The Back Fence

The townhouse was cheap and I knew why the second I signed the lease. Small kitchen, thin walls, a backyard the size of a parking spot. But it was mine, or rented by me anyway, and at twenty-three that felt important. I'd been sleeping on my sister's couch for four months and I was done with it.

The back yard had a wooden fence along one side, shared with the next row of townhouses. One board near the bottom was loose. The gap was maybe an inch wide, and through it I could see a strip of their patio and a corner of a grill. I bent down and looked the first day, just to see what I could see. Not much. A folded lawn chair and a coiled hose.

What I didn't count on was sound. That first night I sat outside with a beer and my phone, sorting boxes on an app, and I heard voices come through the fence like they were sitting next to me. Words, then not words. Just the shape of them. A man laughing low, and a woman telling him to be quiet and not meaning it.

I want to set one thing down plainly, since it matters later. Two years ago, when I was twenty-one, I dated a guy named Cody for six months. Construction worker, broad shoulders, laughed like a drain clearing out. I ended it because he wanted serious and I wasn't ready to be anyone's serious. I haven't thought about him much since. I told myself that, anyway.

So when I heard that laugh through the fence on my third night in the place, I didn't think anything at first. Lots of guys laugh like that. Then the woman said his name. Maya. She said it twice, half whisper, half not.

I know Cody's laugh. You don't forget a laugh like that in two years. I sat very still on my folding chair with my warm beer from the fridge and my heart doing something I refused to name.

Because here was the thing. I had moved into this townhouse three days ago. The neighborhood was canyon-adjacent, whatever the listing meant by that, and cheap, and I picked it off an app in one afternoon because the photos showed a bay window. I never once looked up who lived behind me. What were the odds. Honestly, what were the actual odds that my ex-boyfriend from two years ago lived in the row of townhouses that shared my fence.

Then I heard him again. "Maya. Shh. The neighbors."

"The neighbors aren't out," she said. "I checked."

He laughed again, lower this time, and I heard the folding chairs scrape on concrete, and then a while of nothing that was very obviously not nothing. I won't write out what I heard through that loose board. Some of it was breathing. Some of it was Maya not being quiet at all. Some of it was Cody saying her name in a voice I remembered from a small apartment near the depot, and yeah, my face got hot, and yeah, I stayed in the chair instead of going inside, which is its own thing to sit with.

I told myself I stayed because moving would make the chair scrape and they'd hear me. That was maybe ten percent of it. The rest I'm not proud of, but I'm an honest woman on paper at least. I listened. He was twenty-five now. I was twenty-three. We broke up two years ago because I said the word not ready and he said okay, and that entire conversation was it, and I regretted the tone of it for a long time after.

After a while it got quiet out there. I heard the tap run. I heard Maya say something about cold pizza. Normal sounds, after. I finished my beer and went in and lay on my mattress on the floor and stared at the ceiling fan and felt like a creep and also felt something else I didn't have a word for yet.

The next morning I knelt by the fence with a screwdriver, telling myself I was fixing the board for privacy, everybody's privacy. The screw just spun. The board had been like that a while. Somebody before me had probably given up on it too. I left it.

I thought about it all week, which was embarrassing. I work at the state park north of town, ranger, mostly answering the same four questions and fishing a phone out of a creek once a week. My coworker Deb asked why I was smiling at nothing on Thursday and I said a meme. It was not a meme.

Friday night I went out with a guy named Trevor from the climbing gym, because my friend kept pushing him at me, and it was fine, dinner and one drink, and I kissed him goodnight because he asked first and it seemed polite, and then I went home and stood in my little yard in the dark, listening. Nothing. Quiet patio on the other side. I felt dumb and went to bed.

Saturday I worked the entrance booth until six. When I got home there was a box on my porch from my mom, more kitchen stuff, and I carried it through the house and out the back door to open it at the little patio table, because it was finally cool enough to sit outside and I was determined to enjoy my yard as anyone would and not lurk by a fence.

That's when I saw it. Tucked into the gap where the loose board sat crooked. A folded square of paper, white, corner sticking out just enough that you'd only catch it if you were already kneeling by the fence, which, fine, guilty.

