Michael Boni had barely known his grandfather, who’d bought this house when he’d started working at Dodge Main, just before the war. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d joined at the boom, and he’d left just before the bust. The year after he retired, pension in hand, the auto plant was razed. The year after that, when Michael Boni was eight, his grandfather died of a heart attack. Or as his father put it once, Grandpa retired once and for all from Grandma.
Grandma had outlived them all. His parents, his sister. She’d outlived the neighborhood, too. The dairy was now an empty cube of cinderblock. The barbershop she’d been too cheap to send Michael Boni to had burned down to the crossbeams. What remained looked like the exoskeleton of a giant insect.
Her house was on the corner. There was an overgrown hedge and bars on the windows. The garage was around back. Michael Boni built a new workbench below the only window, which looked out over the pair of empty lots across the street. He spent a lot of time staring out that window, waiting for glue to dry and joints to set. The empty lots made for an awkward view. What he saw when he looked outside were the naked backs of a pair of houses a block over. After a while, he began to feel indecent, as if he were accidentally seeing up a woman’s skirt.
Mr. Childs had lived in one of those lots when Michael Boni was a kid. Mr. Childs had been a spot welder, and Michael Boni remembered him spending his Saturdays tuning up an old Triumph in the driveway, rattling the glass in his grandmother’s china cabinet. She’d had a special hatred for Mr. Childs. What little Spanish Michael Boni knew he’d learned while she stood with her arms crossed, scowling over the hedge. The motorcycle didn’t need half the work Mr. Childs put into it, but even as a boy Michael Boni could appreciate the lengths certain people went to just to piss his grandmother off.
The only immediate neighbor now was Constance, who was seventy-something and lived alone in a Craftsman with a roof felted in mold. Constance’s son had moved her to the neighborhood the year before, wanting her to be close to her great-grandchildren. Michael Boni had never heard his grandmother mention Constance. It wasn’t until he moved in that he realized how odd that was, two old ladies living side by side with nothing else to do but meddle in each other’s business.
Several days after the funeral, Michael Boni had come to look at his grandmother’s house. He hadn’t spent much time there since he was a child. Once both his parents were dead, he’d lost touch not just with Abuela but also with his cousins and aunts and uncles, all of whom claimed they couldn’t afford to make it to town for the services. That day he saw Constance sitting on the porch next door and went over to introduce himself.
“I’m thinking about moving in,” he’d said.
Constance had rocked back in her chair and scratched her armpit. “I’m not going to try to stop you.”
And that was the moment Michael Boni began to wonder if maybe the block hadn’t been big enough for Constance and his grandmother to share.
Constance hadn’t gone to the funeral. But her son Clifford had, a black man dressed like a WASP accountant in khakis and a button-up. For two hours, he and Michael Boni were the only living bodies in that cold, curtained parlor, and as they left the funeral home afterward, Clifford took Michael Boni aside and shook his hand with a double clasp, as if he were greeting a foreign dignitary.
“Your grandmother was a wonderful lady,” Clifford said. “We went shopping together almost every week.”
There was something about the man that made Michael Boni want to behave badly.
“You kept her in pozole,” he said.
Clifford’s grip grew firmer. “Someone had to.”
It was a mystery to Michael Boni why Clifford remained in the neighborhood instead of joining the genuine WASP accountants in Bloomfield Hills. And why he was willing to move Constance to such a wretched place. Except it turned out that Clifford wasn’t an accountant at all. He made his actual living selling discount cell phones, and this neighborhood was all he could afford, having to support not just himself and his wife but also his mother, his daughter, and her two children. The daughter and her two girls lived with him, too, in his tiny three-bedroom rowhouse with a neat bed of flowers. All that was missing was the white picket fence.
One damp morning in late April, after Michael Boni had been living in his grandmother’s house for about a month, he was standing at his workbench, planing away at a piece of oak, and he happened to look up. Through the foggy window he saw Constance in the empty lot across the street, wearing a purple floral housedress beneath a gray cardigan sweater, black rain boots reaching past her hem. The boots were so bulky, they made it look as if she didn’t have legs, as if the muddy earth were in the process of swallowing her whole. A cloudy plastic milk jug hung heavily from her fingers. Constance was staring at the ground, turning in a slow, halting circle, as if looking for something she’d lost.
She seemed so old and so confused that Michael Boni decided to go out and help her. But just as he was brushing the wood shavings from his sleeves, Constance started back to her house. That was the last he saw of her that day.
But the next morning, at almost exactly the same time, she was back, standing in the same spot in the empty lot. Wearing the same dress, same sweater, same rain boots, even though the ground had dried overnight. And with the same milk jug in hand, Constance turned in the same slow circle. But this time Michael Boni noticed something spilling from the jug, splashing from the earth, onto her boots. She looked like a homeless shaman performing some kind of mystic ceremony for ancient ghosts. Michael Boni’s first thought was of Mr. Childs and his departed Triumph. His second thought was dementia. Constance was losing her marbles, and Michael Boni’s thoughts wandered to the conversation in which he got to break the news to Clifford.
“Your mother’s a wonderful lady,” he’d say, clutching the man’s hand with two of his own. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her when you’re not around. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you she’s batshit crazy.”
Constance repeated her ritual every day that week: purple dress, rain boots, milk jug, circle.
Finally on Friday morning, as he watched her return for yet another round, Michael Boni decided he’d seen enough. From the window in the garage, he followed her through all her usual gestures. And when she was done and turned to go, he raced for the door.
“Morning,” he said, reaching the front walkway just as she was clopping by in her rubber boots. But he’d forgotten to take off his dust mask, and his greeting had seeped out like a demented moan.
Constance froze like a squirrel. The milk jug slipped from her fingers, the plastic folding in on itself as it hit the sidewalk, liquid glugging out into the street.
Constance clutched her cardigan. “Jesus Christ.”
Michael Boni stooped to pick up the jug, sliding the mask down to his chin. “I don’t think it’s broken.”
“It’s not exactly an heirloom.”
He handed it back to her. “I thought it might be important.”