Let's Not Meet Again

My "Friendly" Neighbor

A little bit of a description and backstory to help paint the picture. At the time of this, I was roughly twenty-six years old. I'm thirty now. My husband and I at the time lived in a military city (he was enlisted) and this particular city was only popular, not just for the base it housed, but by its incredible crime rate. Honestly, if people had warned us ahead of time, we would have happily moved out of the city and dealt with the long drive, but I digress.

At the time, we lived in a duplex in a really bad neighborhood. The way the unit was set up was if you stood in the street or our parking-lot style driveway and looked at the house, our unit was to the left, our neighbor's to the right and exposed to the street since our building was on the corner. The entire property was surrounded by a chain link fence save a six-foot privacy fence that ran along the back of the property to block our view of the parking lot that led to the apartments behind us. I promise, this will be relevant.

As I said, we lived in a horrible neighborhood where crack-heads and hookers ran free. But, I didn't ever feel overly-unsafe. At the time, I had a two-hundred pound English Mastiff (a sweetheart, but intimidating from a distance) and my size always gave me a hint of security. I'm 5'9" and definitely not a bean-pole.

We also had a few sweet neighbors which helped buffer the horrible. One such neighbor was a man that walked the neighborhood regularly. He walked everywhere and our house was about center in his path to the store and the like so we'd see him at least once a day or so. Dwayne was a nice enough man, my height, roughly my build and always smiling, but not that 'creeper' kind of smile, a normal, jovial smile. He never set off alarm bells, which makes this more disturbing.

We'd been living in our house for about a year or so and all the while gotten to know some of our neighbors better. Up until this point, Dwayne would always wave hello and offer some small talk. He'd speak to my husband more than myself because I just don't do well in southern heat and he tended to be long-winded, so I'd wave, say hello and then go inside after a few short minutes. Everything was fine, until my husband was deployed.

We'd been married at that point for six years and this was his fifth deployment during that time, so I was used to being left alone. It didn't bother me in the least, especially since it would be a nine week deployment (seriously, we were so pissed about that. what a pointless time frame) and I'd already learned the layout of the new city fairly well.

One day, I was coming home from the grocery store about two weeks after my husband had left. I'm a firm believer in "one trip" with the bags, so I loaded up my arms completely and headed for the house. As I said before, our yard was completely encased in a fence, so just after I managed to shut the gate, I hear someone calling up at me. Turning, I saw Dwayne bearing his normal, happy, wide smile and heading for me.

I shift the bags and give him my attention. I was raised to be polite to people and since I knew him vaguely, I had no problem saying hello. Besides, seeing my arms full of groceries -some of which was milk, eggs and other cold things- he surely wouldn't keep me too long. I was wrong.

He starts droning on about nothing in particular, during which I could only smile and nod. I waited patiently for a break in the conversation so I could head inside, but he barely took a second to breathe, let alone let me speak. For a little while, the conversation had been pretty mundane, until he started talking about his 'lady friend'.