82/365 The Men Next Door

"The two next door, you know, are a gay couple," Mildred tells me. It's the last thing she says to me before we leave with our real estate agent. "But they're good neighbors. Could eat off the the bricks in their patio." She leans on her cane and sighs. Her whole life is in this house and it will take us 10 years at least to shrug the weight off. Jake and I leave with our agent, planning our move. I don't think anything about what she said until after we've bought the place and moved in, shoveling out decades of crap from the basement and peeling wallpaper from Satan's drawing room off the dining room walls.

I hear them in their yard, though, sometime in June. A head pokes over the wood fence. "Hi," he says. "I'm Ruben."

I introduce myself. He welcomes me to the neighborhood. Offers me hostas once I get my yard together (which of course never happened--the getting it together, I mean). Later that day, Jake and I are sitting on our front porch, thinking about what we've done, and there's the other neighbor. He stands in his front yard and doesn't approach.

"Hello, you must be Bridgett and Jake," he says, not moving.

We agree. "Ruben told me about you. I'm Scott. We keep our porchlights on at night, maybe Mildred didn't mention it."

"Ok," I nod. "That sounds like a good idea."

"For safety." He walks away. "Good luck with the house."

It'll be a long time before I'm drinking really good wine offered to me by a rented butler, standing in their living room at a Christmas party where I'm the only woman in the room, laughing and laughing at Ruben's Barbra Streisand collection. Jake and I had a long way to go to prove ourselves. And Ruben and Scott and a long way to go to figure out that we were there for the long haul.