THE ENTOMOLOGIST by Hadley Moore

Earlier today the hippies had ambushed Lynette, and in the hours since they left she’d been off-kilter, lost in a vacant sort of perseverating that came down to feeling humiliated and not knowing how to soothe herself.
She guessed the hippies had tried the broken bell first. Then they knocked while she was in the bathroom, and she’d hoped she could hold her breath and wait them out. But they knocked again. She debated whether to flush, decided against it, and crept from the back of the house up the hall, at the end of which she saw a man’s face pressed to the wide front window. He waved. She considered running out the back, but he might chase her. She couldn’t remember if she’d locked the front door, and it seemed safest to meet him on the porch where the neighbors could hear her scream.
She opened the door. “Yes?” she said.
There were two of them, the man and a woman. They were skinny as new trees, and though their clothes were shapeless, they had bathed and combed their hair. Portland was lousy with vagrant youths – “hippies” was probably an old-fashioned word – but these two appeared neither sinister nor pathetic. Even so, Lynette reminded herself to keep her guard up.
“Yes?” she said again.
“I’m Antoine,” the man said.
Lynette crossed her arms.
“And I’m Catty,” said the woman.
“Catty?” Lynette repeated.
The woman smiled. “It’s a nickname that stuck.”
The man went on, “Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
“Huh,” Lynette said. She pulled the door shut behind her and took a step forward. Antoine and Catty took a step back.
“We’re from Oregon Micro Farms,” Antoine said. “Have you heard of it?”
Lynette stared at him.
“We notice you have a chunk of unused land – ”
“What?”
“Behind the house.”
“You mean my yard?”
“It’s a full quarter acre, and it’s mostly empty.”
There was a toolshed she hadn’t unlocked in years and a dying crabapple tree.
“What do you want?” Lynette asked. She tried to sound impatient but the sun lit Antoine’s white-blond hair. “You have a halo,” she told him.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, not a halo – a, like, nimbus or something. Of light.” Lynette drew an imaginary circle around the top of her head and pointed behind them. They looked.
“The house faces west,” she said. “So, your hair.” It was four o’clock on a March day in Portland.
“Oh,” Catty said. Her hair was black.
Antoine touched his head. He and Catty glanced at each other.
“You must have lovely sunsets,” he said.
“The backyard faces east, which would give us enough light, and we could use this south-facing side yard too.” Catty pointed.
They talked, and Lynette watched their mouths. Antoine’s head still blazed, and the colors in their clothes pulsed, first the orange flowers of Catty’s floppy sweater, then the blue-blue of Antoine’s jeans. Lynette felt heat begin in her solar plexus. She wiped her upper lip.
“Something, something, Oregon Micro Farms,” they said. “Something, something, something, vegetables. Something, something, raised beds.” That phrase over and over – raised beds.
“I’m Lynette.”
They stopped talking.
“Anyway,” Antoine said. “Can we show you what we mean?”

       That was how she ended up in the backyard with the hippies, all three of them assuming the posture of the surveyor: wide stance, hands on hips. Antoine and Catty would build raised beds on her “land” – they would start tomorrow – and maybe also plant a few hardy fruit trees. Some of the food they would donate to shelters and soup kitchens, and some they would sell at farmers’ markets to benefit Oregon Micro Farms. They would get to keep a little for themselves – it was part of the contract – and they would give a little bit to Lynette.
“I’m allergic to cucumbers.”
“Got it,” said Catty.
“Is this your job?” Lynette asked.
“Partly. I nanny, and Antoine works in a coffee shop.”
“Everyone in Portland works in a coffee shop.” Lynette laughed. “Of course, I love coffee.”
Antoine smoothed his beard. It was darker than his hair.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I study termites. Studied them. I’m retired.”
That surprised them. They thought she was a nutty old lady, but she had a master’s degree in entomology.
“Interesting,” Antoine said. “Studied them for what purpose? I know they’re helpful for decomposition in some ecosystems.”
Lynette guffawed. “Like decomposing the ecosystem of your house!”
They gave her tiny fake smiles.
“I worked for a pesticide company.”
The grudging smiles persisted, but Lynette knew she had said too much. The heat began again, and she fanned her face. She was embarrassed because, for one, the hippies didn’t believe in pesticides, and for two, the termites were back.

* * *

Her humiliation was like having a chocolate cake in the house. She would think about it until it was gone. She would eat the cake in anticipation of the relief of not having to look at it.
There are things everyone knows but no one recalls learning – boys and girls are different, all of us will die. Her bewildering humiliation was like that: she had always known it. It was more than familiar; it was atmospheric. She got in trouble as a child for transgressions she didn’t understand she’d made: Be friendly. Smile and say how do you do. Look at people when they talk to you. Please try to seem like you’re having a nice time. For goodness sake, Lynette, stop digging in the dirt! She would try, but it was hard to tell if she was doing it right.
Also atmospheric was her preference for animals, particularly insects (abundant, intricate, six-legged!) over humans. But she would go along, interacting with humans, or at least being where they were – and doing what they wanted her to do; it was easier than navigating on her own. So she was bossed around on playdates, then later on dates and at parties, her looks, she would come to realize, earning her heaps more patience than if she’d been homely in addition to strange.
“You’re so pretty!” girls would say, wistful-like, while the boys looked at her sidelong. This started when she was nine or ten. Then the boys got bigger and introduced her to the word hot, a word that could both thrill her and twist her stomach. She was tall, and very blond, and was made to understand that she was striking. But if she’d been homely people might have been more willing to leave her alone.
Now, Lynette glanced at her watch. Since the hippies left, five hours ago, she’d intended to call the dermatologist, do laundry, pay bills, give herself a cream rinse, and mollify her tenants, who were still pissed off about the mold in the shower. But all she’d done was bang around the house and check the termites about ninety-five times.
She sat at the kitchen table and kicked off her slippers. The window looking over the backyard was a black square, so she leaned to the wall and turned out the light. There was just a quarter moon, and the crabapple was the same stark sculpture she’d stared at for more than twenty winters. Soon it would show whether it had survived this one. The toolshed lay outside her sightline, and was not worth moving to see.
Tomorrow would begin the construction of the raised beds, large wooden boxes laid out geometrically. They were efficient and also attractive, the hippies had told her. She would like them; they would improve her property.
Lynette had made a resolution, and she reminded herself: she would not mention pesticides again. And she would not mention pests.

