I couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hello,” I said. “Welcome to Saddlebrook Estates. I’m Lex. I like your sweater.”
He looked down at the front of his sweater, as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing. Then he gave me a pleasant grin. “My name is Mendes,” he said, “and this is Popcorn.”
What a delightful name for a cockatiel, and I said as much.
“Thank you,” Mr. Mendes said. “He’s the light of my life. I’ve had him fifteen years.”
“Does he talk?”
“Oh, yes, very much.”
Mr. Mendes leaned over and said something to the bird. Soon Popcorn’s chirpy bird voice rang out. “Touchdown,” he said. “Touchdown. Touchdown.”
“It’s football season,” I said with a laugh. “And you know how football-crazy Columbus is. Go, Bucks! You’ll be the hit of the neighborhood.”
And he was. All because of Popcorn, who charmed the neighbors when they dropped by to bring Mr. Mendes a loaf of bread, a pound cake, some homemade cookies. Mr. Mendes himself was civil but quiet. He withstood the neighbors’ visits, but I could tell it was painful for him. He was a man who liked to keep to himself. As the weeks went on, I took note of the way he kept his curtains drawn and how I mostly saw him when he was leaving for work—he did something with computers at Cardinal Health—or coming home.
As winter settled in, we saw each other less frequently, and to be fair, the same could be said about all the neighbors. We were starting to hunker in, holing up for the long haul that was winter in central Ohio, all of us having to face the facts of our own lives.
For a while I thought I might develop a lasting friendship with Mr. Mendes—out of all the neighbors, it seemed to be me, the first to welcome him, with whom he felt most at ease. Chick Hartwell on the corner was too har-de-har-har, a backslapping sort who acted like he’d never had a sad day in his life. How could someone like Mr. Mendes not feel even more down in the mouth about his solitary life in the presence of someone like Chick? Herb Shipley, two doors down from me, was too angry. Fuck this and Fuck that. Pissed off about the homeowners’ association, which told him he couldn’t store his garbage can outside his garage. Pissed off about the Buckeyes and their lack of want-it. Just pissed off at the world in general. Then there were the Biminrammers—Benny and Missy—next door to Mr. Mendes, who were clearly incompetent, though cheerily so, and on a dead-straight course toward disaster. They were always asking Mr. Mendes to do them a favor. Maybe they’d locked themselves out of their house and needed to use his phone. Maybe Benny had sliced his thumb open with a carving knife when Missy was at a Mary Kay party, and now he wanted to know if Mr. Mendes would be good enough to drive him to the emergency room.
I, on the other hand, asked nothing of my new neighbor, and for that reason alone he found me to be someone he could confide in.
His own story was a story of heartache. He’d left his native Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. Castro, besieged by Cuba’s economic problems, agreed that anyone who wanted to leave the country could. Mr. Mendes was fourteen years old and in love with a beautiful girl named Eva. She and her family stayed behind, and he never saw her again. He still thought of her, he told me one evening when we were chatting by the curb. It was nearly dusk and too cold to be standing outside, but we’d both come out to our mailboxes at the same time and he crossed the street to say hello and one thing led to another.
“I wonder what happened to her,” he said. “I wonder if she ever thinks about me.”
“Forgive me for being too personal,” I said, “but surely you’ve had other loves.”
“A few.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But nothing to last. No one like her.”
At that moment Henry came slinking across the street. He’d been out gallivanting somewhere, and now he was eager for the warmth of home, his food dish, and Vonnie’s fussing over him as he stretched out beside her on the new couch.
Perhaps it was something about what Mr. Mendes and I had been discussing there on a winter’s evening with the dark settling in and the lights glowing in our neighbors’ windows that made him reach down to pet Henry, who promptly hissed at him and lashed out with a claw that scraped Mr. Mendes across the back of his hand.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“You should keep that cat inside,” said Mr. Mendes, and that was the last time I spoke with him that winter.
It was a winter of odd occurrences that further frayed the flimsy threads barely holding Vonnie and me together.
Our phone rang often, and when one of us answered, there was no one on the other end of the line. Nothing you’d think about if it happened occasionally, but something else altogether if it happened three or four nights a week to the point that we finally had to give in and change our number.
Of course, Vonnie accused me of having an affair. Of course, I did the same.
“How could it be a boyfriend or a girlfriend calling?” I finally asked her, “if they’re hanging up when either one of us answers?”
“That makes sense.”
I could have pressed on, but I decided against it. The truth was neither would accuse the other of infidelity if the accuser hadn’t already wondered, him or herself, what that might be like. If Vonnie thought a phone call with no one on the other end was a sign that I’d been unfaithful, then that told me she’d been imagining another life for herself and was looking for a reason to walk out the door.
We hung in there through the holidays. We even managed to find some small degree of pleasure in each other’s company—mulling cider, watching Christmas movies on TV, stringing lights around the outside of our house.
Our cul-de-sac was festive with lights and lawn ornaments, even the inflatable kind—Santas in sleighs, snowmen in snow globes, penguins waving, Snoopy wearing a Santa’s hat, Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger decorating a tree.
Mr. Mendes was more restrained, but even he couldn’t resist hanging a wreath and putting an electric candle in each of his front windows. One evening I had to knock on his door because the mail carrier had left a piece of his mail in my box by mistake. It was a letter, postmarked Miami and addressed to Mr. Hugo Mendes in a feminine handwriting. I knocked on the door and even rang the bell, but though there were lights on inside, Mr. Mendes never came to see who had decided to call on him. I shaded my eyes and peered through the glass sidelight of the front door. I could see down a hallway to the family room, and there in the corner was Popcorn’s cage, the door open. Mr. Mendes had draped the cage with a string of white twinkle lights. I tried the storm door and found it unlocked. I left the letter between it and the front door, sure that Mr. Mendes would find it.
It wasn’t long before Vonnie or I began walking into our bedroom to find the ceiling-fan lights on. At first we thought that one of us had been forgetful, neglecting to turn off the lights when leaving the room. We picked up the remote that controlled them and punched them off.
Then one night we went to sleep only to wake up shortly because the lights had come on. I sat up in bed. “Did you?”