Some Other Town Read Online Free

a van delivers each weekday for her mother.
    I myself have a different suspicion. It’s stolen goods, I think, not hot lunches, that help Mrs. E make ends meet. Mrs. Krantz just refuses to see it.
    That is, I have reason to believe Mrs. Eberline is a thief. Almost from the beginning there was evidence. The first summer I moved in, for instance, immediately she began crossing our property line,after which, I then noticed, I kept losing things—the grass clippers, new within the same month, that to this day I know I left in the lilies; a bag of bone meal where I was planting bulbs; a whole new large box of grass seed. Consequently I now garage my possessions, I do not leave them unattended in grass. I keep an eye out for Mrs. Eberline’s sticky, long reach.
    All that may be, Mrs. Krantz allows. Mr. Krantz has seen her steal too. Still, she says, Mrs. Eberline deserves her due. She grew up on this block, there is that. She has history here, seniority. It naturally allows her rights.
    Which apparently in your case, Margaret, she adds, are visiting and using the toilet.
    I don’t know why Mrs. E prefers the facilities here. I’m not sure why she stops by so often. But over time I have learned to resign to these visits. They are never long and almost always strange, and despite their ominous bent of late, I’ve come to count on them in a twitchy sort of way. “Well come in, Mrs. E,” I say. And while she heads down my hall to the bathroom, I find I’m myself looking for cookies to offer. Then as Mrs. Eberline emerges and proceeds to my front room, I wait for the sport to begin.
Are You All Right?
    At the sound of the toilet flushing, she calls. “Is that you?”
    She listens, a second flush. “Are you all right?”
    A third flush and she is on her feet.
    â€œMy god,” she says from the door and stares as he stands on theseat of their toilet, dropping what appear to be pairs of his socks between his legs and into the bowl.
    â€œMy good god,” she says again, but stops when she sees the water rising.
    â€œAren’t you well?” she asks, then quickly backs from the door as a small fountain of navy blue water rushes up over the rim of the toilet bowl and down onto the bathroom tiles.
Ain’t Seen Him ’Round
    So I open the door now to Mrs. Eberline’s pounding. I do in fact catch Mrs. E in the middle of her next attack. She stands below me one step, her fist raised midair for the door. The hood of her red parka is still up, it reaches just past my waistline.
    â€œWell Mrs. Eberline,” I say, looking down at the top of her hood. I sound as though this is certainly a lucky surprise. “How nice to see you.”
    I am always cordial to Mrs. Eberline. She does not buy this of course, she knows well enough that we are not friends. Still, there is no advantage with Mrs. E, I have learned, to incivility. We are stuck with each other, she and I, next door as we perpetually are. There is no need to make things any harder.
    Mrs. Eberline steps up into my house and storms past me for the front room. Today it is apparently not my bathroom she is after. I close the door and “Have a seat, Mrs. Eberline,” I am going to say. Though when I turn, I see she has already found her place on my couch. Hunched small and withered on the far end cushion,the hood of her parka pulled in tight, she looks up at me. Then glaring, she works her lips back and forth.
    â€œIs something wrong, Mrs. Eberline?” I ask. What little color she has has escaped her face. She does not look the least bit well. “Would you like a glass of water?”
    â€œThat Ben feller,” Mrs. Eberline says, and looks at me. “Ain’t seen him ’round.”
    Ain’t seen him ’round. I consider the diction. And so today, it seems, Mrs. Eberline has gone Appalachian. She is her old hardscrabble self, just one of her many leading roles. They are part of her