The Tea Bags On My Balcony

The Afternoon

I took a personal day. That alone should tell you how seriously I took it, because I had not used one in two years.

The first thing I did was drive to the dollar store on Main Street and buy things that cost almost nothing. Two dozen sandwich bags with the zip tops. A roll of masking tape. A black marker. A cheap pocket notebook with a spiral at the top. The egg cartons I did not buy, because the woman at the pharmacy counter keeps a stack of them under the register for her chickens and gave me two, the gray fiber kind, without asking what for.

So I decided to be something harder for a man like that to deal with. I decided to be boring, and thorough, and quiet.

What I settled on was this. I would catch every tea bag. Each one would go into its own bag, labeled with the date and the exact minute it landed, and I would set them in the egg cartons, twelve to a carton, in order. I would keep the notebook. Nothing sneaky, nothing that would make him the victim of anything. Just a plain count, kept by a woman who works in a county clerk’s office and knows what a record is.

That would have been enough for me, honestly. It would have been a thing to hold in my hands. A way of telling myself I had not just taken it.

But when I got home that afternoon with my little bags of supplies, I stopped on the second-floor landing to catch my breath, and Eddie opened his door.

Eddie is seventy-one, a retired county road man with forearms like fence posts and a gray mustache he trims every Sunday with kitchen scissors. His wife passed three years ago, and he has not changed a thing in the apartment. He looked at the egg cartons under my arm.

“Breakfast?” he said.

“Not exactly.”

I don’t know why I told him. Maybe it was that he had a way of waiting, like a man who spent forty years leaning on a shovel while other people talked. I told him about the tea bags, about the laugh, about being thankful it was only tea. I did not raise my voice.

Eddie did not say anything for a moment. Then he turned and went into his apartment, and I heard something being dragged, and he came back with a gray plastic cover, the kind that fits over a barbecue grill, and held it out for me to see. The inside was crusted with dark flecks.

“Coffee grounds,” he said. “Since June. I figured it was the wind. Then I figured it was kids. I scrubbed this cover four times.” He turned it over in his hands. “Four B’s the only one who drinks coffee that strong on that side of the building. I smell it on the stairs.”

“You never said anything.”

“Who would I say it to? The man’s the vice chair of the residents committee. He sits on the board that tells me what I can leave on my own balcony.”

I had forgotten about that. I try not to think about the residents committee, which meets once a quarter in the community room off the lobby, with a coffee urn and a sign-in sheet and Fred at the head of the table, who has run the thing for nine years because nobody else wanted the clipboard. Craig had joined last year, and in six months he had made himself vice chair, mostly by being the only person who showed up to every meeting with a typed agenda.

“The next one’s the third Thursday in October,” Eddie said. “Twelve days.”

I stood there with my cartons.

“Lois,” he said, “I don’t think you’re the first person that man has laughed at.”

That was the thing I carried upstairs. Not a plan, exactly. A question.