LITMIR.BIZ

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move about his life, he had to learn to ignore her better. That and keep his kitchen blinds closed. Actually, all the blinds on this side of the house. Today she had come home from work, disappeared only long enough to change into shorts and grab a glass of what looked like iced tea. Now the ice in her tea was melting as it sat in the sun on her front porch while she was elbow deep in soil, shoving mums into the dirt. When she leaned forward, she stretched like a cat, her back long and her ass high in the air.

      God, he definitely had to learn how not to watch her, because he didn’t want to shutter his entire house. He liked the sunlight coming in through the windows, especially the afternoon summer sun. The big, south-facing windows were one of the reasons he’d bought this house.

      He shoved the gearshift into Reverse, looked over his shoulder with barely a glance at his neighbor’s ass, backed out of the driveway and sped down the street.

      * * *

      “YOU’RE LATE,” DENNIS SAID, lifting up his eyebrow and his phone at the same time. Both pointed comments on the time.

      “Barely.” Levi slid into the booth and motioned to Mary for a beer. The two of them had been coming to O’Reilly’s and sitting in this booth every Friday night for three years. The first six months, she’d come over to ask what beer he wanted. He’d said “whatever” enough times that she brought over whatever she or Brian, the bar’s owner, felt like bringing to him. Sometimes he drank the entire beer and sometimes only a sip or two.

      A little adventure, in his otherwise boring life.

      A safer adventure than watching his neighbor.

      Dennis coughed, a bad one that collapsed his shoulders in on his ears and shook the table. The kind of cough that would have his sister rushing to her husband to see what was wrong and Dennis struggling to both catch his breath and shake off Brook.

      If he and Dennis were being honest with themselves, a surprise beer was probably the only adventure either of them needed, since the mine accident. And Dennis didn’t even seem to need that. He always got the same bottle of Bud Light with a Jameson chaser. Had for years. Since before Missoula. Since before everything.

      “You ain’t been late since the day you were born,” Dennis said, his bottle resting against his bottom lip. “And this ain’t a big city, so you can’t blame traffic.”

      “I’ve got a new neighbor.”

      Levi hadn’t meant the comment by way of explanation, but he could tell by how Dennis lifted his eyebrows that it was the way his brother-in-law took the information. “He park in your driveway?”

      “No. My neighbor’s not why I’m late,” he said, though he didn’t have a better explanation for his tardiness, because “No matter how close I am to my new neighbor, I want to take at least one step closer, so it took me a while to drive away” would sound pretty stupid.

      “Why’d you mention it, then?”

      She was on his mind. “I’m not used to having a neighbor. It’s distracting.”

      “So, not a sixty-year-old with a gut. You wouldn’t be distracted by that.”

      “Ha!” Levi rubbed his own stomach. It was still flat but, at the age of thirty-seven, he was starting to think more about carrots and less about French fries and beer. “We’ll both be lucky not to be that in twenty years.”

      “I’ll be lucky to be that in twenty years.” Dennis took a long pull on his beer, draining the bottle and signaling for another one. It was going to be one of those nights. Levi and the dishwasher would be hefting Dennis into the passenger seat of Levi’s truck, and sometime around noon tomorrow, Dennis would text him for a ride back to get his car because Brook refused. And Brook would be texting him about letting Dennis get that drunk, because not only did she still think it was her job to monitor Levi’s behavior, but she considered it Levi’s job to monitor Dennis’s behavior.

      His sister had gotten taller over the years, but inside she was still a bossy twelve-year-old playing Mom while their dad worked in the mines.

      But neither Levi nor Dennis would drive home drunk, so that was progress since their reckless younger years. At least they’d learned something.

      Proof that stupidity wasn’t guaranteed to kill you young.

      “So, you gonna introduce yourself to this distracting neighbor?” Dennis asked, his second bottle of beer already half-gone. At least the whiskey was untouched.

      “What for? To get roped into helping her with home renovations?” Levi shrugged. “That house needs a lot of work, and I’m already too busy as it is.”

      “So, she’s cute.”

      “She’s a child,” he said, yanking his mind away from her legs and her nose and her ass and everything else about her he’d tried not to admire over the past couple of weeks.

      “She bought a house, so I’m guessing she’s at least twenty-five. Hmm. Might be more than cute—hot, even.”

      Levi shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time. Or interest. I’ve been married already. You should know. You were my best man.”

      Dennis shrugged. “Only ’cause no one else would do it.”

      A couple of beers between them helped them both laugh at the joke. At the time of Levi’s actual wedding, Dennis—and everyone else—had been dead set against it. Kimmie had been too young, the chorus of noes said. And Dennis had only served as best man because Kimmie had cried when he’d refused. And then everyone had been mad at Levi for making her cry. No one had noticed at that time that his entire goal in his marriage had been to keep Kimmie happy.

      All history.

      “You gonna ask your neighbor out?” Dennis asked with disarming openness. Both he and Brook regularly pushed Levi to date women. Dennis suggested women like the girls who worked the registers at the hardware store or the ski shop. While Brook had a never-ending supply of friends who would be perfect for him.

      Sometimes he said yes to Brook’s friends, and he’d even gone on more than one date with a couple; but there had never been any spark that compared to what he’d felt for Kimmie. Anything less would be doing both of them a disservice.

      “I don’t know her name.” The least of the things he didn’t know about her, though he was very familiar with the shape of her calves.

      He had to figure out how to stop looking at her without closing his damn blinds.

      “Don’t see why that should stop you.”

      “I’m not interested in being married again.” One time had been hard enough, even without the spectacularly tragic ending.

      Dennis signaled for his third beer. Levi was still on his first. A part of him wished his friend would finish the shot sitting on the table so he would fall over, and they could both go home already, but his friend seemed determined to get drunk nice and slow. Which usually meant mean. He’d have to warn Brook.

      “Hey, man, I’m not suggesting marriage,” he said, draining the last of the bottle while Mary brought a new one.

      No, Dennis never suggested marriage. But that was always Levi’s first thought after seeing a woman who attracted him.

      Or second, after the she’s got nice legs thought.

      He just wasn’t interested in a stand, one-night or otherwise. Once attached, he stuck.

      “Maybe you should ask her,” he suggested to his brother-in-law, as useless a suggestion to Dennis as Dennis’s had been to him. “Brook wouldn’t be at all mad.”

      Dennis’s shoulders started to shake with a laugh, which turned into a hacking cough. It sounded worse tonight. They each waited until it passed, pretending it wasn’t happening. The one time Levi had offered Dennis sympathy and a pat on the shoulder, he’d been angrily shrugged off, which only exacerbated

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