Outside Ada’s bedroom window, the car’s engine roared. No muffler. Her neighbors hadn’t had a muffler for forty-five days now, not that she was counting.
Rick was.
Ada could sense him beside her, awake but pretending not to be, his entire body rigid as he listened to the varoom-varoom next-door. The bed, which had seemed so comfortable moments before, was a trap, the covers heavy and too hot, the pillow too soft.
Suddenly, there was silence. Merciful silence.
She could hear the click-click of the second hand on the old-fashioned alarm clock they used, and then—
Brakes squealed, followed by a final varoom as the car backed out of the driveway. Radio, heavy metal from the 1970s, turned on full. She could just make out Alice Cooper, or was it Kiss? The bass line always sounded the same.
Fifteen seconds between the first barrage of varooms and the second. Then the fading roar of the engine as it rounded the corner, gone for the next twelve hours.
She didn’t move. She knew if she moved, Rick would launch into his tirade. Don’t know why people don’t respect each other. Don’t they know they have neighbors?
The second hand continued clicking — the sound too soft to be a tick — and she tried to calibrate her breathing to it, keeping it even. Forty-five days of the muffler. Then, before that, the eight-year-old’s new drum set. Or had that been at the previous house?
They were all blurring together.
She didn’t dare confess that. Twenty-one years of tirades, and nineteen new homes. First, apartments with paper-thin walls. She’d understood the tirade then. She hadn’t liked the thump-thump-oh, honey, oh!s any more than Rick had. Or the fights coming from the other apartment. Or the constantly ringing phone from the apartment below.
The townhouse had been slightly better. Only a few shared walls there, and not important ones — laundry room, closets. There, the problem had been the communal deck, the smell of charcoal wafting through the window.
Outside the bedroom window, a child shouted, then laughed. Another child answered, shrill. More laughter.
Rick’s tension grew. Ada wasn’t sure if she should continue to pretend to sleep or if she should get up and head for the shower. Because the next sound from below would be a loud conversation about all those things children cared about and no one else did, followed by the sigh of bus brakes and the wheeze of exhaust.
Ada threw the covers back. Rick jumped. He clearly hadn’t realized she was awake. She smiled at him, hoping to fend off the tirade, then swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
Her right foot found the shag carpet that they couldn’t afford to replace.
“I’ve half a mind to write to the city and demand they do something about that bus stop. Can’t they stop the damn thing at an intersection? Does it...”
Ada leaned backwards, put a gentle finger on his lips, and then kissed him, more to shut him up than to start anything. He wouldn’t be interested anyway. He was already too tense.
“I’m going to the shower,” she said. “Care to join me?”
He threw his own covers back. “I’ll put on coffee. Maybe it’s quieter in the kitchen.”
But Ada knew it wouldn’t be. It never was.
Rick had a meeting downtown with the accountant. For the first time in weeks, Ada had no morning appointments and could take her time to get to the shop. Usually she left at nine A.M. sharp, either to meet with clients or to talk to the stores that recommended her interior decorating skills.
She took her coffee into the home office. It was on the tree side of their property. Spruce, maples, a few oaks. Through the window, it looked like they lived in a forest. The walls were thick — a bathroom and their bedroom between the nearest wall and the street.
She wanted to put their bed in here, but Rick had overruled her. He needed silence when he worked more than he needed anything else. And since he handled the books, the promotion, and all the other little details of her interior design business, he got what he wanted.
The doorbell rang, making her jump. No one rang the bell. No one came to the door, not even the mailman, who left all their packages in the large mailbox at the foot of the driveway.
Ada pressed a hand to her heart. It was racing. She made herself get up and head downstairs, wondering what had gone wrong this time.
She was nearly to the living room when the doorbell rang again.
“Coming!” she yelled.
She arrived at the front door slightly breathless, and pulled it open without looking through the spyhole Rick had put in.
A balding man with a football player’s neck and a sagging belly stood on her stoop. He looked familiar, but it took her a moment to place him.
Muffler Man, the neighbor. Ada had only seen him through a window, from a distance, or inside his car. She hadn’t realized how solid he was up close.
“Your husband in?” Muffler Man asked, and there was nothing friendly in his tone.
For a moment, she debated lying to him, but she didn’t know what that would gain her. He would know soon enough that Rick wasn’t here.
“He’ll be back soon,” she said. “You want me to let him know you called?”
Muffler Man stared at her as if she had spoken Swahili. His gaze moved up and down her face, then his eyes narrowed. “You give him a message for me.”
“Sure,” she said.
“You tell him I know what he’s doing. He’s not going to drive me outta here. You tell him I seen the pattern, and I know the truth.”
Her heart hadn’t stopped pounding. “The truth about what?”
“You just tell him,” he said, and stalked off her porch.
She stood at the door and watched him cross the yard, his boots leaving deep prints in the moist spring grass. His shoulders were broad, his arms thick and muscular.
Ada debated going after him, but she didn’t. She didn’t like confronting angry men. Fortunately, she didn’t have to do it often. Most of her interior design work was for female clients, and Rick rarely lost his temper. He just complained a lot.
Muffler Man didn’t sound like a complainer. He seemed like more trouble than that.
Ada closed the door, then locked it. After a moment, she went to the back door and locked it, too. Then she sat down at the kitchen table — butcher-block, bought for their fourth house, where it had looked lovely in the dining area — and shook.
Those were threats. Vague threats. The kind you couldn’t call the police over because you couldn’t exactly say what was menacing about the conversation.
She picked up the phone, started to dial Rick’s cell, then hung up. She didn’t need to interrupt his meeting with the accountant. Rick would find out soon enough.
And he wouldn’t be happy. He already hated these neighbors for their children and their pets and their refusal to buy a muffler. He didn’t need another reason to watch their house from the spare bedroom, to make a log of all their transgressions, to complain about the muffler every morning when he woke up.
Maybe she wouldn’t tell him. Maybe she would just let it slide, as she’d let so many other things slide for so many years. Maybe she’d pretend that it hadn’t happened at all.
The meeting with the accountant went well. The business was finally turning a profit, even with their salaries taken out every two weeks. Rick took Ada out to celebrate, and in the excitement she forgot about Muffler Man.
She didn’t think about him at all until the following morning, at seven-fifteen sharp. She could count the varoom-varooms, then almost predict the moment of squealing brakes as he backed to the edge of his driveway. Such a ritual, followed by the crank of heavy-metal music — Metallica this time — and the final varooming “screw you” as the car drove away.