Part Two: The Sun Dress and the Chickens…

By noon she'd be in the garden proper, and the nightie was traded for a sundress so light and loose it seemed designed less to cover her than to suggest her. Thin straps. A back that showed the knobs of her spine. When she knelt in the dirt to weed, the hem pooled around her thighs and the front dipped low, and I'd catch myself standing at the window like a man watching a nature documentary about something rare.
She kept chickens. Six of them, in a coop she'd built herself, I could tell from the crookedness of the hinges and the way she babied it. She'd talk to them. Actual conversation, low and murmuring, like they were confidantes. She'd gather eggs into the fold of her dress, and the way she cradled them made you jealous of breakfast.
Twice she caught me watching. Both times from the coop, both times mid-motion, once bent over to collect an egg, once reaching up to fix a latch and both times she just... held it. Didn't wave. Didn't smile. Just looked, long enough for me to feel it in my chest, then went back to work. As if to say I know you're there. I've always known.
A man starts to lose his mind with a neighbor like that. Every small thing becomes a signal. The watering can left out overnight facing my house. The sun dress getting, if anything, a little shorter as the summer deepened. The way she'd stretch her arms overhead after finishing the beds, arching, the whole long line of her drawn taut against the sky.
Was she teasing me? Or was she just living, and I was the one doing the teasing to myself?