The Dress My Neighbor Wore Saturday

I called the company. I called the carrier. Then I walked across the street, because Vicki is home during the day and her front window looks right at my porch.

“Oh, Lori, no,” she said. She put her hand flat on her chest. “I didn’t see a soul. I’d have run them off myself.”

She came over that night with banana bread, still warm, wrapped in a dish towel.

“It’s those kids from the apartments off Russellville Road,” she told Dennis at our kitchen table. “They cut through behind Brenda’s fence. I’ve seen them.”

Dennis grunted and ate his banana bread. He is not a man who gets worked up.

In April it was the invitations for Amber’s bridal shower. Sixty of them, cream card stock with a little sprig of lavender printed in the corner. I paid $84 to have them done and then paid $84 again when they never showed.

In May it was a heating pad and a box of school supplies I had bought with my own money for a little boy in second grade whose family was having a hard year.

In June it was the stand mixer I had ordered for Amber’s shower gift. That one was $329. I cried over that one, standing in my own driveway, and Vicki came across the circle in her house shoes and put her arm around me.

“You need a camera,” she said. “I’m serious. Tell Dennis I said so.”

Dennis put one up that Saturday. A doorbell camera, the kind that sends a clip to your phone. Vicki stood at the bottom of the ladder and held it steady for him and handed up the screwdriver.

“Now tell your drivers to tuck things behind that planter,” she said to me. “So nobody can see a box from the road. Out of sight, out of mind.”

I thought that was smart. I typed it into the delivery instructions on every account I had. Leave behind large planter on porch.

It was August before I understood that the planter sat to the left of the door, flat against the brick, and the camera looked straight out at the steps and the yard. Anything behind that planter was outside the picture. And a person who stepped up onto the porch from the side, from the flower bed, never crossed in front of the lens at all.

Even then I did not put it together. I thought the thief was clever. I never once thought the thief had held the ladder.

Things kept vanishing. A set of sheets. Dennis’s birthday present, a fishing reel I had saved for. A case of the coffee pods he likes. Every single time, I walked across the street and asked the same question, and every single time she gave me the same sad shake of her head.

I counted later. Eleven times in seven months I stood on that welcome mat and asked Vicki if she had seen anybody on my porch.

Eleven times she said, “No, hon. I wish I had.”

She kept a little list for me, she said, of cars she did not recognize. She told me she had called the non-emergency line herself. She told Brenda on the corner and Kim next door to her that it was a shame what was happening to poor Lori, and they told me she had said it, and I was grateful.