A couple of weeks earlier, she had met the termite evidence with calm acceptance. Insects outnumbered humans some 200 million to one. That a relative few should show up in her house again was not surprising, though it was ironic. Or maybe just coincidental.
She’d been vacuuming the living room – which was itself notable; usually she just ran the Dustbuster around corners – when she bashed through the baseboard on a not-very-aggressive pass. She turned off the machine. On hands and knees she held her nose to the wood. It smelled moldy. She hooked a pinky finger inside the four-inch gash and drew out dirt. On either side of the gash she pressed, and on either side it gave a little.
Lynette switched on the light and sat. She fixed her eyes on the new hole, then moved them slowly up until she noticed a rippling in the wallpaper. She leaned forward and ran her hand up too, until she could no longer reach. Then she sat back. She had to check the basement.
Directly below was the furnace room, where no one had been since the igniter for the tenant unit was replaced a few years ago. But the two old furnaces had been kicking on and heating the house, and more and more it seemed better to leave well enough alone.
Descending the stairs, she was serene in anticipation of what she’d already identified. She opened the door to the furnace room, and swept her flashlight beam up and down the south wall. Then she swung to the north, and on her third pass up she found the mud tubes. They had bloomed from a crack in the foundation, four separate termite highways straining for a food source. The tubes had reached the wood of the floor joists overhead and wrapped around the cross braces like vines. She noted a pulse of pleasure in the recognition: Reticulitermes hesperus.
She went upstairs for her penknife, and came back to slit open the base of the widest tube, revealing the tiny white workers, further evidence, wholly unnecessary. This must all be destroyed.

* * *

In the morning Catty and Antoine began hauling wood into the backyard. They parked a rusty Toyota pickup in front of the house and used the south side yard to go back and forth. Catty wore a flowy skirt like a pioneer wife, and Antoine had on overalls. Lynette watched them alternately from the bedroom and kitchen windows. They would come and go, they had told her. They wouldn’t bother her. They didn’t say where they would use the bathroom. Not inside the house.
Even so, she batted cobwebs out of corners, ran a wad of tissues over the lid of the toilet tank to grab the dust, gave the bowl a vigorous scrub to loosen the layer of scum that now waved in the water like a lacy sea creature. She wiped her sleeve across the mirror and gave herself a good looking-over.
Gray hair a springy cloud she could tie a knot and put a pencil in to hold it. No makeup, prominent laugh lines, and pale, shriveled lips. But eyes still bright blue, brows still dark, pores still small, chin still single.
And she wore a bra, for heaven’s sake. Under a gold kente cloth tunic she’d found at Goodwill, but still, she made some effort. She sneezed into her elbow. She was nearly seventy, but she’d been attractive, arresting even, when she was younger.
Lynette opened the medicine cabinet, thinking she might find an old lipstick or blusher. She poked around for a few seconds, knocked a label-less tube of ointment into the sink, replaced it, and shut the door. She pursed her lips and pinched her cheeks and blinked several times. The color rose from her heart up across her chest and throat, seeping and uneven like something spilled. She turned from the mirror, stalked out of the bathroom, and shut the door behind her.
She sneaked back to the kitchen and leaned against the window frame, peering out at Antoine and Catty’s progress. There were two small trees in plastic tubs (pears? apples?) set against the shed; ten or twelve bags of soil, or manure or peat maybe; and stacks of wood, two by fours or four by sixes or whatever, long reddish rectangles. Everything new and raw.
Antoine and Catty came around from the side yard, each carrying another load of boards. Antoine set his down next to the others, then took Catty’s and set those down too. They stood for a few minutes, hands on hips, or hands pointing at things, or hands gesturing to each other. Catty looked at Antoine, and Antoine looked at Catty, and Lynette watched the swiveling of the backs of their heads, black to blond and blond to black.
They turned toward the house and shaded their eyes. Antoine held a hand up toward the window, and Lynette did not move. Then they left, back around the side yard to the front. The truck started, and she exhaled.

