you have a phantom neighbor.
you’ve lived in this apartment complex for four months and you’ve met every other person on the floor already, if not the entire building.
the sweet old lady with the long last name across from you (and the phantom), who told you just call me mrs. p when you knocked on her door to introduce yourself. the married couple three doors down—they’re looking to move out soon, find somewhere bigger since they’re trying to have a baby. you had nodded and smile politely, a little uncomfortable with the openness, but hey, maybe that’s just what people here are like.
there’s others that you haven’t seen as much, so they don’t come to mind as quickly. you have a strict routine, you always have. out the door by seven-fifteen, at school at by seven-thirty, and you come back around four usually. even then, you have a routine you stick to after work. cleaning up, getting started on dinner, an episode of love island while you eat. you try to go on a walk afterwards, especially in the summer when it’s still warm and sunny around seven or seven-thirty.
and in all that time, you have never seen your next door neighbor.
it doesn’t make sense—how can that possibly be? you know he exists. there’s a label that says 309 — j. abbot in the building directory, right above yours, 311. you’ve seen packages left at his door before. one time the mailman accidentally slipped his electric bill into your slot—and you had left it on the floor by his door, and the next day it wasn’t there anymore
so j. abbot did exist, just maybe on a different operating schedule than yours. you don’t know why you even care so much—it’s not really that important. in other cities people go years without meeting their neighbors, and sometimes they’re better off. the last thing you need is for other people on the floor to learn that you’re nosy, or something terrible like that.
you think maybe you’re just curious. the better answer is that all the cheesy romance novels you read have passed through your skull and infiltrated like a virus, giving your self-diagnosed brain rot a whole new meaning.
you’re not nosy, you decide, but you still ask mrs. p about him one day, when you’re helping the older woman get her groceries up the stairs. they’re servicing the elevators, and she tells you how they must have started after she’d already left that morning. to thank you for hauling in the reusable bags filled with something inordinately heavy, she invites you in for tea.
you’ve never really been a girl who drinks tea, but you accept her invitation with a smile. she makes a pot of earl grey and you two chat about things that come up—what you’re doing this weekend (nothing, if you can help it), how your students are (wonderful, but june can’t get here soon enough), and then you sneak it in.
“do you know the man who lives next to me? in 309? mister abbot?”
“oh! that’s doctor abbot, honey,” she says, and you feel yourself flush, as if you’re embarrassed for getting his title wrong when he isn’t even there. you’ve never even seen the man. “he’s very nice. a widower, you know, so sad.” she whispers the last part as if it’s some sort of secret she shouldn’t be sharing.
“oh. that’s very sad. is he young?”
nosy, nosy nosy, a voice in the back of your head sings to reminds you.
“everyone’s young when you get to be my age,” she says with a smile, piling on more cookies to your plate while you try to resist.
you leave about an hour and a half later, after mrs. p has gotten a chance to fill you in on everything she deemed necessary for you to know. now that it’s warm, there’s a farmer’s market in the early afternoon she thinks has the best produce—get there early before they run out, though. a couple upstairs is getting divorced, and she’s keeping the apartment—he cheated. can you believe it? well, you haven’t seen the man, but trust me, you wouldn’t believe it. him?
and right before you were about to excuse yourself to go finish lesson plans and treat yourself to a eight dollar latte, she fills you in on 309, dr. abbot, the very nice, allegedly young, widower.
“well he served, just like my husband did. always stops by on veteran’s day for tea. i think he works nights at the hospital.”
but then she changes the topic again, and you don’t want to keep pushing just to satiate your own stupid curiosity. by all accounts, though, he does seem really nice. maybe you’re just not old enough to know many nice men, but stopping to have tea with his elderly neighbor on veteran’s day doesn’t seem like something just any man would do. you bid mrs. p goodbye and buy your latte and finish your work.
your schedule seems a little thrown off today—courtesy of all the cookies you ate with tea. you’re not hungry at all come six pm, so you keep reading whatever romance book is rotting your brain today, and then at six-thirty, with the notable absence of clanging pots and pans and your overstimulating kitchen hood, you hear it for the first time.
the door next to you close. there’s the sound of jangling keys. and as quickly as your tip-toes can take you to your peephole, you miss him almost entirely, just seeing his back—broad and covered with a black scrub top—and the back of his head—salt and pepper.
you wanted to see what he looked like and deduce for yourself just how young he really is, since mrs. p told you to basically not trust her judgment. you’re a little dejected but you’ll take what you can get—before today he was a complete phantom. now he’s a blend, somewhere between phantom and person, with a very nice personality and gray hair.
you suppose that’ll have to be enough for today.
