After dinner I head upstairs to work on the windows in the second room. It’s late but I need to get the paint chipped off the best I can before I lay down the first coat in the morning. There are two windows in this room—one looking over Bradley’s fenced in back yard and the other facing his house, which lines up with the window in one of his bedrooms. With no curtains up yet next door, I can stare straight down into that room as I work, and I tell myself that’s not the reason I decide to work on this window first.
Because the light’s on over there, I can see boxes stacked up in the center of the room, headboards propped against the wall, a mattress tossed carelessly onto the floor beneath the window. Every now and then Rudy comes into view, stepping onto the mattress and then out of sigh