I pulled it out with two fingers like it might bite me. Unfolded it. Block letters, pen, a guy's handwriting, and I would know that handwriting anywhere because he used to leave me notes on my windshield when I worked early shifts, and I'd kept two of them in a drawer until the move, which I am admitting here because the whole story falls apart otherwise.

The note said: I know you can hear us. Want to watch? Friday. 9. Then a smiley face. A regular one, two dots and a curve, drawn at the end like he couldn't help himself.

I read it four times. I looked through the gap at the empty patio. I looked at the note again. A woman's handwriting was on the back, smaller and rounder: Or just come say hi. Either is fine. Maya.

So his girlfriend knew. His girlfriend was in on it. I sat down hard on my folding chair and laughed out loud in my empty yard, one short bark, and a dog somewhere down the row barked back.

Here is where I should tell you I was horrified. Part of me was. A real part, the part that pays bills and answers park questions. But the other part, the one that had stayed in the chair Wednesday night with her warm beer, that part read the note a fifth time and thought about Friday at nine the way you think about a dive you can see from the trail, the kind you're not supposed to jump off.

Two years since I'd seen him. I ended it, that was on me, I own that. He had a girlfriend now, a girlfriend who wrote notes in round handwriting and said either is fine. And a week of listening through a fence had done something to me I wasn't ready to name yet.

I put the note in my back pocket. Then I took it out, because I was going to wash those pants, and put it on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a trout. I made pasta and ate it standing up and looked at the note about eleven times.

Friday was six days away. I had a lot of deciding to do, and a lot of lawn chair scraping to avoid in the meantime.

Friday came slow. I worked the booth, I ate dinner at five thirty like a senior citizen, and then I sat in my kitchen chair and watched the clock on the microwave say 8:40 for what felt like an hour. At 8:55 I went out the back door. I brought a lawn chair and then left it folded against the wall, because kneeling seemed more honest. Like I was committed to the bit.

The yard smelled like cut grass and grill smoke from somewhere down the row. Through the gap, the strip of patio was lit by one string of lights, yellow, and the corner of the grill like always. But there was a blanket out now, red, spread across the concrete, and two people on it.

I knew his shoulders before anything else. Cody at twenty-five looked like Cody at twenty-three, just thicker through the arms, forearms with a new scar on one of them. He was sitting on the blanket with his back to the fence, and Maya was in his lap, facing him. She was small and dark-haired and she was laughing at something he said.

I knelt down and put my eye to the inch of space and did not move.

They kissed for a while. His hands went up under her shirt and she lifted her arms so he could pull it off over her head. She wasn't wearing a bra. She had a tattoo of a mountain range along her ribs. He got his mouth on her nipples and she tipped her head back and I could hear her through the fence, these little sounds, not loud, just real. He reached down and pushed her shorts off and she kicked them off one ankle at a time.

"Get over here," she said, and pushed him flat on the blanket.

He laughed. That laugh, I'd know it through a wall. She pulled his shorts down and his cock came out hard and she wrapped her hand around it and looked at it like it was hers.

"Hi," she said to it, and then to him, "you're so easy," and she leaned down and took him in her mouth.

I watched her head move, slow at first, then quicker, her hand working what her mouth couldn't fit. His stomach tightened and his hand found the back of her head but he didn't push, just rested it there. I was kneeling on my own concrete in my own yard with my hand pressed flat against the fence boards and my heart doing way too much.

He pulled her up and off him and rolled her onto her back on the blanket. She grabbed a condom off the blanket, actually had them sitting there in an open box like snacks, and rolled it onto him. He pushed into her and she made a sound louder than the small ones, a real moan, and I flinched back from the fence like I'd been caught. Nobody had caught me. I went right back.

They fucked like people who liked each other. That was the part that got me. He said her name and she said his and her legs went up over his shoulders and he reached down and rubbed her while he moved, and she came first, hard, grabbing the blanket, and then he pulled out and pulled the condom off and finished with his hand while she watched him do it.

Then they just lay there. She put her head on his chest. I should have gone inside. That was the moment. But I stayed, kneeling, and I guess my knees shifted on the