Page 52 of Ewan

He’s gone, the street is frosted, and the lights come to life in my neighbor’s home.

And that’s my cue that I need to go back in.

12

SCARLETT

Two dayslater

Sunday

My phone ringsrepeatedly as I pick up speed on the treadmill. Sweat trickles down my chest, and rivulets of heat make my skin blister.

I needed this so badly.

The entire weekend has been a long ‘keep yourself busy and try not to think of him.’ The man who almost put my ex husband through the hedge.

I couldn’t escape Mrs. Eisenhower’s sarcasm on Saturday morning. With nothing better to do, my eighty-one-year-old neighbor keeps track of everything happening on our street.

I benefit the most from her surveillance as I’m the one getting news around the clock about my neighbors, as well as her insightful observations and poignant comments about my life.

She has said repeatedly she is hard of hearing and struggles with the glare from streetlights at night. While I’m not dismissing what she’s saying, she does well with gathering information for fun.

So, my suspicions were correct.

She witnessed some of the scuffle the other night.

I don’t know how much she’d seen, but she had a big smile on her carefully hydrated face the following morning, and her comments didn’t fail to appear.

‘I never liked your ex. My cats didn’t like him, either. I think he was mean to them,’ she said.

While I never caught Joachim doing anything to her cats, he did speak negatively about them and cat people in general.

Her tabby cat used to sunbathe on our front porch, and he always had a hard time walking past her.

As if she was an alligator or something.

He was squeamish like that.

He must’ve had a bad experience with a cat when he was a child. I don’t know what else could’ve fueled his dislike for them.

He never confessed to any of that, but he was always irritated by them, which I found childish and even comical. Now that I think about it, I no longer see it that way.

He was squeamish about a lot of things, except one.

He had no problem finding a new woman, although he did postpone telling me about that.

I still think his omission had to do with the car loan more than anything else, which only shows how pragmatic he was about these things.

Charlotte Eisenhower also said men like my new male friend––she had no idea what she was talking about––had made women like her blush in her day.

I didn’t want to exchange notes with her and inform her he had me blush several times early that evening.

I tried to avoid her yesterday but couldn’t tell her to go inside when my car arrived in the afternoon, and she was all eyes and ears as the towing truck delivered my old car, fixed and detailed. It looked like a new one. The only thing missing was the bow and someone taking a picture of me next to it.

In all fairness, not only did they fix my car, but they also detail it. It looked brand new. It smelled fresh, and the windshield was spotless.

Everything looked fine.

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