The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Read Online Free Page B

people notice.
    Mrs. Davis, who lived alone one floor below me, was the first to say something. It was the beginning of November and Judith had fully settled into her new home and become a fixture around the neighborhood. Her routine was familiar to those of us who watched. She was prone to midafternoon runs and reading in her living room with the curtains pulled back. The house looked beautiful now, especially at night with the single porch bulb shining down on the steps, which had also been smoothed out and worked over.
    “You know that woman living next door?”
    Mrs. Davis was standing outside as she normally did, leaning against the front fence, surveying every person and car that passed before her with what she believed was a keen and watchful eye for all things suspicious. For twenty-three years she had lived in this neighborhood, thirteen of which were spent in this house, first alone, and then with her husband, who passed away eight years ago. Over the years I had watched her go to church two, sometimes three times a week just, I believe, so she could escape the deafening silence that came with living alone in old age. In the summer she made feeble, halfhearted attempts at planting flowers in the weed-ridden patch of soil in front of the house. A geranium or tulip would bloom, only to die of neglect. In the fall and spring she stood outside and watched the children walk home from school with their arms around each other, and in the winter you could sometimes spot her wrapped in a blanket sitting on the couch nearest the front windows simply staring out vacantly onto the empty sidewalk and street, as if something only she remembered had occurred there, and now was the hour designated for remembering it. She had a habit of spitting out bits of food trapped between her teeth as she spoke to you, and in desperate moments of restlessness she was known to sweep the sidewalks and street free of litter. Anyone who didn’t know her well and saw her pushing a broom back and forth from the front of her house to the curb thought she was mad. Those of us who knew her realized she was not mad, only bored and looking for the attention of her neighbors.
    When Mrs. Davis asked me about Judith, she already knew the answer. I had caught her on several occasions watching us talk from her living-room window. She couldn’t help smiling her perfect, wide smile to remind me of that.
    “Yes, Mrs. Davis. I know her.”
    “Why do you think a woman like that would wanna live here? Doesn’t seem right, does it?”
    She had a small face with tightly bundled features, her eyes and nose closely set together, as if they had failed to grow since she was a child. When she asked me questions she rapped her fingers against the fence, showing off her hands, which had aged even better than the rest of her.
    “It’s a free country, Mrs. Davis. People can live where they like.”
    “What do you know about free countries? You didn’t even know what that was till you came here last week, and now you’re telling me people can live where they like. This isn’t like living in a hut, you know. People around here can’t just put their houses on their backs and move on.”
    She tried not to laugh at her own joke, but failed, and her face disappeared once more under a row of shining, perfect white teeth.
    “What can you do? The neighborhood’s changing,” I told her. I had said the same thing at least a dozen times before, when the first few houses in the neighborhood were sold, when a restaurant opened up a few blocks away, when up the street the discount grocery store with two rows dedicated solely to generic goods shut down. The neighborhood’s changing, things are changing, it’s not like it used to be, I can’t believe how much it’s changed, who would have thought it could change so quickly, nothing is permanent, everything changes; the passive and helpless observations of people stuck living on the sidelines.
    The change wasn’t gradual,