       It was only 10 AM. Lynette knotted up her hair and put on a sweater and went outside. The neatness of their supplies was even more impressive up close. Corners had been lined up, bags stacked like with like, three soil to every one manure and peat. The trees were indeed pears. She wondered where they had used the bathroom.
How long could this go on? They would build their raised beds and plant their trees and vegetables, and winter would come, and would they be back next spring? For years and years and years, every spring? Eventually they would realize they needed real jobs, or they would break up, or Catty would get pregnant, and the raised beds would fill with weeds and rot, and the trees with worms, and Lynette would either be dead or the one to witness the entropy.
Or the house could fall first. Not literally fall, but be eaten to crumbling. It would take a while. People thought termites worked very quickly, but that was only because by the time they discovered any damage, Reticulitermes hesperus had been working for years. The bugs ate from the inside out.
It was almost a decade ago that she had come upon a termite swarm in the front yard and hired her employer. But now it had been so long since her retirement, and the new owners were lying low because of all the bee deaths last summer – though anyone would have sprayed like that for aphids. Clearly, though, they overdid it: 50,000 bees dead. Anyway, she felt awkward going back there. Maybe no one would remember her, and she wanted to do some research on her own, besides. The science would have progressed in the last half-dozen years. A few weeks would make little difference.
There had been a memorial service for those bees. Oh, Portland. Maybe Catty and Antoine had gone. Did you sing at a service for bees? Were there prayers? Lynette stared at the boards and bags and the trees in tubs and tried to imagine it. Was there a minister? Some Unitarian Universalist probably.
“Mrs. Collins?”
Lynette turned around. The tenants were striding across the lawn. “Christ,” she said.
They caught up to her. “What’s going on here?” That was the white fellow, Mitchell, the more obnoxious one. The other one was Prashant, who told her he was from Kerala (in southwest India – she’d had to look it up) but was dark like an African. When they moved in, seven months ago, she’d asked them, “Are you roommates?” That was an idiotic question, but what she’d meant was, Are you gay? Mormons? Adopted?
They were graduate students.
“The university’s kind of a hike from Southeast, isn’t it?” She’d meant Portland State, downtown. They went to Western Seminary, they’d told her, only a few blocks away.
“That’s handy, then,” she’d said.
They were neat and quiet but they complained, more than any other tenants she’d had. It was mold in the shower or condensation on the insides of the windows or ants in the kitchen or noise she could hardly recall making, just the incidental sounds of daily puttering on her side of the duplex. Her side. It was all hers. This backyard too. She didn’t have to answer to Mitchell.
“Oh, some young people are planting some things,” she said to him now. “Raised beds.”
“Some young people?” That was Prashant. He sounded more British than Indian.
“A couple of – ” She didn’t want to say hippies. “A couple of gardeners.”
Mitchell sniffed and Prashant just looked at her.
“You rented your yard?” Prashant again.
“Yes.” Should she have asked for money? The hippies were like tenants, but with no monthly rent check. So the benefit to her was what, again? Property improvement. Fruits and vegetables. “But I wonder how they knew this big yard was here,” Lynette said out loud. Had they been lurking around her neighborhood? She felt hot again and shrugged her sweater off her shoulders. She sat on a pile of boards.
Mitchell started up: “Anyway, we wanted to ask you – ”
“I know, the mold.”
“Not the mold. We just bleached the heck out of it.” He smirked. Why should he care about mold? He was transient; none of the responsibility was his.
And the bleach was supposed to bother her (no makeup, kente cloth tunic, “Keep Portland Weird” bumper sticker on her car, and now urban farming). It did not bother her. Lynette wondered what the tenants would think about a memorial service for bees. She was so hot. She wanted to put her head between her knees.
“What then?” she asked.
“Will this be loud?” Mitchell made a half-pointing, palm‑up gesture toward the wood. “A lot of hammering, I mean.”
“Oh Jesus,” Lynette said. Now they would complain about the hippies too. She fanned her face and chest. What the hell was going on? She was well through menopause. “You could tell them when you’ll be gone. You could give them your class schedule.” She’d tried to sound sarcastic, but the tenants looked at each other. Prashant shrugged.
“When will they be back?”
“I don’t know,” Lynette said.
“What do they look like?” Mitchell asked.
“They look like hippies.”

       The hippies came back in the evening. No sooner had they braked in front of the house than the tenants practically galloped across the front lawn to meet them. There were handshakes all around, and the tenants gave the hippies a sheet of paper. Catty held it and Antoine looked over her shoulder, and they nodded, and the four of them laughed. Mitchell turned to indicate the house behind them, and Lynette shrank from the front window, where yesterday Antoine had pressed his face.
So they were friends now, the earnest farmers and the earnest Christians, and they had come to an understanding about how and when they would all make use of her property.

* * *

A month ago Lynette had let a plumber into the tenants’ apartment while they were in class (rust stain, dripping tub faucet, weeks of complaints about the noise), and after showing him the bathroom, she’d walked through the other rooms. For all their fault-finding it was the first time she’d had real cause to be in Mitchell and Prashant’s space longer than a few minutes, and without them present.
The apartment’s familiar layout mirrored the side where she lived, kitchen and one bedroom in the back, living room and the other bedroom in the front. Bathroom between the bedrooms, where the plumber was banging away. That was some top-dollar noise he was making. It sounded a little overdramatic.
In the kitchen was a small dining table set with a laptop and a manila folder. She lifted one corner of the folder and let it drop. In the refrigerator, their food was labeled, black magic marker for Mitchell, green for Prashant. Each had his own carton of eggs. Mitchell preferred orange juice, Prashant whole milk.
Prashant had the back bedroom (she knew by the family photo), with just a twin bed, tidily tucked in with a navy blue quilt, and bookshelves made of stacked milk crates. Mitchell’s front bedroom had a double bed with a yellow chenille blanket and two tall bookcases – proper bookcases, but cheaply made.
The living room held two more dining chairs and a card table on which was set up an elaborate board game printed with a map of the world. Lynette moved an olive-colored battleship from Spain to Brazil.
Were they friends before seminary, or did they get matched up by some questionnaire on which they’d both indicated they were spartan housekeepers who liked war games?
“Ma’am?” the plumber called.
Lynette stepped away from the game, her face warm. This was innocent; it was hardly even snooping, and she only ever did it with the chaperoning presence of someone she’d hired.
She paid the plumber and ushered him out, and it was after she’d gone down the porch steps and across the lawn to her own porch that it occurred to her she might have looked in the bedroom closets. She hesitated at the bottom of her steps. The key was still in her hand. She made a tight fist, then pocketed it and climbed.

