The Melon Peel

The street was not long. There were three houses on it, and the middle one had a kitchen door that faced the drive. I had lived on the street for eleven years and could not have told you the names of my neighbours, which I considered a point in my favour.

The trouble began with the boy. He was eight, maybe nine, and he had a habit of standing at the end of my drive with a melon. Not eating it. Holding it. He would stand there for twenty minutes at a time, the melon cradled in both arms like something he had been asked to carry somewhere and had forgotten where.

I watched him from the window. I am not proud of this. I watched him the way you watch a tap that drips, not because you care about the water, but because the sound has made a place for itself in your head and will not leave.

The first time I spoke to him, I said: "That melon won't keep."

He looked at me with the flat patience of a child who has been told many things and has found most of them untrue.

"It's for my mother," he said.

"Then take it to her."

"She's not home."

"When will she be home?"

He considered this. "When the melon is ripe."

I did not know what to do with this information, so I did nothing. I went back inside. The tap kept dripping. The boy kept standing. The melon kept not ripening, as far as I could tell, though I am not an expert in melons or in boys.

The second week, I brought him a glass of water. I do not know why. It was not kindness. It was the same compulsion that made me watch him - the sound that had made a place for itself. I held the glass out over the fence.

He took it. He drank it. He handed the glass back.

"Thank you," he said, and I felt, for no reason I can name, that I had been seen doing something I had not meant to be seen doing.

The third week, I brought him a chair. This was worse. A chair is not a glass of water. A chair is furniture. I carried it out of my house, down my drive, and set it on the grass beside him, and I sat in it, and we both looked at the melon.

"It's a good melon," I said.

"It's the only one," he said.

I did not ask what he meant. I have learned that asking is how you end up responsible for things. We sat. The melon sat. The street sat. It was the longest I had sat still in eleven years, and I did not once think about the tap.

The fourth week, his mother came home.

I did not see her arrive. I saw the boy's face change, the way a room changes when the light moves, and I looked up, and there she was, standing at the end of the drive with a bag of shopping, looking at her son, and at the melon, and at me, sitting in my chair on the grass.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello," I said.

She did not ask who I was. She did not ask why I was sitting on the grass with a chair and a glass of water and a melon. She looked at her son, and she said: "Is that for me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Then bring it in."

He brought it in. The melon, cradled in both arms, carried the length of the drive, through the door, into the house. The door did not close behind him. It stayed open. I could see the kitchen light, and the shape of her hand on his shoulder, and the melon being set down on the counter like a thing that had finally arrived.

I sat in my chair for a long time after the door stayed open. I thought about the tap, which had stopped dripping somewhere in the third week, and which I had not noticed stopping. I thought about the eleven years. I thought about the boy, who had stood at the end of my drive with a melon he was carrying somewhere, and who had known where he was going all along.

I did not go inside. I stayed in the chair. The light from their kitchen reached the grass where I sat, and I let it.

I am still there, some nights. Not the chair. The chair is in my house now, where it belongs. I mean the place. The place at the end of the drive where the hand reaches out and stays out, and the melon is carried in, and the door stays open, and the light reaches the grass.

I have not told anyone this. I am telling you. If you are standing at the end of a drive with something you are carrying somewhere, and you have forgotten where - bring it in. The door will stay open. The light will reach the grass. It is not a long street. There are only three houses on it. One of them is yours.