The Tea Bags On My Balcony
The first tea bag landed on my balcony in March, on the corner of the mat by the door, and I picked it up with two fingers and dropped it in the kitchen trash and never gave it another thought. By the end of September I could have told you the time it would come down without looking at a clock. Seven in the morning, give or take four minutes. Nine at night, give or take ten. A wet little brown square with a string on it, smacking onto the concrete like a slap you could hear through the sliding door.
I am fifty-eight years old. I have lived in the same third-floor apartment in Elm Springs, Wisconsin, for eleven years, and in all that time I had never once been the woman who walked upstairs to complain. I want that understood before anything else, because what happened later in that building depended on it. Everybody knew I was not the type.
Four Times Is Not A Misunderstanding
The first time I knocked on his door, I brought him a plate of lemon bars.
I am not proud of that, but it is true. Craig Haskell had moved into 4B the spring before, a man in his late forties with thinning sandy hair, a gray quarter-zip he wore in every weather, and a handshake that went on one beat too long. He had signed for my packages once, and I figured a neighbor who has done you a favor deserves a lemon bar. When I told him, standing in his doorway, that something seemed to be coming off his balcony onto mine, he put a hand flat on his chest.
“Oh, no. Was that mine?”
“It’s happened about six times now.”
“I am so sorry. I’m half asleep in the mornings. I just flick it over the rail without thinking, and I never once pictured where it lands.” He looked at the plate in my hands like it was a kindness he did not deserve. “It won’t happen again. I promise you.”
I went back downstairs feeling like I had made too much of a small thing. I remember actually thinking that. Fifty-eight years old, and I walked down one flight of stairs apologizing to myself.
The next morning, at 7:03, a tea bag landed on the arm of my balcony chair.
I gave him three more weeks. That is how I am made. I would rather be patient too long than be rude once. In those three weeks I found a tea bag on a white bath towel I had hung on the rail to dry, a brown ring in the exact center of it the size of a coffee cup. I found one in my basil pot, hanging off a leaf like it had been put there on purpose. I found one stuck to the glass of the sliding door, and I scrubbed that spot with vinegar for ten minutes and told myself it was a coincidence of wind.
Then one evening in the first week of October I came home from my shift at the county clerk’s office, a Thursday, and set my purse on the kitchen table, and out the window I saw the cushion on my balcony chair, the green striped one I had sewn the cover for myself, with a tea bag sitting dead in the middle of it. It had been there long enough for the stain to bleed through to the foam.