NOLA Notes

She sits on her front porch regularly.  She thinks she knows her neighbors well:  The couple next door that are having health problems, the woman across the street whose brother is living with her until his home is finally repaired from Katrina, and the neighbor catty-corner from her, Mike, who lives upstairs as he works on an addition to the back of his home.  Mike also owns the house three doors down from her.  Mike’s son, Jared, used to live in the second home; he is in his forties and rumored to have a slight mental disability.  Jared now lives in the front of Mike’s home because the second home is in disrepair.

Jared drives up to his father’s home and walks inside without waving to her.  Moments later, he returns outside with a green ceramic plate in his hands and walks to his far neighbor’s house.  She wonders what Jared is doing.  Do her neighbors share dinner every night and she not know it?  Is he going to get dinner and bring it back to eat alone?  If he’s eating at his neigbor’s, does he have some weird phobia about using others’ plates?

She hears voices and looks to see her neighbors talking.  Jared’s hands are empty; the far neighbor is holding the green plate.  There was nothing psychotic about the mystery; it was nothing habitual.  It was just a guy returning a plate to his neighbor.

Jared then hopped back in his car and drove away from his father’s home.  He did not look across the street to her.