The Tea Bags On My Balcony

That was the cushion my late husband sat on when we drank our coffee out there. I will not say more about it than that.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on 4B for the second time in my life.

He opened the door in socks, holding a mug. The string of a tea bag hung over the rim.

“You’re still doing it,” I said. I kept my voice level. I had practiced on the stairs.

“Doing what?”

“The tea bags. This is the fourth time I have come up here, Craig, if you count the notes I slid under your door. I have thrown away a towel. Tonight you ruined a cushion cover that I made.”

He leaned against the door frame and looked at me for a long moment, like I was a bill he had decided not to pay.

“It’s a tea bag, Lois.”

“It stains.”

“You live underneath me. That’s how buildings work.” And then he laughed. Not a big laugh. A short one, through his nose, the kind you give a child who has said something cute. “Honestly, you ought to be thankful. It’s only tea.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying. Be thankful it’s tea and not something worse.”

He closed the door. Not slammed, which would have been something I could answer. Closed it gently, with the little click of a man who has finished a conversation.

I stood on that landing for nearly a minute. Across the hall, a door opened a crack and shut again. That was Trish, who lives in 4A, and I would learn later how much more she had heard through that door than I had.

I thought about the eleven years. I had watched Eddie’s cat on the second floor when he had his hip done. I had carried Edith’s groceries in from the car when her knees went, and Edith lives on the ground floor, so you can see how little that shows about my character, since it was only a walk from the parking lot. I had watered plants and taken in packages. I had signed for Craig’s deliveries all of last winter, a box of something heavy almost every week, and never once asked him what was in them.

And I knew, standing there, exactly what he wanted from me. He wanted me screaming in the hallway at nine at night so he could tell the whole building about the crazy woman downstairs who lost her mind over a tea bag. He had the story ready. I could see it in his face, the way he’d left the door open that extra second before he laughed.

So I did not scream. I walked down one flight, sat at my kitchen table with the stained cushion in my lap, and decided to give him a final chance, the way I always do. If nothing came over the railing by seven the next morning, I would let the whole thing drop.

At 7:04, a tea bag came sailing down and landed beside my basil.

I stood there in my robe and looked at it for a long time. Then I went inside and finished my coffee.

By the time the cup was empty, I knew exactly what I was going to do.