Wrong Porch, Right Now

My name is Gerald, I am fifty-four years old, and until eight months ago I lived a life of quiet dignity in a suburb where the only thing that erupted was my neighbor's sprinkler system. Then my wife Cherie, who is fifty-two and has the tongue of a dockworker and the eye of a sniper, decided we should rent a duplex on a lava plateau near a volcano, because the rent was cheap and the view of the cinder cone was, in her words, free entertainment. She took side A for her tailoring business and I took side B, for the sake of the marriage, with two doors, one shared wall, and a standing agreement to conduct all disputes in writing. I am an accountant. I like columns that add up. Nothing on this plateau adds up, least of all the doorbell, which rings whenever the ground under the house gets a burp going, and least of all my wife, who I am convinced is running a psychological operation against me involving packing tape and strongly worded notes.

It came to a head eight months after we moved in, when a box showed up on her porch with my name on it, or near enough, and she refused to hand it over on the grounds that possession is nine tenths of the law and the tenth tenth is also hers. I had been leaving notes on her porch about her parking job, which takes up two thirds of the shared driveway, and she apparently decided the correct response was to intercept my mail, which is a federal crime, though you would not know it from the way she sleeps at night. She sleeps, I should say, on her side of the wall, and I on mine, a system that was her idea and that I have never admitted I miss.

So there I was on a Tuesday morning, standing at the bottom of her steps in my good slacks, pointing at the box like a man identifying a suspect in a lineup.

"That's my package," I said. "The label says Gerald, apartment B, and I am Gerald, and I live in apartment B."

She came out onto the porch with a cup of coffee and looked at the box, then at me, over the rim of the cup. Cherie is a tailor and she has spent thirty years looking at people and finding where they don't fit, and I have been fitted more times than I care to admit. "Prove it," she said.

"Prove it. It has my name on it."

"It has your name smudged on it. The last three letters could be anything. Could be Gerold. Could be Erin. I don't hand over parcels to every Erin who wanders up my steps."

"You know my name. We have exchanged fifty-three notes. Your last one called me a 'taped-in menace,' which for the record is not even an insult, it's just words in a trench coat."

"Taped-in menace is a fine insult," she said, and went back inside, and the screen door clapped shut like punctuation.

I need to explain the doorbell here, because if I don't you will think I am making it up, which I would not blame you for. The house sits on ground that the volcano underneath, a big grumpy thing called the mountain by everyone in town, warms and shifts at its own leisure, and the wiring in the doorbell runs through the slab, and when the thermal differential gets excited the chime goes off on its own, ding-dong, cheerful as a church, at two in the morning, at dinner, at funerals. The previous tenant left a note in the kitchen drawer that said simply "the bell is not broken, the ground is," and I have reread it many times like scripture.

I went home that morning and unpacked my office supplies instead, which is what I do when I am angry, I organize. I had a whole system laid out on the living room floor among the other ninety boxes we have not unpacked, letter trays nested in letter trays, a label maker still in its blister pack, and I was alphabetizing a drawer of pens when the doorbell rang.

I answered it. Nobody. The porch was empty, the mountain smoked politely in the distance, and the dog that does not exist, because we have no neighbors close enough to own a dog, did not bark.

I went back to my pens. The doorbell rang again, twice, ding and then dong, with the confidence of a visitor.

"Stop hitting the button!" Cherie yelled from her sewing room, which is on the other side of our shared wall, because our houses are that close, because the lots on this plateau were drawn by a drunk surveyor. Her voice came through the drywall like she was standing in my kitchen. "I can hear it through the wall and I know it's not ringing itself, Gerald, nobody visits you!"

"It's ringing itself, you deranged woman, it rings itself constantly, ask the note in the drawer!"

"Ask the note in the drawer," she muttered, and I heard her sewing machine start back up, which is her version of slamming a door.

* * *

The knock, an actual human knock, came on her door at four o'clock, and because Cherie's hearing is selective but not deaf she opened it, and I opened mine at the same time, because I have the hearing of a bat when there is a possibility of my package being involved.

