The early days of May had been quiet-ish, but Maggie had made her presence known in the alley and out front. It was definitely weird to go outside when she was there and when you are trapped in your house all day and night, it’s really nice to just go outside and not think about a hulking woman fiddling with things and playing music.

She propped stuffed animals up in chairs in her front yard, which was already chaotic. During saner times last summer Maggie had dug up the lawn and planted circles of flowers with pinwheels. I understood what she was trying to do, which was plant a garden for fairies. I had experienced that exact fantasy when we moved into the house. But I don’t have the stamina for that kind of whimsical creation. I knew I would just let the work on the garden trickle off, as she had done. She never moved the bags of topsoil she’d bought for the garden. That blasted fairy garden of my dreams was a mess.

And yet flowers had grown this summer, pushing their way up past the plastic bags of dirt, and Maggie’s front yard was really pretty. I saw a few people walking down the street stop and comment on the flowers, which made both Calvin and me quite jealous. We had flowers too and they were beautiful but no one ever stopped to admire them.

Aside from the lurking and the surprisingly nice flowers, Maggie just bubbled on the bottom edge of Calvin and my attention, until she pushed into our mornings.

We have a regular morning routine that has barely shifted even during the pandemic. Calvin gets up first, goes downstairs to make coffee, and then comes back up for a few more minutes of sleep. Then he goes downstairs again, and I follow and we drink coffee, I stare at my phone, and he does various active things. Then he gets the kids up and we all go running or fast walking, except for Wyatt who just ambles along miserably. Before pandemic, I power walked (yes, with the arms even, so suck it!) and Calvin ran, and the kids went to school, but now we all exercise together and I run because it is often the only challenging thing I do all day, and now I’m addicted. So yeah, I run a 14 minute mile, baby, it’s the only thing I have.

One morning Calvin was agitated. “She’s throwing food on our lawn,” he said. “I’ve been finding it for the past few days, and I know it’s her.” He’d found a yogurt cup, a bagel, a food wrapper. Maggie had food delivered to her–there were always boxes on her stoop. It looked like the food you could pick up from public schools, the Department of Education’s attempt to keep feeding all the kids who usually eat breakfast and lunch in public school. That stuff was getting tossed on our lawn.

The next day he found glass all over the alley. Then Maggie sporadically blasted her music over the day. We realized she played music in the back and the front at the same time. When she did this, she would stay inside, I guess where it was quieter.

The tenants, a couple in their early 20s, officially moved out one Sunday, and it was tense.. Maggie hulked around but once they left, she had a locksmith come to change the locks on the front door. She was getting into a conflict with the locksmiths, and I walked outside like the confrontational fool I am. I was pissed that she ripped off the two tenants, that she was throwing crap into our yard, that she was going crazy in the middle of a pandemic, and that she has always been an unpleasant, didactic person, intent on proving that she is special even when nominally sane.

She immediately told me that the tenants were breaking into her house and I said, no, she had ripped them off. The locksmiths looked like they would like to be anywhere else but on this stoop with these crazy women. Then she hurled a beer bottle at me, which broke before it got close. Everyone jumped and I went inside.

Then it got so much worse.