The woman in the tan raincoat bent down slowly and picked up her fallen grocery bag. She held both bags against her chest. She didn’t take her eyes off the deck.
Then Brent moved.
He left his coffee cup on the railing. He disappeared through the glass door. I heard it slide open and slam shut.
A minute later, he came around the side of his house. Fast. Barefoot. Still in his bathrobe. Down his perfect lawn, across the grass, wet with dew, to the fence that divided his property from my father’s.
There was no gate in that fence. There had never been a gate. Old Mr. Swenson and my father used to just step over the low part in the corner, where the post had leaned for thirty years.
Brent stepped over it.
He walked through the edge of the corn, pushing the stalks aside, until he came out on the driveway.
