He had met her at the door, face red in embarrassment the moment he saw her. He knew why she was there. Amanda had laid into him about how some people had real jobs and needed to sleep at night. Dunc had apologized, and the music immediately went down to reasonable levels. She didn’t have to ask again.
Then there was that embarrassing night over the summer. Amanda awoke, frightened, at 3 am to someone singing at the top of his lungs outside her front door. It sounded more like an expression of pain than anything Amanda recognized as music. A proclamation of sorts. For a moment, she laid in bed transfixed, listening to the musings of a heartbroken soul.
Forced to get out of bed, Amanda was not in a good mood. She had stomped to the front door. Amanda had peered through the peephole to see her neighbor swaying in front of her door. He began belting out another round as mournfully as he had the first, and she couldn’t take it. It was sad.
Amanda yelled at Dunc that he was drunk and to go home. She had moved to the window next to the door to get a better look at him. He was staggering uncontrollably and trying to leave like she had told him to. His head was down, and his shoulders slumped. She felt sorry for him and angry at the same time. Dunc had attempted to walk down the porch steps and swayed into the railing. There was a loud cracking sound as he fell across the old wood. Then her drunk neighbor had let out a startled yelp and vanished from sight along with most of her railing.
The railing was old, and Amanda had planned to replace it in the future. It wasn’t a significant loss. She was far more concerned about her neighbor than the broken railing. With a sigh, she had finally opened the door to help Dunc. She found him flailing in the bushes surrounding her porch. He couldn’t figure out what had happened nor how to get out of it. He was a mess.
Once Amanda got to him and managed to grab his hand, he had a moment of clarity and looked ashamed. His entire face turned red, and he slurred an apology. Amanda had been so angry. Drunk people were not fun or amusing in her eyes. They were a menace to be avoided. She also didn’t need to deal with another lawsuit.
Dunc turned into a pathetic mushy pile of apologies as Amanda half dragged, half carried him to his front door. His mother answered, and between the two of them, they got him inside. Then he collapsed on the floor. It was not a side of her neighbor she wanted to see. Dunc’s mother had immediately called 911 in a panic, saying this wasn’t normal for her son. Amanda stayed for his mother and was furious with whatever it was Dunc had done to end up in such a state. He had worried his mother to tears. Amanda was standing in only a nightshirt inside the McCormick’s living room when the ambulance arrived.
She had left that morning with a meager opinion of Duncan McCormick. He was like any other man, just wrapped in a more realistic package. He gave in to his vices at the expense of others. Amanda assumed he was fine when he returned home the next afternoon. She was a tiny bit concerned.
Several days later, Amanda got up like any other day. She showered then picked up her laptop to get some work done on the couch in the front living room. It was a habit from when she liked to watch Dunc in the morning. She had been sitting for a few minutes, enjoying her morning cup of coffee, when she heard a man’s voice coming from her front yard. He was swearing in a foreign language. Several foreign languages, then in English with a slight Scottish accent. Then she heard the popping sound of a nail gun.
Amanda had been afraid to look outside. There was no telling what was going on out there. She sat on the couch and listened. Amanda was sure it was her neighbor, and he was doing something in front of her house. She could hear him walking up and down the stairs and onto the front porch, grunting and swearing. Then she heard him humming a song. It went on for a good hour, with Amanda wasting time listening to her neighbor talking to himself, cursing, and singing. She caught tidbits of his conversation. He kept saying the word idiot over and over again. After an hour, Amanda finally worked up the courage to look through the window and see what her weird neighbor was up to.
She was in awe at what she saw through the blinds. Dunc had removed all the railing on her porch along with a lot of old rotten boards. Her entire porch had been on the verge of rotting away. Dunc’s truck, which he parked outside the house, had a trailer loaded with all the old rotten lumber attached to the back. It looked like he had been working on her porch before the sun had even risen. Dunc had replaced the weak boards on her porch and was more than half done with a new railing. A sturdy new one had replaced her crummy old porch.
Amanda had stared at him through the blinds, completely confused by what he was doing. He was on her porch, fixing it, and hadn’t said a word to her. He hadn’t even asked her if he could or should. It was a bold decision on his part to do this, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Pure awe replaced her anger. She didn’t