* * *

It was ten years ago that her husband died and left her this house and its mortgage. Her husband! Remember that little fiend? He’d insisted on buying a duplex so he could install his father on the other side, and then Lynette was the one left with the old man. God, why did anyone marry anyone?
Her father-in‑law was from Mississippi, and he called her a hant, sometimes a haggard old hant, or an old gray hant, or that old hant the bug scientist. He thought that last one was a terrible insult, an aspersion on her femininity.
When her husband died the old man told her she’d never be able to keep up the house on her own. He wanted her to sell and give him half. When she refused he demanded she buy him out. She should kick him out, but she didn’t say so. I certainly will not was all she told him, and after that were a few days of stand-off and then an announcement that he was leaving and she should just see if she could take care of this house by herself!
It was months later, when she was well past his whiplash-strange departure – she had her first tenants by then; it seemed like the thing to do – that she was paging through The Oregonian and saw his name. He’d been beaten and robbed in his apartment in Gresham, and he’d given an interview from the hospital. What he said was unmemor-able, two or three quoted lines about how he never hurt nobody and you sure couldn’t tell about people these days, but there was a photograph of the (alleged) perpetrator that stopped her.
He was an obvious meth head, a white kid, with the cratered skin and collapsing mouth, a twenty-year-old flat-faced fetal alcohol baby. You saw these kids all over. Familiar face, familiar revulsion, but a weird realization rose in Lynette: she sympathized with neither her loathsome father-in‑law nor the loathsome kid who beat him. She stared at the photo and waited for some fellow-feeling for the poor old man or the boy who’d had no chance in life at all, and she thought of her husband too – didn’t he deserve compassion? (Obesity, aneurysm.)
She never saw her father-in‑law again. He might be dead now. She never told anyone what happened to him, because whom would she tell? It was this secret scrap of knowledge she didn’t care about, exactly, but that was hard not to be captivated by for its utter strangeness. She still carried it around with her.

       Those first tenants moved out after a year. There were three of them, a couple plus a single woman, which seemed suspicious, and Lynette wasn’t sorry to see them go. She kept up the house: mowed the lawn, cleaned decently, hired things done when she had to (cracked chimney, termite swarm in the yard). After a few years she retired, so she had plenty of time, but there was so much disintegration and undesirable growth and breaking apart. She was way too old for chaos to be an epiphany, but it could still stun her how just waking up in the morning or looking out the window might bring new discoveries of rot.
It was all her responsibility, and had been now for years. She wouldn’t wish back her husband or his father, but living by herself, in a duplex, made her feel like everything she touched fell to shit. She reminded herself that falling to shit was the inevitable state of the world. She was a scientist. She knew about entropy.
So she took care of the house on her own. Well, so what – she knew she would. She wasn’t interested in proving anyone wrong; who cared what ghosts thought? She stayed because this house was hers alone and you had to live someplace, the way you had to have a body, everything contained. It could all be such a burden.
She advertised sporadically. Tenants came and went. They finished out their year-long leases, or they didn’t and she kept their deposits (she could use the money). She never took things from them; she only brushed through their lives as she let in plumbers, plasterers, electricians. The tenants asked for the essential repairs, and even then sheepishly: the toilet won’t stop running, we wake up with plaster in our hair, anything plugged into this outlet gives a shock.
If they were home she waited in the entryway while the broken things were fixed, magazine in hand, leaning against the wall or sitting cross-legged on the tile. Tenants might hover in the living room and ask if she wanted a chair, or retreat to a bedroom or the kitchen and keep quiet.
If they weren’t home, she wandered. She touched only the things that were out, like books, things a guest might touch, but also shoes piled by the door or coupons fastened to the refrigerator or pictures hung on the walls. She would adjust several items, but each only a little.
She wanted her tenants to feel not endangered, not even haunted, really – but askew. She wanted them to know that everything here was hers, and all of it hard-won. They could come and go, and lodge themselves and their belongings with her for a little while; they just could not stay.

* * *

In the morning the hippies didn’t come until ten, their presence her new signal that the tenants were away, in class. Outside it was sunny, and Lynette watched Catty and Antoine in the back for a few minutes, then grabbed her keys and made her inefficient way across the front yard to the tenant unit. A portal between the living rooms would be easier.
She had been down to the basement already today, before the hippies came. By the time she’d detected them, the termites had done what they could do down there. They had reached a spectacular food source and were deep inside it, their progress undeniable but obscured, revealed only when, for example, she banged the baseboard with the vacuum sweeper. She’d been gentle with woodwork and walls since then.
But she still liked to visit the furnace room. Early in the morning, first thing, she had gone down to run her fingers over the mud, a combination of earth and feces and saliva. She had swept her flashlight up each mud tube, one by one following their paths to her floors, her walls.
It was hopeful prospecting that sent the termites up the concrete foundation; they might very well find nothing, and Lynette had to admire their single-mindedness. That admiration was an occupational hazard – intense study produced respect bordering on envy. They were only insects, but some of her colleagues could relate: how could you not sort of love the system of it, the workers, the soldiers, the reproductives, and the queen, that hyperprolific mother? Lynette’s life was all happenstance – things happened to her; she endured them. But entomology she had chosen. Or, rather, she had recognized her singular interest, and followed it.
She had spent her career in the lab, removed from the dirty work, and so she could forget her purpose for weeks at a time and be lulled by pure, conceptual-seeming science. But then she would remember.
Now, she stood in the tenants’ entryway and took stock. The card table was bare, the war game nowhere to be seen. She had no reason to be here. She crossed to the kitchen and glanced to see that Catty and Antoine were still occupied. They would plant the trees first apparently; they were digging holes some six or eight feet apart. She wondered when the building would begin. No loud hammering yet.
Lynette opened the refrigerator. She had no reason to be here. Two loaves of bread, two cartons of eggs, all labeled. Two crispers of vegetables – they must have an understanding of whose was whose. Lynette removed the eggs and set them on the counter. She opened the cartons. Prashant had four eggs left, Mitchell seven. She picked up one of Mitchell’s eggs and made a fist around it. It was cold against her palm and she squeezed a bit, then deposited it in Prashant’s carton. She put both cartons back where they’d been and closed the refrigerator.
In the bathroom a red towel and a white one hung on the bar, and the medicine cabinet held the usual things – toothpaste and brush, floss, razor – two of each, but only a single box of Band-Aids. Perhaps those were fine to share, or someone was immune to cuts and scrapes. The bathroom didn’t interest her.
In Prashant’s room Lynette licked her thumb and pressed it to the face of the man she assumed was his father in the photo on the sill. The man smiled at her with his arm around her tenant.
And in Mitchell’s room, she sat on the bed to put a dent in his stretched-tight covers. She preferred Prashant to Mitchell. She preferred the hippies to Mitchell. She preferred the termites. Mitchell was hard to look at, smirky and pimply and overweight. Red-haired. Pasty. He was chief complainer, and clearly the ringleader of the hippie charm offensive, printer of the class schedule, bleacher of the shower stall, and the one with the hypersensitive hearing.
She leaned over and looked under the bed. Nothing. Like Prashant, Mitchell had no bedside table or dresser. She wanted drawers in which to find porn (preferably gay) or drugs or bookie sheets. She stood and opened the closet. Inside were a hamper and tennis shoes and flip-flops on the floor, plus a dozen or so hangers with pants and shirts. Four stacked milk crates held underwear, socks, t‑shirts, and sweaters, and that was all. Nothing interesting, nothing incriminating.
Lynette sat down and then lay back, her arm under her head. She put her feet flat on the bed and let her knees fall together. She might have dozed a few minutes, because when the drilling started she found herself sitting upright, her hand on her chest. “Jesus!” she said out loud. “Jesus.”
She got up and crossed the hall to the kitchen. The hippies were using an electric drill, of course, not hammers. It wasn’t even that loud now that she was fully awake.
Lynette went back to Mitchell’s room, closed the closet door, straightened the bed, and stood before the bookcases. She found a Bible with a gold cover and moved it down one shelf, and then one more.