Standing on Cherie's porch were two people. The woman was thirty-two, give or take, with the sunburned cheerful look of someone who works at altitude, and the man next to her was thirty-five, big through the shoulders, with the look of a man who carries things for a living, which meant nothing to me at the time because I was not yet fully awake to the conspiracy.

"Hi," the woman said. "I'm Alia, I'm the volcanologist up at the observatory, and I think my package got misdelivered here. This is Will, my boyfriend. Sorry to bother you."

"You're welcome," said Cherie, who has never once in thirty years accepted an apology without converting it into a compliment to herself.

"The observatory," I said, appearing at the bottom of the steps with the speed of a much younger man. "The package. There is a package involved."

"There was," Alia said. "It had some sensor parts in it, nothing exciting, and the address got smudged, and I've been tracking it, and the tracking says it's here, or it was here."

"It's in my hall closet," Cherie said. "I was holding it hostage."

"Why," said Alia, in the tone of a woman who studies the earth and thought she had seen irrationality.

"Because my wife," I said, "has been intercepting my mail as part of an ongoing campaign of terror that began over a parking space."

"It began over his notes," Cherie said. "He left me a note about my parking that had a diagram. A diagram, Alia. With dotted lines."

"The dotted lines were helpful."

At that exact moment, the doorbell rang. Not their doorbell, mine, and not through any button, because nobody was within a hundred feet of my button, and the sound rolled across the shared yard and into the open door and Alia jumped about a foot and Will, the carpenter, did not jump, but he did go very still, the way a man goes still when he hears a house make a noise he knows houses do not make.

"What in the hell was that," Alia said.

"That," said Cherie, "is the doorbell. It rings when the mountain feels like it. Come in, both of you, and I'll make tea, because it takes about twenty minutes to explain and I refuse to do it on a porch."

They came in, and here is where I will admit something that costs me. Cherie makes good tea. She has an old brown pot and she warms it properly and she puts out an actual plate of biscuits like her mother taught her, and I sat in her sewing room, which doubles as her sitting room, on a chair with a half-finished blazer draped over the mannequin next to me, drinking tea with two people I had known for four minutes, while my wife of twenty-five years explained volcanic thermodynamics to a volcanologist, incorrectly, with enormous confidence, while Alia nodded politely and corrected her only twice.

Then came the argument about the package, which went exactly how you would expect. Alia could not pick it up until Friday, she said, because she was on rotation at the observatory and the road up was closed for grid work until then, but she came by to check on it anyway, and the question became who kept the box for four days.

"I'll keep it," Cherie said. "I have a closet."

"You'll lose it," I said. "You lost your own tax documents for a month. I found them in the fabric drawer. Under the corduroy."

"That's where they belong."

"I'll take it," I said. "I have a filing system."

"You have a system for filing your system," Cherie said.

Will cleared his throat into the middle of this, the way a big man clears his throat when he has been quiet too long. "Look," he said. "I fix things for a living. That doorbell of yours isn't broken, but the wiring's a mess and I could put in a thermal break, an isolator, so the ground can't ring it anymore. I'd do it free. I'd just need to borrow a screwdriver and maybe your good drill for the afternoon, mine's back at the shop."

Cherie and I looked at each other over the teapot, and for the first time in months we wanted the same thing, which frightened us both.

"You can borrow the drill," I said carefully, "if you tell her the package goes to my house."

"You can borrow the drill," Cherie said at the same time, "if you tell him the package stays here."

Will looked at Alia. Alia looked at her tea. Somewhere under our feet, the mountain shifted its weight, and the doorbell rang again, patient, like it had all the time in the world.

Will came back the next morning with his own screwdriver after all and a coil of wire over his shoulder, and he crouched down at my doorbell like it was a patient, tapping the little plastic cover and whistling something tuneless while I stood in the doorway with my arms crossed, supervising a man who was fixing my house for free and therefore had no right to look that comfortable about it.

"Gerald, is it," he said. "Alia told me the whole saga. Fifty-three notes. That's a hell of a paper trail."

"It's fifty-three now," I said. "The count moved after the tape incident a few months back."

Cherie's door opened across the shared yard, as it