Ezoic
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say goodbye. I just hung up and stood in the middle of my living room with laundry on the floor around my feet and my hand pressed against my belly and said, quietly, to no one but her, “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m trying, I promise.”
She kicked. Hard and deliberate, right under my ribs, like she was answering me.
I needed air. Just one breath that didn’t taste like fear. I pulled on my shoes, grabbed the mail from the counter, and went outside, blinking in the brutal morning light. The heat hit me immediately, but at least it was a different kind of terrible than the one inside.
That’s when I saw Mrs. Higgins.
She had lived next door for as long as I’d been on the street. Eighty-two years old, always neatly put together, hair pinned up even on the hottest days, the kind of woman who made you feel vaguely underdressed just by existing near her. Most mornings she sat on her porch with a crossword puzzle and a glass of sweet tea and called out a greeting if she saw you pass. She knew everyone’s names. She remembered birthdays. She had told me once that she’d lived in that house for fifty-one years and planned to die there, and she’d said it like a fact, not a sadness.
Ezoic
But today she wasn’t on her porch.
She was out on her lawn, hunched behind the most ancient push mower I had ever seen, both hands gripping the handles, working her way through grass that had grown well past her shins. She was sweating through her blouse. The mower hit a thick clump, groaned, and died completely.
She looked up and saw me standing on my porch. Wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Managed a smile that wobbled at the edges but held. “Morning, Ariel. Beautiful day for a little yard work, isn’t it?”
Her voice was cheerful. Her chest was heaving.
I hesitated. My back had been aching since I woke up. I was dizzy from the heat before I’d even stepped off my own porch. I had a stack of mail in my hand that I already knew contained nothing good and every sensible reason in the world to go back inside, sit down, drink some water, and not take on anyone else’s problems when my own were already swallowing me whole.
Ezoic
But Mrs. Higgins had one hand pressed to her chest and was blinking faster than a person should be blinking in the middle of the morning.
I stepped into the grass.
“Let me grab you some water,” I called, moving toward her. “You shouldn’t be out here in this heat.”
She waved me off immediately. Pride was load-bearing in that woman. “Oh, I’m fine. I just need to finish up before the HOA does their rounds. You know how they get.”
“Seriously,” I said, reaching her. “Let me do this. You go sit down.”
She frowned at my belly with genuine concern. “It’s too much for you, dear. You should be resting.”
“Resting is overrated,” I said. “And I need the distraction.”
Something shifted in her expression. The cheerful performance softened into something more real. “Trouble at home?”
I shook my head, forced the smile back into place. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
She looked at me the way older women sometimes look at you when they’ve seen enough of life to recognize a lie by its posture. Then she let go of the mower handles and sank onto her porch steps with a long, slow exhale that sounded like relief she’d been holding for a while.