       Sometime after lunch the hippies’ drilling stopped and birdsong crowded in. Lynette got up from her couch, where she had been not reading exactly, but riffling a magazine and holding still to keep down her heart.
She stood back from the kitchen window a couple of feet. Catty and Antoine held court with Mitchell and Prashant, there on her lawn, among their planted trees and what looked like one finished box – the first raised bed – and one that was C-shaped, three quarters done.
The C-shaped thing enclosed the four of them. Her tenants smiled while the hippies talked and pointed at their bags of soil and peat and manure, their handiwork so far, their trees. They stepped outside of the C, and the tenants followed them. Antoine made broad strides across the lawn, flicking his wrist at intervals as though he held a wand that might cause the whole yard to leaf and fruit. He looped around and ended between the pear trees, grinning like he’d conjured them. He and Catty had conjured it all, the trees and boards and bags of rich material. They had conjured the lot itself, and the house, and the woman standing at the window, though they did not see her.
Perhaps she should go out and make herself visible, remind them, disturb their breezy new friendship. She could get something out of the shed or inspect the lawn for bare patches – her shed! her lawn! – and then ask them in for tea, reproach and forgive them.
Antoine put a hand around a tree, the one nearer the old crab-apple. His audience joined him, and all four of them looked into its heights – just one foot above Antoine’s and Prashant’s heads. They stood there like worshipers, and Lynette counted to thirty before Catty stepped back, interrupting their adoration. She pointed at the crabapple, and the others nodded, and then she swept her hand in a half-circle to indicate the yard. The men laughed, and Lynette’s heart bulged and twisted.

       When Mitchell showed up on her porch later, Lynette squared herself for a confrontation. Sure enough, he had a complaint, but it wasn’t this morning’s egg or slimy thumbprint or migrating Bible. It was the window in the kitchen. It stuck.
“It’s still March,” Lynette reminded him. “What do you want to open the window for?”
“I like fresh air.”
“Go outside.” He’d just been outside. She’d seen him.
He smirked.
“Does it have to be that window? Can you open a different window?”
He shook his head.
“Bang on it. It’s probably painted shut. I don’t know what to tell you.”
He sighed.
“Get your friends the carpenters to help you.” She jerked her thumb toward the backyard. “They seem to be moving right in.”
He shrugged. “You let them.”
“They just appeared!”
He shook his head again and opened his mouth and closed it. “I want – ” he started, and turned to look down the street. He turned back to her. “I just want to open the window.” He thumbed a pimple on his chin.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” She wasn’t sure whether she had any tea.
His brows came together and one side of his upper lip quivered. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Why do you care about any of this? None of it is your problem.” Window, mold, rust, ants. What would he do if he discovered the termites? They might swarm at any moment. “None of it is yours.”
“It is mine, Mrs. Collins. It is mine for one year. That is what a lease is for.”
They stared at each other. Lynette felt her nostrils flare and that roaring heat from the middle of her chest.
He went on, louder. “And it is true for Catty and Antoine too. I assume you had them sign something.”
She was hot all the way through now, hot in layers: skin, muscle, bone, and organ. “For Christ’s sake, wouldn’t it be easier not to complain about everything?” She wanted to tell him a few things about ownership, about rot and responsibility and infestation.
“So you won’t fix the window.”
“No,” she said. “I sure as hell won’t.”

       After dark she went outside, and the cold of the March night was easier on her heart than the warming daytime. The moon was nearly full, and Mitchell and Prashant could look out and discover her if they wanted to. It was her yard.
The pear trees were spindly things, sticks dug into the ground, so unlike the old crabapple. Soon, if she were lucky, leaves would hide its knotted skeleton. The pears had tiny, incipient foliage, the crabapple none yet. But the crabapple was continuous with the earth, and the pears looked as though they’d breached it, the sod disturbed, the dirt swollen like blisters around their trunks. She could pull them out with her two hands.
The first two raised beds, one still unfinished, each lay beside a pear tree. She squatted to examine the unfinished bed. It was more complicated than she’d realized, with stout posts in the inside corners, to which the boards were fastened. Would the posts face into the ground, or out of it, to hold some kind of net or trellis?
Lynette stood and looked down at the structure. She touched her toe to the long end, then pulled her foot back and kicked the bottom board, heel first, with enough force to hear a snap. There was no visible crack in the wood, just some small giving-way inside, and she let that echo. She let it knock around her skull.

