They'd been neighbors for eleven years. Their mailboxes touched. Their lawns shared a property line invisible in the grass.
When the oak came down in the storm, she'd brought him soup. When her mother died, he'd mowed her lawn without asking. They waved on the way to their cars. They knew each other's dogs by name.
After the rezoning, she found out he'd been in a different school district the whole time. Different garbage pickup, different water utility, different emergency services. His 911 calls went to a dispatch center forty miles from hers. If his house had caught fire, the truck would have come from the opposite direction.
She'd always assumed they were in the same parish. Same neighborhood, same street, same weather. But the boundary ran right between their mailboxes — a line drawn in 1923 by someone who'd never seen either house, following a creek that had been paved over before either of them was born.
The routes home were completely different. They just happened to end up next to each other.
Now she understood he'd meant something else when he'd said, that evening on his porch with the dog between them: We're not really from the same place, are we.
She'd thought he was talking about Ohio.