The Tea Bags On My Balcony
Eleven Days
The next morning I was on my balcony at 6:40, in my robe, with a cup of coffee going cold in my hands and the notebook on my knee.
At 7:04 I heard his sliding door.
I want you to picture how that sounds from underneath. A rattle, a pause, the faint creak of a man leaning his weight on a railing. Then a small wet sound in the air. I did not look up. I held my cup in both hands, and the tea bag came down in front of me, turning slowly, and landed on the concrete a foot from my slipper.
I let it sit a moment. Then I picked it up with a paper napkin, slid it into a sandwich bag, zipped it shut, and wrote on the tape: Oct. 3, 7:04 a.m.
Above me, the railing creaked again. He had leaned over to look.
“Morning, Craig,” I said, not loudly, in the voice you use for a person you pass in the church parking lot. And I held the little bag up so the sun caught it.
I did not look at his face. I did not need to. But I heard him go still, and then I heard his sliding door shut a good deal faster than it had opened.
I set the bag in the first slot of the first egg carton. I did that twice a day for eleven days.
On the fifth day I learned something else. Around eight in the evening, as I was taking the trash down, I met Ginny from 3C coming up the stairs with her little boy asleep on her shoulder. Ginny is thirty-four and works the night shift at the nursing home, and she had a grocery bag in one hand and a baby monitor clipped to her belt, even though the baby was right there on her shoulder. She stopped when she saw the egg cartons in my arms, because by then I had started carrying them down to my car each morning so Craig could not see them through my window.
“Is that what I think it is?” she said.
“What do you think it is?”
“Tea bags.” She lowered her voice and looked up the stairwell. “Lois, he reported me to the committee in June. For the stroller in the hall. I’ve had that stroller in the same spot since the baby was born and nobody ever said a word. Then the notice came with a typed paragraph about fire exits, and Duane called and said he’d had three separate complaints. Three. From the same person. And I know it was him because he said good morning to me the next day with this big smile.”
“You think it was Craig.”
“I know it was Craig. He signs everything with initials, but nobody types a fire code paragraph like that on a Tuesday.” She hitched the boy higher on her shoulder. “I didn’t want to make trouble. I’ve got a toddler and a lease and eight months before I can move anywhere better.”
That was the second person in two days. I took out the notebook and wrote down the date, and beside it I wrote her initial and the word stroller, and I felt a little like a woman building something she had not meant to build.