A woman waters a plant that isn't hers. That's the story. The rest is how she got it.
Her neighbor Paul is moving out. She knows because of the dumpster, not a conversation. The bookshelf that had been visible through his dining room window for years. The exercise bike she used to hear through the wall at 6 AM.
She hadn't known his name for the first four years. Then a package was misdelivered. She signed for it. He came to collect it, and they stood at her doorstep a beat longer than the exchange required. Not long enough for anything. Long enough to notice.
After that: nods. Bins on Tuesday nights. Sometimes he'd pull hers to the curb if she was late. She'd bring his back up Wednesday morning. They never discussed this arrangement. It happened the way some things do — not decided, just maintained.
His marriage ended in March. Or started ending. She didn't know the specifics, only that one car disappeared from the driveway and didn't come back. The house grew quieter through the wall.
She brought a casserole. He thanked her at the door. That same beat.
Now the dumpster. She watches from her kitchen as he carries things out. Quick decisions — the bookshelf, gone. A lamp, kept. A set of dishes dropped in with the particular carelessness of returning what was never yours.
On his last day he knocks. He's holding the pothos from his kitchen window. Eight years of growth in a ceramic pot, roots pressing through the drainage holes.
"Can't take this on the road," he says.
She takes it. It's heavier than expected.
"Where are you going?"
"Eugene. Sister's place."
He looks at her. The look acknowledges something — what exactly, she couldn't name and doesn't try. Seven years of bins and nods and beats at the doorstep. Not nothing. Not a thing you could put a word on. Something that had existed only in the daily doing of it and now, without the doing, would not exist.
"Thanks," he says. "For the casserole. And." He pauses. "The bins."
She puts the plant in her window after he leaves. It faces his empty house. The roots are bound tight, pushing against the pot from the inside. She'll repot it eventually. She doesn't yet.