* * *

Twenty-odd years ago she’d met her ex‑husband at the bar where he worked. She liked to think of him as her ex‑husband, but what he’d actually been was first her regular husband, and then her dead husband.
She had let herself be talked into going out with co‑workers one Friday when, apparently, the bartender had noticed her. Her co‑worker Holly, who was dating her co‑worker Sean, told her.
“What?” Lynette asked. “Who?’
“The bartender!” Holly said, exasperated already. “Sean kind of knows him. He noticed you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you even know who I’m talking about?”
Lynette thought for a minute. “The bartender,” she repeated, as though it were coming to her. “Dark-haired guy?” It was a lucky guess.
So she ended up back there with them, the second Friday in a row, and she pretended to recognize the dark-haired guy when he put an oily-looking pink drink in front of her and winked. She let the drink get watery before sipping it. It tasted like a Shirley Temple with vodka. From down the bar Holly and Sean smirked at her and raised their eyebrows, and Lynette wished for an attack of appendicitis.
She was attractive! Okay, fine! It just wasn’t the most interesting thing in the world to her, but Holly acted as though Lynette were wasting something important.
Holly and Sean weren’t her friends, exactly, but they took Lynette’s reticence, her focus on her work, her indifference to her looks as a challenge. This bartender veered toward chubby, but Lynette was awkward, so they probably figured each had an approximately equal deficit. There was an undercurrent of making fun, and Lynette didn’t know how to show them that she recognized it. Who knew whether the chubby bartender did.
There were some superficial similarities. She and the bartender were both past forty and both orphans if you didn’t count his father, a late-in‑life transplant from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest who hadn’t been around for Brent’s childhood – Brent, that was her ex‑husband’s name – but showed up in his son’s twenties. And though Brent would make vague claims to sexual experience that sounded not just exaggerated but made up, Lynette was close enough to virginal not to question them.
They were an exact match! said Holly and Sean.
Holly and Sean broke up and quit, one after the other. Lynette and Brent stayed together.

* * *

Sometimes termites swarmed indoors. It could happen in the tenants’ living room, piles of bodies and cast-off wings, dead bugs drifted like sand. This was the season. The termites would appear like a spray of mud where the baseboard met the floor, sudden black flecks against the white paint. Quickly they would be tens and hundreds, thousands before they were through, a horde more like one large, writhing body than many small ones.
Lynette had witnessed a swarm only once, outside, a couple of months after her father-in‑law left. She had been walking home with a chair someone down the street had set out for the trash, a lightweight but bulky rattan number that allowed her to see, as she lurched home gripping its arms and with the seat resting on her head, something blowing around her front porch. It was leaves or dirt, caught by a low wind. When she reached the house she lowered the chair and knew, without a single what the hell moment, that here was Reticulitermes hesperus, swarming out of holes they’d made at the base of her porch.
Her employer gave her a discount to treat the house, five percent for loyal service and another five for her bereavement. Brent, she reminded herself: the source of her bereavement. He was recently dead and his father even more recently gone, and she was not so stupid as to think the appearance of the termites was a sign, but she liked the symbolism of it and the order in which events had occurred: she was rid of one repulsive man and then the other, and practically the next thing that happened was her very favorite insect (her pet insect! ha ha), one she’d spent her life studying, showed up in the yard that was now hers alone.
Her pet insect was one of several she’d spent her life trying to kill, but still. It was like a part of herself came back to her, in this house she’d never wanted anyway.
Swarmers were the reproductives, all frantic for a mate. If they emerged indoors they were trapped. Unable to get into the soil, they would dry out within a few hours. Mitchell and Prashant would come home to thousands of dead and dying insects, their wings separated from their bodies – picture it, such lavish waste. She would love to see it happen, but she would not stay to clean up because she was not supposed to be there. It is mine for one year, Mitchell had told her. That was what a lease was for – of course she knew it: to keep her out.
But she would stay and watch. She would even risk discovery to see the insects pouring from the baseboard, so many it seemed the wall should burst; there would be her portal. They would stream toward the front window, and cover the glass so it vibrated and the light in the room dimmed and dappled. Then the first few would drop to the floor, having lost their wings. More would come after them, and for several minutes there would be a rush from baseboard to window to floor, a black gust.
She would watch until the stream slowed, and the termites were mostly down, a mass of bodies on bodies, desiccating and thwarted. They would be slower moving now but inches thick, and she would slip out the front door while they still twitched and suffered. What would it be like to die by drying?
She would cross back to her side to wait. Mitchell and Prashant would see the insects as soon as they came in. They would make the horrifying discovery and come to her. They would lodge their hysterical complaints, and tell the hippies.

* * *

Prashant’s closet was as unremarkable as Mitchell’s. She took a pair of his socks and dropped them in Mitchell’s sock crate. She put salted water in one cube of one ice tray. She moved Mitchell’s other Bible, the one with the red cover, and slid Prashant’s makeshift bookshelves a few inches toward the window. And when the war game reappeared, she moved one tiny plastic man or plane or tank per day, Libya to Japan, Manchuria to Australia, Alaska to Peru.
The hippies were harder to affect. Kicking that first raised bed did nothing but bruise her heel. She poked holes in the bags of soil and peat and manure, and hid a box of screws under the shed. She considered scraping some of the mud off the walls of the furnace room, to transfer termites to the raised beds, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to. Any damage would be minimal, besides. These were only the workers; they couldn’t reproduce.
While the hippies built their raised beds, Lynette let herself in to the other side of the duplex to make her small adjustments. It is mine, Mrs. Collins. It is mine for one year. And at night she made adjustments to the yard.

