8.

Yes, it is true: I am betraying my initial “neutrality”—“objectivity”—as one whose relationship to life is essentially that of the investigator/experimenter.

Led by curiosity to discover the grocery clerk’s schedule: five days a week, with Mondays off. And where the grocery clerk lives: one point eight miles away from my own house on the river, though inland, in a “working-class” residential area of Herrontown.

Rare for me to become so involved with anyone—anything.

Rare for me to experience such feeling.

But here I am, across the street from the grocery store on one unexpectedly mild afternoon in April. Waiting for Keisha to leave with a coworker at the end of their shifts, six p.m. Following the coworker’s vehicle at a discreet distance in my own vehicle. Noting where Keisha is dropped off.

Driving past the small clapboard house on Mill Run Street, a street of small, interchangeable clapboard houses. Some of the houses run-down, needing repainting, repair. One or two of the houses abandoned, boarded up. Puddles from melted snow and ice glistening in driveways. Mud-rutted front yards. In the small front yard of the cashier’s house at 54 Mill Run Street, bright yellow daffodils beaten down, broken after rain.

She has planted these daffodils, I seem to know. Broken after rain, mud-flecked, yet still alive, vivid yellow.

Oh! The knowledge is a needle to the heart. Seeking beauty even in ugliness.

Driving past the house, circling the block. Slow. No hurry. Where else to go? Nowhere else calls to me. Driving past the small, undistinguished clapboard house another time. Daring to park a short distance away.

Lighting a cigarette. (Seven years, five months since I’ve smoked.) Sudden thrill in the lungs, as if youth itself is flooding back.

For some time sitting here, smoking. Watching the house through the rearview mirror on the exterior of the car, beside the driver.

Watching the house—her house? Why?

Might’ve felt discomfort, unease—shame. Yet oddly I do not. Emptiness of mind: stained sink into which a thin trickle of water falls from a faucet. As it falls, it drains out.

From time to time, vehicles pass my parked car. Slow-moving vehicles, driven by faceless figures.

Am I waiting for him to come home?—the brute husband.

(There is a narrative in which N__ might pay to have the “brute husband” dispatched, disappeared. Ah, I could afford to pay an assassin, in fact two assassins, a very handsome sum! But this is not that narrative.)

About to pull away from the curb when an insolent-looking boy of about fourteen appears, pedaling a gleaming red bicycle, turning into the rutted driveway beside the clapboard house.

She has bought the boy that bicycle!—I know it.

Not that the bicycle is new. Might’ve been purchased secondhand from Mike’s Bikes New & Used in town, which sells a few expensive Italian racing bikes amid less expensive American bikes and secondhand bikes. But the boy’s bicycle is a recent purchase, I am sure of this.