Page 32 of The Neighbor
“Oh yeah?” I say to keep the conversation moving, even as I struggle to catch my breath.
She looks over at me and frowns. “Yeah. He wanted to get together. I asked him if he was going back to his wife, and he couldn’t give me a straight answer! On top of that, he wouldn’t even say if he was going to get rid of Kerry. She’s the other woman he’s been seeing. I swear he’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m going to be okay with that now.”
That this woman, who until recently was the other woman or at least one of Jared’s other women, now has a problem with his cheating might be the most ironic thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I want to laugh at her outrage because it’s utterly ridiculous, but I keep my expression calm and stifle any hint of a chuckle.
“Sounds like he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going,” I struggle to say as she turns left to head down toward the oldest section of the development.
“What he doesn’t know is a good thing when it’s standing right in front of his face. I hope he gets fat and out of shape now. That other girlfriend of his doesn’t like him to run. Says it makes him sweaty and she can smell the stink on him whenever she sees him. So fine. I hope he blows up to the size of a house. See how much she wants him then, right?”
With every word that comes out of Sara’s mouth, I think I like Jared’s other side chick more and more. At the very least, I like her attitude toward running. Right now as my left calf muscle feels like it’s going to explode out of my skin, I can think of nothing else but never doing this again, no matter how fat and out of shape I get.
“Yeah. Well, good riddance to bad rubbish is what they say,” I mumble before wiping the sweat from my forehead.
Sara sprints ahead a little bit and turns around so she’s running backwards. “You’re really doing well, Adam. I don’t mean to insult you by saying this, but I wasn’t sure you’d come back for another run today. I figured you spent all day in agony after yesterday’s run. I’m impressed that you didn’t throw in the towel.”
If she only knew how much I want to do just that, but the desire to kill her is far more powerful than the wish that I could just stop this right now.
I wave away the very idea that I would give up and laugh, although it comes out far more maniacally than I expected. “No way. I’m in this to win it.”
She laughs at my gung-ho attitude, likely wondering what the hell I think I’m going to win by running with her every morning at the crack of dawn. Oh, I’ll win in the end. Until then, though, I’ll have to suffer through the pain of running to get what I want.
After spinning around to face forward again, she elbows me in the arm. “I like the way you think. You’ve got a great mindset about things. You aren’t like the other people over in that neighborhood. That’s cool.”
Even in my agony-riddled state, I know the beginning of gossip when I hear it. Turning to look at her, I see her grimacing. Oh, yes. She has something on her mind.
“I don’t really know everyone very well, so you might be right. I’m not sure. They’re nice, though. I’ll give them all that.”
In a show of anger, she snaps, “Oh, yeah. Sure. To your face. Then behind your back, trust me, they’re trashing your clothes and the way your hair looks and everything about you. That’s how those kind of people are. Phony. They think they’re so much better than everyone else.”
She isn’t wrong about them. Sara barely walked away from the tent the other day before my neighbors’ tongues started wagging. At the time, I felt like she had it coming since she was intruding on the party her married boyfriend’s wife would be attending.
Now I’m just curious what else she has to say about them. Maybe I’ll find out something about my neighbors I don’t know yet.
“I don’t know them well. I’m the newest person on Park Circle.”
Even as I open my mouth to correct my misstatement, Sara says, “Second newest. The girl in the green house is the newest.I had to hear all about that from Jared when she moved in. He really liked having that house empty, and he was pissed when she bought it. Do you know he thought she was some Only Fans chick or something? I told him there was no way that was happening. She’s not hot enough, and her body isn’t great, so nobody’s going to be paying her to do anything online.”
The mere thought of Caroline performing for strangers in front of a camera for money is so utterly absurd I can barely stifle my laughter. Jesus, that Jared really is a moron.
“No way,” I say between gasping for breaths. “I can’t imagine anyone on that street doing that.”
“I know, right? They’re all so prim and proper. They wouldn’t even know what to do if someone stuck a camera in front of them like that. The only one I would have even thought it could be possible with was the woman who lived in the green house before this one. You should have seen her. I don’t know how old she was, but she liked to wear these tiny dresses and parade around her yard like she was Miss America or something. She had this gardener who used to come over a couple times a week, but he wasn’t just tending to her bushes and flowers, if you know what I mean.”
That stuns me, and I barely keep up my pace with Sara as I try to process all she’s said. I wonder why nobody has ever mentioned her before. She seems like someone they’d all like to gossip about.
“I had no idea. I have to admit I’m most curious about the guy who lives next to me. Him and the woman in the green house,” I say, hoping she’ll tell me all she knows about Aaron and Caroline.
Once again, Sara sprints ahead and then turns around to face me as she runs backwards. “The guy whose wife died and then her parents took their kids to live with them? Oh, yeah. He’s a basket case. He was walking around the streets the other night.Jared and I ran into him, and all he could talk about was God knowing the bad things we do. Jared was sure he was talking about us together, but I told him that’s ridiculous. The guy never leaves his house. Probably just guilt, if you ask me.”
I need to get her off the topic of that idiot ex-boyfriend of hers and back onto my neighbors, so as smoothly as I can, I say, “I heard he was in a bad way. Aaron, that is. Not Jared. But nobody seems to know much of anything about the woman in the green house. Caroline. It’s like she’s an enigma.”
That seems to upset Sara, who twists her face into a hard grimace as I finish my comment. “Why? Because she’s not from around here? Jared thought there was something strange about her, but I told him she just likes to keep to herself. A woman is entitled to some mystery. Not everyone needs to know her business.”
“True, but considering my neighbors, I’m surprised they haven’t found out more than she used to live in Maryland.”
I’m getting nowhere with Sara, and now a Charlie horse is making my thigh feel like someone’s tugging on both ends of my muscle like some sadistic taffy pull. I consider begging off with some claim that I have to work early today as I look for the next street to turn off, but just then she begins unloading about all she knows about Caroline.
“I don’t know about where she used to live, but I know I saw her in town at the hardware store the other day. She was buying rope and those eyebolt things like she was planning on attaching them to the ceiling and hanging something heavy from them. That seemed weird to me. Then yesterday after we finished running, I saw her when I was taking my break standing outside the salon on the other side of the street. I got the feeling she was watching me.”