…”a photo of him. He looks a lot like your husband. I’ve seen you two at the farmers market.”
The photo came through. A man in the driver’s seat of our car, lit by a streetlight, staring at a house. It wasn’t my husband.
It was his younger brother, Kevin. He’d been living in our basement for four months, since his divorce.
I called my husband, shaking. He picked up on the first ring, at the office. He’d been carpooling with a coworker all month, he said, and Kevin had been “borrowing the Subaru for job interviews.” My husband went very quiet when I sent him the photo. Then he said, “I’m calling the police. Don’t go into the basement.”
I didn’t. I took my keys and my phone and drove to my neighbor’s house, and waited there.
The police came that night. My husband met them in our driveway. When Kevin pulled in with the Subaru around 1 a.m., they were waiting. In the basement they found a notebook. Eleven addresses. Eleven women’s first names. Their schedules, written in pencil. He’d found most of us through the same neighborhood group where we’d all been talking about him.
He was charged with stalking. My husband hasn’t spoken to him since. He told the detective, “I let him into our home. I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life.”
The woman who posted, Denise, organized something I’ll never forget. Two weeks later, all eleven of us met for coffee. Some of us had lived on the same block for years and never said hello. We sat at a long table and told our stories, and nobody had to explain why we’d been scared to leave the porch light off.
We still meet on the first Sunday of every month. We call ourselves the Pine Street Book Club. We haven’t read a single book.
