The garage kept its secret the way this town keeps everything, by not looking.
I sat on an overturned bucket for one last minute before I committed to the lot, Luis behind the van and the bleach still punching the air. My hands were clean. My shirt was clean. The Saturday outside the door was still a Saturday. A basketball hit a backboard. A mower stopped, then started again. A woman laughed two yards over, the easy laugh of someone whose biggest problem was a burnt bun. Nobody knocked. Nobody screamed. The absence of screaming was louder than screaming would have been.
I had always imagined noise. Sirens. A neighbor with a phone already lifted. The world rearranging itself around a man who had finally spent the thought. Instead I got the tick of the water heater and a fly walking the dirty window like it had an appointment.
Dispatch called again. I let it go. The food court texted. Five min?? I typed with the rag still around the phone. Traffic. Stay there.
Lies are easy when they are short.
I wrapped what I had to wrap. I will not inventory it. I put the moving blanket where it needed to be. I rinsed the knife a second time because once is a superstition and twice is a habit. I looked at my face in the dark glass of the garage door window and did not recognize the calm.
Calm is not peace. Calm is a postponement.
The clipboard said Mira. The mall said now. The van said I was already late for a life I had just ended.
I opened the garage. Daylight felt like a spotlight that had not been aimed yet. I backed out slow, the way a man backs out when he is only going to the hardware store. The logo on the door caught the sun. I waited for a shout. I waited for a face in a window. I got a kid on a bike who did not even turn his head.
The garage door came down with its usual rattle, the one I had heard a thousand evenings after a job that asked nothing of me except sitting. Today the rattle sounded like a lid. I left Luis in the dim and took his van into a neighborhood that still believed in lawns.