It was the kind of place where nothing dramatic ever seemed to happen.
At least, that was what I had always believed.
My next-door neighbor, Dorothy, was an 83-year-old widow who had lived in the same pale yellow house for as long as I could remember.
Her husband had passed away more than a decade earlier, and they had never had children. After his death, Dorothy rarely traveled farther than the grocery store, the pharmacy, or the little church on the corner.
She was more than a neighbor to me.
When I was a child, Dorothy often helped my mother look after me. She watched me when my mother worked late, made grilled cheese sandwiches when I refused to eat anything else, and sat beside me during thunderstorms because I was terrified of the sound.
« You count the seconds after the lightning, » she used to tell me. « That way, the thunder doesn’t get to surprise you. »
Even after I became an adult, Dorothy still treated me like the little girl who used to run through her kitchen with scraped knees and tangled hair.