* * *

After a few more days the intermittent drilling stopped for good. She’d noticed the provisional stop, the usual whooshing back in of quiet, and then some time later – twenty minutes, an hour? – she noticed the quiet had persisted. She looked out her kitchen window to survey the backyard. Though she’d been monitoring the hippies’ progress, the six raised beds surprised her in their finishedness. They faced north and south in two rows of three. They would surely fade to gray, but for now they were starkly red coming up out of the green-brown of the lawn, foreign and geometric.
They had to be filled, and the vegetables planted and tended (did the hippies expect to use her water?), and these were relatively quiet chores, unlikely to disturb her studious tenants. Maybe Mitchell and Prashant would allow them to come and go now as they pleased.
Catty and Antoine stood at the north end of the yard and admired their work. Lynette watched them, and she saw Catty raise her hand and smile and the tenants come loping across the lawn. Mitchell and Prashant gestured at the raised beds, swung their arms north and south in exclamation over – what? Symmetry, perhaps. Besides the colors, and the finishedness, the beds’ symmetry was most striking. The hippies had measured and straightened, and they’d pounded the stout interior posts into the ground.
And now they were giddy with their success. Look at what they had done! An ugly yard in the middle of the city, and they had made it theirs. It was theirs to share with Mitchell and Prashant, and to tame and beautify further. The crabapple would come down, and the shed too, and eventually the house with the termites in it. Lynette would skulk around, invisible, as her property was razed and rebuilt around her.
She went outside, down the stairs and around to the back from the south, on “her” side. She strode to the first bed. The four of them – the hippies and the tenants, the farmers and the Christians – drifted toward her. Lynette looked inside the bed. Just grass so far.
“They look like coffins,” she said.
“They’ll look different when they’re full,” Catty answered.
“What’s next?”
“We’ll fill them and start planting,” Antoine said.
All four looked at her, waiting, and she was reminded of the abrupt quiet after the drill stopped.
“How will you water?” she asked.
Antoine again. “We have jugs of water in the truck, for the trees, but it would be helpful if we could use your spigot. We brought our own hose. And if it’s okay with you, we thought about installing rain barrels.”
“How did you find me?”
Catty slid her eyes to Antoine. “We knew which neighborhoods had large lots,” she said.
“You can look up lot dimensions,” Mitchell added. “That’s public.”
Lynette ignored him. “So you picked some and went around, appraising them for your purposes?”
“Yes,” Catty said, and Antoine said, “That’s when we came to your door.”
“You looked in the window.”
“I apologize for that,” Antoine said. “It was hard to tell if anyone was here.”
She glanced at Mitchell and Prashant, who appeared unfazed that their new friend Antoine had come right up on her porch and looked inside her house. The tenants met her eyes, and Mitchell shrugged. She couldn’t affect any of them.
The heat started at the base of her neck and slithered up her scalp. “Are you done making noise?” she asked.
Catty tilted her head. “I’m sorry?”
“With the drill. Planting and watering and so forth – that won’t bother the tenants.”
There was one short bark out of Mitchell, which ended in a smirk, and Catty corrected her. “Mitchell and Prashant,” she said, as though Lynette didn’t know their names.
“It won’t bother us,” Prashant said. “We’ve already talked about it.”
“We need one more day to drill in hardware for bird netting. But after that we’ll start coming earlier in the morning,” Catty explained. “And we’ll be quiet.” She smiled at Lynette, to suggest she might have considered her at all.

* * *

Lynette had married Brent because he pursued her. She’d stayed because it seemed easier than the upheaval of leaving. Certainly she’d been pursued before, but never with such persistence. What was the big deal for him? She had not been very responsive, which was maybe part of the initial appeal, but how do you say to someone, Listen: it’s not that I am mysterious, it’s that your interest does not interest me?
Certain animals freeze when they think they are being pursued. They play dead. She was one of those animals.
Still, pursuit made you pay some attention, like maybe this person is on to something. Maybe I could be part of a passionate love affair.
It turned out not to be that. It turned out only that her co‑worker Sean sort of knew him and thought he seemed lonely, what with his dad – who sounded like a demanding old bastard – sucking up a lot of time and energy. So he could use a little female companionship.
And Sean knew this lady Lynette at work who was quiet and kind of odd but also weirdly hot, not to mention over forty and still single like Brent was, so they’d bring her to the bar some time and he could look her over; come on, man, why the hell not?
Some of this was reported by her co‑worker Holly. Some of it Lynette guessed.
After her genuine, non-strategic indifference failed to deter Brent, she let herself be borne along by his pursuing, about which she did have a preliminary flash of curiosity, and which resulted in a pregnancy and then very quickly a miscarriage, an experience more strange than traumatic but one that made him clamp down on her, when she should have taken the opportunity to extricate herself – shouldn’t she? Or maybe it was inevitable that the whole thing would play out the way it did. Anyway, it was long over. What was the point of regret?
They got married, the pregnancy, in a way, still heavy inside them both, with her play-acting at guilt for her aging body’s rejection of it. Her relief was huge, it was obscene, and it made her feel expansive and tolerant: not that, thank god not that, and so this? This she could handle. It was just what people did, right – get married?
Once in a while he stirred something in her, and she would rally to a bit of loyalty, almost. Or an acknowledgment she was, if she had to ally herself one way or another, classifiably heterosexual.
Why did marriage have to mean cohabitation and being together all the time, though? The kind of relationship she thought might suit her – sustained and monogamous but periodic – didn’t appear to be on offer anywhere, but was she truly the only person who might want to go out or have sex just once a month or so?
God, though, she didn’t like when he touched her, not really at all. Early on, she got herself sort of hummingly through it by letting her mind leave the scene. But one time he noticed her actually humming – “What is that? Hold music?” he’d asked, which surprised her for being so clever and apt that she laughed. He rolled off and didn’t talk to her for two full days.
The silent treatment was glorious. Lynette thought he seemed calmer, too, after those two days, and this appeared to be their way forward: leave each other alone. It worked for a while, but he got fat and resented her for it, and needed a knee replacement and resented her for it, and she never got pregnant again, so he resented her for that. What used to be almost companionable quiet was filled with his stomping and muttering. Then when she did not immediately assent to his suggestion that they let his dad live with them (they’d been married a few years; she’d already had a belly full of her father-in‑law), he swept a dirty casserole dish off the kitchen counter and roared ridiculously when it only bounced on the linoleum. She snickered, and he left the house and came back hours later and told her they were buying a duplex. She didn’t respond, which wasn’t the silent treatment; there was just nothing to say.
After that it was ten years before he died, years she spent being married the way she spent them doing laundry or mowing the lawn. People said marriage was hard work, but divorce would be a project too, something she considered like she considered rehanging the front door. In each case the fix would be gratifying but the process a trial, and there were work-arounds: pull up on the handle to open in the one case; work late, sleep in the guest room, hum very quietly in the other.
But when he died her beautiful, ardent relief was even more obscene than it had been the first time.

