Light of a long day

I know why our neighbor Neil hasn’t ever been married. When we were little, he used to go fishing with my father and us. He had a tin boat with a small motor and enough plank seats for the three of us while he sat at the back, steering. Every time he had a Ziploc bag of neon gummy worms, and we would eat them, and he would say if the fish liked them as much as my brother and me he’d have caught the whole lake in an hour. We thought Neil was funny. My father paid for the gasoline and let Neil borrow any tools he ever needed, as a way of saying thank-you.

After my parents divorced, we didn’t see Neil nearly as much. He would mow the lawn. Occasionally my mother would make him a casserole, give him a tin of popcorn at Christmas. I asked once why he wasn’t married, and she said he probably just never met the right woman. But one evening, it was summer, I was thirteen, and the sky had the hazy light of a long day. We saw Neil from our window, kneeling in his yard, clearly upset—maybe crying. My mother walked out to see if he was okay, and the moment she stepped on his grass in one flying movement he sprang over and hit her stomach. She folded at the hip. He ran into his house, but I got to see his eyes. They were like a baby owl I once found beside the road. It had looked stunned, probably grazed by a windshield, so I picked it up to place it in the safer ditch. Within a few seconds it looked at me and then bit through the flesh in my thumb. Neil’s eyes had the same instinctive hate. My mother returned unhurt, but she never cooked for him again, even when he gave me a used bicycle for my birthday and still cut the lawn when it grew above our ankles.