The Alarm He Called Paranoid
Sugar every Tuesday
You should know who Crystal Boone was to me, because that is the part that still turns my stomach more than the water does.
Crystal and Wade lived three quarters of a mile down County Road 300, in the white two story with the wraparound porch that Wade’s grandfather built. Wade drove propane for the county co op, the same co op where I keep the books, so I saw his name on paperwork most days and I liked him. Crystal did hair two days a week out of a chair in Halesboro and stayed home the rest. She was younger than me by about a dozen years, and for the last year and a half she had made a habit of walking up to my kitchen door on Tuesday afternoons to borrow something. Sugar, mostly. A cup of sugar, a couple of eggs, the good vanilla, once a whole stick of butter because she said she was baking for the church.
I never once told her no. I want that on the record for my own sake. I opened my door to that woman more times than I can count. I let her sit at my table. I let her drink coffee out of my cups and leave her lipstick on the rim, that bright coral color she wore, and I washed those cups and thought nothing of it. I told her about my week. I told her when Dale and I had a good stretch and when we had a rough one. I let her learn the shape of my days, what time I left, what time I got home, which Tuesdays I stayed late at the co op to close the month.
She was not borrowing sugar. I understand that now. She was learning my schedule. Every cup she carried home was a page of my life she was reading so she would know exactly which afternoons my driveway would be empty. The trust was never the sugar. The trust was the open door, the easy smile, the twenty six years I had spent becoming a woman who did not think to lock anything against the people right next to her.
The month I close the co op books runs long. Everybody on Route 300 knows I stay late in July. Everybody. She knew it too. She just did not know that the co op had let us out early that one Tuesday because the power flickered and the system went down.