The coffee pot was still finishing its drip cycle when the knock came. Seven in the morning on a Tuesday, and Arthur Pendelton was standing on my porch with his windbreaker zipped to his chin. Arthur has lived across our gravel drive in Hastings for twenty-two years, and he usually only comes over when the culvert clogs or my dog gets out. He didn’t look at my face when I opened the screen door. He looked past my shoulder at the hallway coat rack, his hands jammed deep into his pockets.
“Morning, Brenda,” he said, and his voice sounded thin, like he had been chewing on a lemon. “I didn’t want to say anything. But a man has been leaving your house every morning at 6:15 for three months.”
I stood there with my mug halfway to my mouth, waiting for the punchline that never came. My kitchen still smelled like the cinnamon toast Chloe had burned in the toaster twenty minutes earlier before she caught the bus for her junior year at Central. I live alone with my sixteen-year-old daughter in this brick bungalow, and we have for four years since her dad took his tools and moved down to Beatrice. Nobody else has a key. Nobody else even knows where we keep the spare key, which is tucked inside an old oil can behind the lawnmower.
“Arthur, what are you talking about?” I asked, and my voice was too loud for seven in the morning. “Nobody stays here.”
“I’m just telling you what I seen,” he said, turning around to walk back down my porch steps without another word. “Every single work day. Tall fella. Gray jacket. Carries a heavy green rucksack.”
I didn’t go back inside right away. I stood on the top step and watched Arthur’s blue Buick back out of his drive, his brake lights flickering twice before he turned the corner toward the grain elevator. The morning air smelled like damp alfalfa and coal smoke from the yards downtown. My hands were starting to feel cold, even though I was holding a steaming ceramic mug. I went back into the kitchen and sat at the formica table, staring at the little rubber toaster crumb tray until my eyes watered.
I don’t know why I remembered the box. It was shoved behind the Christmas decorations on the top shelf of the hall closet, right next to the turkey roaster I only use once a year. A little white cardboard box with a cartoon camera on the side. I bought it on Amazon back in February when they had that two-day sale because three houses down by the Methodist church got hit while people were at Wednesday suppers.
I never hooked it up. I couldn’t figure out the app on my old phone, and then the Wi-Fi password got reset when we switched providers, and I just left it sitting there in the dust.
It took me twenty minutes to plug it into the outlet behind the umbrella stand and download the app again using my old email. The little blue light blinked twice, then went solid. Eighty-seven days of clips were sitting right there in the cloud storage because I forgot to turn off the free trial.
I clicked on yesterday. Then the day before that. Then I started jumping backward through the calendar like a crazy person, my thumb trembling against the cheap glass of my phone screen.
The footage didn’t look like a movie. It looked grainy and green-tinted, lit by the motion-sensor floodlight over our back porch. Every single night, right around eleven o’clock when the town was completely dead, the latch on the back screen door would click.
A tall man in a gray canvas work jacket would step out of the shadows, slide the wooden window sash up three inches to reach the interior latch, and slip inside our back utility room like he owned the place. At 6:15 every morning, right before Arthur walked out to check his mail, the same man would come back down the hall, pull his hood up, and walk out into the dawn.
Eighty-seven days.
My stomach didn’t drop; it felt like it turned to lead and fell right through the floorboards. I sat on the bottom step of the hallway stairs with the phone in my lap, watching a little green timestamp tick past my own front door while I was upstairs sleeping. 11:14 PM. 3:42 AM. 6:12 AM. He walked through my house like a ghost. He used our silverware. He sat on the yellow plaid couch in the den where I watch my stories every night after ten.
When Chloe came home from school that afternoon, she dropped her canvas book bag by the door with a loud thud that made the hall mirror rattle. She looked tired, the way she has all semester since she joined the track team, her hair pulled back into a messy ponytail with three loose strands stuck to her forehead.
“Hey, Mom,” she said, kicking off her muddy Nike running shoes without unlacing them. “We have pizza coming or what? Coach made us run three miles in the wind and I’m starving.”
I didn’t move from the kitchen chair. I didn’t even put down my coffee mug, though it had been cold for six hours. I turned the phone around and laid it flat on the table between us. The screen was paused on a clip from Tuesday of last week, showing the man in the gray jacket standing right by our refrigerator, drinking straight from the carton of skim milk.
“Who is he?” I asked.
Chloe stopped halfway to the refrigerator. Her whole body went completely rigid, the way it did when she fell off her pony back when she was nine and didn’t want to admit she broke her wrist. Her skin lost every bit of color until she looked almost gray under the fluorescent light. She didn’t look at the phone. She stared right at the baseboard heater near the pantry door.
“Mom,” she whispered, and her voice shook so hard she could barely get the second word out. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Who is this man in our house, Chloe?” I asked. I didn’t yell. That was the weird part. When you find out your life isn’t real, you don’t scream; you just talk very quietly because you’re scared if you raise your voice, the rest of the walls will fall down. “Arthur saw him. The camera saw him. Eighty-seven times, Chloe. Who is he?”
She looked down at the linoleum floor, her fingers twisting the straps of her backpack until her knuckles turned white. “He told me not to tell you. He said if we got caught, they’d take me away and put me in a home. He said he’s my…”
She stopped. The silence in the kitchen was so heavy I could hear the tiny hum of the refrigerator motor working overtime in the corner. Arthur’s Buick went by outside, gravel spitting off his tires, but it sounded like it was miles away.
“Your what, Chloe?” I said.
She raised her eyes then, and they were full of tears that weren’t falling yet. “He said he’s my brother. He said Dad had another family over in Grand Island before you two met, and that he was just trying to look out for us because you work so many hours at the clinic.”
I sat there with my hands flat on the table, staring at my daughter’s face, and for the first time in my life, I realized I didn’t know who was sleeping under my roof. The back door was still unlocked. I could hear the wind rattling the loose screen latch in the utility room, three inches from where the gray jacket always hung.
