The New Neighbors

On the drive home, Ben slept in the back seat with his hands still wrapped around a toy dump truck. Maddie watched the windows go dark with sunset. Kate said, “Don’t stare at it like it’s a job site.”

“It is a job site.”

She snorted. “Marriage, too.”

A week later, the vacant ranch next door sold.

Mike saw the sign come down before lunch and the new one go up by supper. White stakes marked the yard. A dumpster arrived. Then another. The house had been empty long enough to feel like a gap in the block.

Now somebody was filling it.

Mike saw the moving truck before he saw the people.

It was a clean white box, not a rented one with somebody else’s logo, but a branded carrier with a clipboard man at the curb and two helpers in matching gloves. They had a schedule. They had a plan. They had a place to be done by five.

The house at 816 had been empty for two weeks. Now the front door stood open, and new blinds leaned against the wall in stacks.

Kate came out with a basket of laundry and stopped at the mailbox. “You can tell a lot from first week habits.”

“Trash day will tell more,” Mike said.

He was washing dried asphalt off his forearms in the driveway sink. The long run beside his house still felt like the reason they had bought it. Not the square footage. Not the brick front. The line. The drive ran straight from Hickory Lane to the back pad, wide enough for the trailer, the paver, the skid steer, and two trucks if he put them right. He could turn, load, and back out without eating up the street.

That had mattered when they signed. It still mattered every morning.

By supper the Prescotts had a porch light on and new shrubs in the ground. A realtor sign sat by the walk with a photo of a blue couch in the window.