The Stranger

Lainey POV I was trying very hard not to laugh. It wasn't funny, exactly. We had clearly stepped into something. But the notary was fanning himself with our bill of sale, Mayor Abbott was sweating through his shirt, and there were now at least a dozen neighbors standing in their yards, not even pretending to garden. A black truck, older than I was, rolled up and parked across the street. The man who stepped out of it was good-looking. I mean the kind of good-looking that makes you forget what your hands were doing. He was tall and dark-haired, with broad shoulders and a jaw that hadn't seen a razor in a couple of days, and he shut the truck door like he had nowhere to be and all day to get there. I couldn't stop staring. That wasn't like me. I never stared longer than politely necessary. Or for long enough that wouldn't be considered gawking. I was now officially gawking. He didn't come over to us. He crossed to the yard next door instead, where an old man stood waiting at the fence with his arms already going. I couldn't hear any of it. I could only watch the old man talk with his whole body, pointing at our moving truck, at Matthew's parents, at the road Matthew had left by. The stranger listened with his arms crossed and his head down. Every so often he nodded. The whole time, something in me wanted to go to him. It wasn't curiosity. I knew what curiosity felt like, and it lived in my head. This was lower, somewhere behind my ribs, a steady little pull like a hand closed around a string. It felt like I had left the stove on in a house I had never lived in. The old man finally ran out of things to point at. He jerked his chin toward our porch. The stranger turned around. His eyes went over the truck first, then Mayor Abbott, then the realtor. Then they got to me, and they stopped. I watched his whole body loosen. His arms came uncrossed. His shoulders dropped, slowly, like he had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and somebody had just told him he could set it down. He took a step off the curb. Then another. Then he stopped, right there in the middle of Alder Lane, as if he had hit the end of a rope. I took a step. I didn't decide to. My foot just went. "Lane? Where do you want the books?" Travis was at my elbow with a box in his arms and sweat running down his temples. I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. "Oh. Um. I'll take them." The box was heavy. It was all my paperbacks, plus the accounting textbooks I had never been able to throw out. I got my arms around it and hitched it up against my chest, and then I looked back across the street. I couldn't help it. He hadn't moved. There was a look on his face that I couldn't read. I was good at faces. I had talked nervous people through the worst afternoons of their pets' lives, and I could usually tell what somebody needed before they said it. This one gave me nothing. It wasn't friendly, and it wasn't unfriendly. It was just fixed on me, like I was a word he was trying to remember. And for some reason, everyone was staring at him. It was all of them. Mayor Abbott. The realtor. The notary, with our bill of sale frozen halfway through a fan. Matthew's father in his house slippers. A dozen neighbors in a dozen yards. Not one of them was looking at the new people anymore. They were all watching him, the way you watch a sky that has gone a funny color, waiting to see what it will do. Heat climbed my neck and flooded my face. I turned around and carried the books into the house. The screen door slapped shut behind me. Inside it was dim and cooler, and it smelled like lemon cleaner and somebody else's life. I set the box down on the first flat surface I found and stood there with both hands on the cardboard. My heart was going like I had run a mile. What was wrong with me? I had a boyfriend. I had eight years of a boyfriend. He was right outside, hauling everything we owned up the driveway and happier than I had seen him in a year, and I had stood on our brand new porch and gawked at a stranger like I had never seen a man before. I should have been ashamed. I was ashamed. I also knew, without turning around, that he was still standing in the road.