The Casserole Dish

The casserole dish has been on his porch for six days.

I've counted. Not because I'm petty, but because I need it back. It's my grandmother's, one of three things I inherited along with this cabin and her collection of unsolicited opinions.

My neighbor, the angry, unshaven man who moved into the Peterson cabin three months before I arrived, hasn't so much as acknowledged its existence. Or mine.

He acknowledged my existence once. Day one. When I knocked on his door with my grandmother's famous tuna casserole and my best librarian smile.

He looked at me like I'd personally offended him by existing.

Then he shut the door in my face.

The casserole was gone the next morning. The dish wasn't.

"You could just knock again," Mabel said at the library yesterday, peering at me over her reading glasses. "Demand it back."

"I'm not demanding anything. He's clearly going through something."

"He's been going through something for three months. That's a long something."

She wasn't wrong.

The man, whose name I never learned, chops wood at 6am like the logs personally wronged him. I hear the thunk of his axe from my bedroom window. Regular as church bells, except angrier.

He doesn't wave when I pass.

He doesn't acknowledge the pie I left last week. (Also eaten. Also dish unreturned.)

He barely seems to notice that he's not alone out here in the Vermont woods.

But I notice him.

I notice the way he stands on his porch at 3am. I have insomnia, I see things. He stares at nothing.

I notice the bottles that accumulate by his truck, empty, multiplying.

I notice that he hasn't had a single visitor in the two weeks since I arrived.

Tonight, I'm on my porch when the sound starts.

Guitar.

It's 2am and my neighbor is playing guitar, badly.

Not badly like he can't play. Badly like he's trying to play something specific and can't quite reach it. The same phrase over and over. Reaching. Failing. Starting again.

I pull on my grandmother's cardigan and cross the fifty feet between our cabins.

His porch light is off. The only light comes from inside, warm through the curtained window.

I raise my hand to knock.

Through the gap in the curtains, I see him.

He's sitting on the edge of his bed, guitar across his lap. Head bowed. Shoulders shaking.

He's crying.

Not quietly. Not stoically.

Sobbing. Like something inside him is breaking.

I lower my hand.

I stand there for a moment longer. Long enough to feel like an intruder. Long enough to feel my throat tighten for reasons I can't name.

Then I walk back to my cabin.

The guitar stops ten minutes later.

I don't sleep.

In the morning, I bake blueberry muffins. Not because I think they'll help. What do muffins fix, really? But my hands need something to do.

I leave them on his porch with a note:

*These are for you. The casserole dish is still for me. Whenever you're ready.*

*- June (the neighbor)*

I don't knock.

Three hours later, I look out my window.

The muffins are gone.

The dish is still there.

But for the first time in six days, his curtains are open.