Zog Falls in Love

Mrs. Henderson washed one plate and one fork at the kitchen window, the way she had washed them for longer than the mailboxes on Starfighter Lane had been leaning, and she took her time about it, because the window was the best thing in the house and the plate was only the excuse. She wore the quilted lilac bathrobe she wore at every hour of the day. Her glasses hung on a chain against her chest. Behind her, in a laundry basket of clean towels he had not been invited into, Biscuit slept the furious sleep of a very small dog, growling at something in a dream and losing.

The lane at dusk was what it always was. The houses stood in a row like one house that had been delivered several times by mistake, split-levels with the same roofs and the same tired gutters, and on half the lawns the sprinklers were still going, ticking back and forth over grass that had been brown for a month, because nobody had turned them off and nobody intended to. At the end of the lane the pavement simply stopped and the woods began. Her house was the last one before them. Mrs. Henderson had always considered this the one honest thing about Starfighter Lane: it did not pretend to go anywhere.

Her side yard ran from the house to the tree line. It held a birdbath, a rosebush, a green garden hose she had been meaning to coil since August, and the gnome. The gnome stood beside the birdbath, eighteen inches of concrete in a red pointed hat, holding a small fishing rod over water it had never once looked at. She did not think about the gnome. She thought about it the way she thought about her own knees, which was only when something went wrong with them, and nothing ever went wrong with the gnome. That was what it was for.

Nothing surprised Mrs. Henderson. She had watched the Fighting Possums lose by exactly enough for nine seasons, first from the bleachers and then from the back page of the Bugle, and she had watched the young people of the lane dye themselves blue and purple and orange and back again for forty years, and somewhere along the way she had arrived at the position most of Bakerfield held without ever having discussed it, which was that things happened, and then you finished the dishes.

A figure came down the sidewalk from the Whitmore end.

It was the exchange student. She had heard there was one, the way you heard things on Starfighter Lane, over a fence and without asking. Sweden, somebody had said. He was short, and he was green, a very bright green, and she filed that where she filed the blue and the purple. He wore a white T-shirt that hung down past his knees. There was writing on the front of it. The writing was not her business. He had a cap on backwards, which was apparently how they wore them now, and a pair of sneakers too big for him, and he walked the way nobody under seventy walks: slowly, down the dead center of the sidewalk, looking at every mailbox and hedge as if there were going to be a test on them later.

She approved of the pace. She rinsed the fork.

He stopped at her side yard.

He stood at the edge of the grass and looked at her gnome for longer than it took to wash a plate, which she knew, because she washed it again. Then he bowed. He folded at the waist until the button of his cap pointed at the grass, one hand out, three fingers spread, and he held it there, the way she had once seen a man hold a door at a funeral. Then he straightened up and said something to the gnome. She could not hear it through the glass. She could see his mouth move, and stop, and his whole enormous head tilt a little to one side.

He was waiting for an answer.

Mrs. Henderson waited too, because it would have been rude not to.

The sprinklers ticked. In the basket, Biscuit growled at his dream and lost again. Across the lane a porch light went on and off twice, as if it could not decide about the evening. The gnome said nothing, which was the whole reason she had bought it.

The exchange student nodded. He nodded the way a man nods when he has been told something in confidence and intends to take it to his grave. He said one more short thing to the gnome, very seriously, and put his three fingers over his heart, or over where she assumed he kept one.

Mrs. Henderson put her glasses on.

She squinted.

She took her glasses off again and let them drop on their chain.

“Kids these days,” she said, and went back to the fork.