137 Steps

She's petite with pencil thin legs. Her hair is long and black, but she usually wears it pulled back. She seems to favor print pants that hug her lower body and legs and frequently wears a hoody or jacket no matter what the weather. The bump in her belly seems misplaced both with her age, which can't be much more than 25 and could be much younger, and her physique.

Every day, she paces back and forth across the parking lot in front of my apartment. She does this morning noon and night. The same 137 steps are traced back and forth across this small, barren, pragmatic space. The whole world exists beyond that lot, but she paces there like she's in a prison yard.

I want to ask her why she doesn't walk over to the shopping mall that is just three minutes away or walk in the park which is about five minutes from this asphalt cul-de-sac, but I don't want to invade her privacy or appear to be disapproving. A few times, she has made eye contact with me or my husband and has smiled once. After that cursory recognition, she has kept her eyes on the ground when we happen across her, as if acknowledging our presence too many times during her repetitive trek will reveal that she seems imprisoned within the length of a parking lot.

Anticipation

Early in the morning, I wake up before he does. I look over at his face. It looks slightly droopy in its state of complete relaxation, but that is as much about his beard as his age. Usually, his shoulder is free of the sheet he uses for cover. The bare skin entices me to reach out and touch it, but I resist.

The price of waking up first is this longing for what is close at hand, but untouchable in the moment. It is desire not yet, but soon to be, fulfilled. It carries the sweetness of anticipation.

Shadow

An atypical wind blew as I rounded a corner and blew my umbrella inside-out. I inverted it back to its former form, but one support was permanently bent in the wrong direction. To prevent any further mishaps, I put it away until the breeze died down. I closed up the compact ersatz parasol and struggled to secure it with it's aging, fuzzy Velcro closure. Once successful, I hung it from my left wrist by the loop on the handle.

As I rounded a corner, I swung my arm slightly and the top flung off of the the handle. Though I can't seem to remember the fact, the screw that secured the two pieces was lost more than a year ago. I bent down to pick it up and noticed that two women were sitting on colorful towels on the sidewalk directly in my path. It took a moment, but I figured out that they were lifting small hand weights and counting outside. This choice was no doubt spurred by the hotter than usual spring day.

I stepped off the sidewalk to accommodate their workout and said hello to them as I started to pass by. The one on the right, a woman with beautifully clear very dark skin, asked, "Aren't you usually walking with a man?" After being momentarily stunned by her intimate knowledge of my habits despite not knowing me, I smiled and told her that I usually walked with my husband, but he was at work at that time.

I asked her if she lived around there and she pointed back at a tidy, smallish yellow house behind her. I started to ask her if she owned one of the many friendly cats in the area, but halted myself when I noticed a beautiful grey and white cat sitting several feet behind her next to a tree. She told me that was her cat and it was named "Shadow."

Shadow was not one of my usual feline acquaintances on this residential walking tour, so I asked if she was friendly. Her owner said that she was bothering she and her friend earlier, but she had exiled her to the spot next to the tree. I wished she and her companion luck with her workout, and as I went on my way, she said, "You're doing good," in reference to my constitutional. I replied that I was not doing as well as she and her friend, who looked fitter than me by far.

A Star

She looked down at the umbrella dangling from my left wrist and asked, “Is it going to rain?” It was a silly question because everybody knows that it never rains in California in the summer. I told her that it was for the sun, not for the rain. She looked perplexed and then slightly vexed.

Her last name was “Star”, and she was renting the house in which we’d just completed a month of cat-sitting. My husband and I were temporarily residing in a sprawling Bay Area home for the cost of scooping out a litter box on a daily basis and forcing allergy pills down one cat’s throat daily. It was a good deal for us, less so for the cat

The Star and her husband were forking over thousands of dollars for their summer there in addition to doing cat duty. They had something or other to do with Stanford University and surely she felt smart enough to know that an umbrella on a sunny California day did not mean rain. To her, I was just a delivery person who was diverting her from the process of moving into her temporary home and embarrassing her with my parasol.

To end her discomfort, I offered her the key that I’d just walked a little over 40 minutes in the cruel sun to deliver. She took it from my hand with a terse smile that showed a sense of relief that this brief social altercation would soon be over and then she bid me farewell. The door was closed nearly in my face and I turned to walk home. At the end of the walk, when the shade ran out, I opened my black umbrella and emerged into the light of the star-less day.