* * *

When Lynette heard knocking that evening, she was surprised to look out and see Prashant on the front porch, alone.
She opened the door. “Hello,” she said. “Come in.”
“Thank you,” he said, stepping inside and easing the door shut behind him.
“Well? What now? Did Mitchell send you?”
“Mrs. Collins, have you been in our apartment?”
He said it with that incongruous British accent, in a low, kindly voice like an old man. He stooped above her, and though she wasn’t Catholic and didn’t know what confession was like, she imagined it could be like this: an accusation in a dim entryway from someone tall and shape-shifting – both Indian and British, young and old, gentle and disapproving, God and man.
She made a sound at the back of her throat that was loud inside her head.
“Because some things seem a bit off,” he went on. “I think my bookshelves were shoved over a few centimeters. Is that possible?”
“I suppose it is possible.” Those bookshelves had been awkward to wield. She hadn’t moved them very far.
“If you need to get in, you’re supposed to tell us. I believe that’s our right.”
“Yes.” The heat bloomed across the top of her chest and tucked itself in under both arms. “Mitchell asks for a lot.”
He made no acknowledgment of that. “I thought I would tell you this now as well – we won’t renew our lease this summer. We have other plans for housing next year.”
First there was relief, then she asked, “What about the hippies?”
“I’m sorry?”
But he knew who she meant. He inhaled and looked away. “They already planted trees,” he said, and looked back at her. “Why would you – ” he started.
She waited, but he only shook his head.
“There are termites,” she told him. It was a confession, the first time she’d said it out loud. “In the house. I’ll need to have it treated.”
He stared at her. Seconds accrued, and his expression didn’t change. Finally he said, “Perhaps we will look to move out sooner, then.” He continued to stare at her. She stared back. “And Mrs. Collins, I think we would be entitled to our deposit money.”
It would be a lot for her to come up with at once. Her heart moved up and up, warming her armpits, then her throat until it lodged in her skull, fitting itself around her brain and her sinuses and pulsing there.
“I will consult my father,” he went on. “He’s a lawyer.”
“In India.”
“Nevertheless.”
She didn’t mean to argue with him. “That’s fine,” she said now to Prashant, priest and demon. “Because I think I might just sell the house anyway.”
“Well,” he said. “We will let you know our plans.”
He left and she went downstairs. The mud tubes were as they’d been, only a means of transport. All the destruction was above her. She’d leaned a mirror to cover the gash in the living room baseboard, but had peeked behind it a hundred times. That gash and this mud were like scabs or pimples or sheets of peeling skin, hideous but fascinating things that she knew she shouldn’t touch.

* * *

The next morning Lynette looked out the kitchen window to see the pear trees, adjacent to that old crabapple, which had started to leaf, and the decrepit toolshed that was like a crypt for whatever it still held. The bags of soil and peat and manure were there; the beds like coffins remained.
Surely Prashant had told Mitchell about the termites; surely they would tell the hippies – also about her claiming she would sell the house. Selling had not occurred to her, not seriously, before she mentioned it to Prashant last night. She would have to treat the termites; she would have to do it now. And she would have to disclose both incidents of infestation. But it was amazing what people would buy. She could so easily foist this burden upon some stranger.
Still, the house was hers alone and you had to live someplace. And entropy was the state of the whole spinning world. She could feel her heart now, trapped and furious inside her. This would be their final day of drilling, the hippies had said. When they came she would have one last assurance that the tenants were in class.
Later though, Mitchell would stage a dramatic confrontation. He would make indictments and demands out of Prashant’s sober questions. But the hippies would not be afraid of termites – of course they wouldn’t; they would see the bugs as benign, masters of decomposition. They knew, or would quickly learn, that these termites would not eat healthy live trees or make the great leap from the house to the raised beds in the yard. Neither would Catty and Antoine be afraid of her selling; they had improved her land already, and lots of people around here would see their continued presence that way too.
She knew what they all would do. She knew it like prophecy. Here she waited, because of things she herself had said. She waited for them, and she waited to see what she would do with her own property and all that it contained. It was entirely her decision – and more than anything now, that was what vexed her.

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Hadley Moore’s short stories and novel excerpts have appeared in Witness, The Indiana Review, Quarter After Eight, Confrontation, and Ascent.