Watching Tiff

Tiff asked me to house-sit again, and of course I said yes again. That's the way it's been for thirty years, ever since we met at that trade show when we were both twenty-two. She hands me a job, I do it, and somehow that's enough for me. Should it be enough? I don't know. Let me back up.

My name is Marty. I'm fifty-two, never married, and yes, I hear the jokes already. Tiff is fifty-two and she owns the mid-century ranch house I'm sitting in right now. The whole place is torn apart. Kitchen gutted, bathroom gutted, drop cloths everywhere, sawdust in the air so thick you could chew it. She's mid-renovation and her apartment fell through, so she's crashing with a cousin for six weeks and I'm watching the house.

That's the official story, anyway.

Here's what gets me about Tiff. Other people ask me for favors and it feels like a transaction. When Tiff asks, it feels like she picked me. Like out of everybody in her phone, she looked at my name and thought, him. That one. And I know how pathetic that might sound to some of you, a grown man glowing because a woman trusted him with her ferns. But you don't know what it's like to be invisible your whole life. Or maybe you do. Maybe that's why you're reading this.

She left me a list. Water the plants. Feed nothing, she has no pets. Take in any packages. Sign for the countertop delivery on Thursday. Simple stuff. She'd taped the spare key under the frog statue by the back door, which is a terrible hiding spot, and I told her so, and she said nobody robs a house with a three-foot concrete frog staring at them. Fine point.

So the first week was plants and packages and me sleeping in her guest room because my own house is forty minutes away and she said why commute, Marty, just stay. Just stay. Like it was nothing. Like she hadn't just handed me the keys to her whole life.

* * *

The crew shows up at eight most days. Duane is the lead carpenter, forty-eight, been working for Tiff for fifteen years. Kath is the electrician, thirty-five, and she's the one who actually explains things when I ask questions instead of just grunting at me. Good crew. I mostly stay out of the way. Mostly.

It was day six when I found the Polaroids.

I want to walk you through this exactly, because it matters. I was looking for the original kitchen drawings. Tiff had asked me to measure the window openings for her, and I figured the plans would be on her desk in the back office. There was a stack of blueprints on the desk, rolled and flattened, the usual mess. I lifted the top roll and the photos slid out from underneath.

Polaroids. Seven of them. And every single one was Tiff.

Now, Tiff is fifty-two and she looks it, in the best possible way. Silver coming in at her temples. Strong shoulders from years of job sites. And in these photos she was posed on her own bed, which is not made anymore by the way, and in the first one she had on a robe, open. The second, just the robe hanging off one shoulder. By the fourth she was naked from the waist up, looking dead at the camera. The last one, well. The last one left nothing to the imagination at all.

I stood there holding them like they were on fire. My first thought was oh no, she mailed these to somebody and forgot them. My second thought was the note taped to the last photo.

"Check the window at 4pm."

That's all it said. Her handwriting, no question. I've seen her handwriting on a thousand job notes.

Check the window at 4pm. Which window? Check it for what? I looked at my watch. It was 2:40. I put the photos back under the blueprints exactly how I found them, and then I stood in her office like an idiot for five full minutes.

Here's the part where you judge me. I didn't call her. I could have. I had her number. Instead I made a sandwich I didn't taste and I sat in the living room where I could see both the kitchen window and the back window, and I waited.

* * *

At 4pm the kitchen window was uncovered. Uncovered, I should say, in a house where every other opening had plastic or plywood on it. That window faced the backyard, clean glass, wide open to the world.

And in the backyard were Duane and Kath, both with their shirts off in the afternoon heat, framing something on sawhorses. Duane was bent over a cut list. Kath was pulling wire off a spool with her shirt knotted up over her ribs. Sweat on both of them, sun on everything.

I stood at that window and I understood. This was staged. She left the one window bare. She left the photos. She left the note. Tiff planned this whole thing down to the hour, and the thing she planned was me, standing exactly here, watching exactly this.

Was it for me to enjoy? Was it a test? I genuinely could not tell you. All I knew was my face was hot and I felt like the most seen man on the planet, and she wasn't even in the state.

Duane looked up once and I stepped back from the glass so fast I knocked a paint tray. Kath laughed at something and went back to her wire. They had no idea. Or did they? God, was Kath in on it too? Was Duane? I stood there with my heart pounding and realized I didn't care, which is a strange thing to learn about yourself at fifty-two.

I went back to the office and looked at the photos again. This time I really looked. In the last one, the fullest one, her hand was resting on the windowsill of her bedroom. Her bedroom window. Which faces, if you're standing in her yard at a certain angle, the exact spot where Duane sets up his saw station.

She'd been watching them for months, I'd bet money on it. And now she'd handed the watching to me, like a plant to water. Like a key under a frog.

I texted her that night. Kept it boring on purpose.

"How's the counter order looking, anything I should know?"

She replied in under a minute. "Did you find my list?"

"You left it on the fridge."

"Anything else you found?"

I stared at that message for ten minutes. Anything else you found. What do I even say to that? I typed six different replies and deleted every one. Finally I wrote, "House is fine. Plants are fine." Chicken, yes. Total chicken. But what was I supposed to say? Found your naked pictures, boss, thanks for thinking of me?

She sent back a single emoji. The winking one.

I did not sleep well. I want you to know that. I lay in her guest bed with the ceiling fan going and I thought about the note, and the window, and the winking face, and I thought about thirty years of being the guy she calls. Just the guy she calls? Or something else she never had the words for?

Tomorrow I'd measure those window openings for her, like she asked. And tomorrow at 4pm, well. I knew which window would be bare.

The next morning I told myself I was going to be normal about all of it. Ha! You know how that goes.

I set up a lawn chair on the patio at 3:30 with a paperback I had zero intention of reading. Tiff had asked me to measure the window openings, so I did that first, walking the house with a tape measure like an actual professional, writing numbers on a pad. Then I picked the chair with the cleanest sightline to the side yard, where Kath was working.

The thing about a renovation is this. When they pull old siding off and don't hang the new stuff right away, you get gaps. Big ones. Kath was running cable through a gap about eight feet wide, shirtless in the afternoon heat. I'm not proud of how closely I followed that war. I'm a fifty-two-year-old man, not a saint.

"You're hovering, Marty," Kath called over at one point, not even looking up from her wire spool.

"I'm reading!"

"You're holding the book upside down."

I looked down. She was right, the little stinker. I laughed and flipped it, and she grinned at me and went back to work. Duane was over by his saw station cutting rafters for the deck ledger, sawdust flying everywhere, and I want to note for my own conscience that I did not look at Duane. Not once. Probably.

At 4pm I gave up the pretense entirely and went inside. The bedroom window was bare glass, the way the kitchen one had been. I stood there maybe ten minutes watching nothing in particular, and that's when I heard the side gate squeak.

"Marty!"

Oh no. Oh no oh no. I knew that voice. She wasn't due back for weeks.

"In here!" I hollered, before I thought about how "in here" meant standing at her bedroom window with a view of the yard. I stepped back from the glass like a man caught shoplifting.

She came around the corner of the hallway with her travel mug and a hard hat under her arm, took one look at me, and stopped dead. Then she smiled. Not a small smile either.

"Well, well," she said. "There you are."

"Tiff. I thought you were at your cousin's for another month."

"I lied about how long I'd be gone." She set the mug on a sawhorse. "Did you find my list?"

"Your list is on the fridge, Tiff."

"Anything else you found?"