday.
“Jennifer,” she said, in the low voice she uses for the very best gossip. “I don’t like to say anything.”
Marlene loves to say things. It’s her favorite activity after bingo.
“But that girl,” she said, nodding toward the gray house. “Every morning. With the coffee. I see it from my kitchen. The whole street sees it. People are talking.”
“People can talk,” I said.
“I’m just saying, honey. Young girl, lives alone, no job anybody can see, wears hats in the heat. Brings a married man coffee every morning.” She raised her eyebrows. “My cousin’s husband in Toledo, it started with coffee. Next thing you know, he’s living in a condo in Sandusky with a dental hygienist.”
“Tony’s not moving to Sandusky, Marlene.”
“I’m just saying.”
I walked back to my house