The Tea Bags On My Balcony

“I live across the hall from him. He leaves his trash outside his door for days. When I said something to him in the hallway, he wrote to Duane that the smell was coming from my unit. My unit. I had it inspected myself, on my own dime, so there’d be a record. I’ve got the paper in my purse.”

“That’s a lie,” Craig said. He had stood up. His voice was thinner now. “That is a complete lie, and I do not appreciate the pile-on. Fred, this is a procedural embarrassment. We have an item on the floor.”

“Sit down, Craig,” Fred said.

“I am the vice chair.”

“I know what you are. Sit down.”

Craig sat. His ears had gone red, and I could see his hand on the folder, the knuckles going pale. He looked around the room for a face that would look back at him kindly, and I watched him not find one.

Then Edith stood up.

It took her a while. She is eighty-four, as I said, and she uses a cane with a little rubber tip, and Duane half-rose to help her and she waved him off. She stood there in her cardigan and her good wool skirt, five feet tall in her stockings, and she looked right across the room at him.

“Mr. Haskell,” she said.

He did not say anything.

“In August I took down my wind chimes. They were my sister’s. She gave them to me the year before she died, and I hung them on my patio so I could hear her when the wind came up. An anonymous note was slipped under my door telling me they were a nuisance, and I took them down that same afternoon, and I put them in a box, and I cried a good while.” She stopped and caught her breath. “I did not know who it was from. I just assumed I was the sort of old woman people could not stand. Tonight I have learned something. It was not me.”

Nobody said a word.

“I would like to say,” Edith said, “that this is a very small man.”

Fred let that sit. The whole room let it sit.

Then he asked Duane to stand. And Duane stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor.

“Fred,” he said, “since we’re here. I’ve got a number I have been uncomfortable about. Over the last fourteen months I’ve received eleven complaints about balcony and hallway issues. Against five different units. Every one of them traced back to the same person, and I should have said so sooner. None of them came with a witness. None of them came with a photograph. I took them in good faith.” He looked up then, not at Craig, but at the rest of us. “I have had his number in my phone more than any other tenant in the building. I am sorry I did not see it for what it was.”

“That’s confidential,” Craig said, and he sounded, for the first time, like a boy.

“It’s not confidential if you signed them, Craig,” Duane said. “You always signed them. With initials. C.H. I assumed you were being modest.”

Somebody in the third row laughed, one short sharp breath, and then put a hand over their own mouth. It was the first sound in the room that was not anger, and it broke something. A ripple went down the rows, not laughter really, just the exhale of thirty-four people who had each believed they were the only one.