Neighbours
Her neighbour’s trash cans had not moved in three weeks. She knocked on the door anyway.
Everyone on the street had noticed. Nobody had done anything about it, and neither had she.
Trash cans go out on a Tuesday here. It is the closest thing our road has to a heartbeat, and his had been sitting against the fence, unmoved, since the middle of January.
Three weeks of Tuesdays
I noticed the first week and thought nothing of it. Noticed the second week and assumed he was away.
The third week I stood at my window with a cup of coffee and thought: I have lived opposite this man for nine years and I do not know if he has anyone.
The reasons not to
He might be away. He might be fine and think I was being nosy. He might answer the door and I would have nothing to say that did not sound like an accusation.
I went through all of them, twice, and then put my shoes on anyway.
He answered on the third knock
It took a long time and I heard him before I saw him. He had been on the floor of his hallway since the Friday and had got himself as far as the sofa and no further.
No broken hip, as it turned out. A chest infection and a fall and four days without anything to eat.
“I didn’t want to be a bother”
That is what he said in the ambulance, and he said it like it was obvious.
He has a son in Phoenix. He had not told him either, for the same reason.
What the trash cans were
Here is what I keep turning over. There was a sign. There was a visible, weekly, three-weeks-running sign that something was wrong at that house, and the entire street saw it and read it as nothing.
It was not that nobody cared. It was that caring never quite became knocking.
Tuesdays now
He is home. His trash cans go out on a Tuesday, and if they do not, two of us on this road will notice by the afternoon rather than the third week.
That is the entire lesson and it cost a man four days on his hallway floor.