Three times I climbed the back stairs to ask my upstairs neighbor to quit spitting sunflower shells off his porch onto the patio where my granddaughter does her homework. The third time he laughed in my face and said, “Lady, you live under me. Be glad it’s only shells.” So I stopped climbing those stairs and started planning.
Paisley was nine that spring, and she sat at my patio table every weekday from four to five-thirty because her mother works the late shift and my kitchen is too small for long division.
The shells started in May.
A little gray drift of them by the leg of my chair, wet, split down the middle.
I swept them into the green dustpan with the cracked handle that came from my sister’s yard sale and figured it was birds.
We don’t have a feeder.
After that they came twice a day, like a clock.
Around 6:40 in the morning, right after his alarm went off through my ceiling.
And again near ten at night, when he came out to pace and talk on his phone.
Then one afternoon a shell landed on Paisley’s worksheet, dead center on a fraction, still shiny with spit.
She looked at it a long time.
Then she looked straight up.
“Grandma, it’s raining gross.”
That’s what sent me upstairs the first time.
Corey opened the door in a hooded sweatshirt with the bag of seeds still in his hand.
I held up the worksheet. “These are coming off your porch.”
He actually winced. “Oh no. Seriously? That’s me? I’m on calls out there all day, I don’t even think about it.”
“She’s nine. She does her homework under you.”
“I’m sorry, Janina. Really. I’ll grab a cup or something.”
I walked back down feeling silly for making a thing of it.
The next morning at 6:42 I heard them hit the tabletop. Tick. Tick.
He NEVER got a cup.
I let it go eleven days.
I’d been in that unit nineteen years. I’m the one who calls Melvin Tolliver when the furnace makes the knocking noise. I was NOT going to be the old woman who goes to war over seeds.
Then on a Thursday Traci came to pick Paisley up and pulled a shell out of her daughter’s hair.
She didn’t say a word.
She just held it up between two fingers and looked at me.
Second trip up the stairs.
This time he leaned on the doorframe and didn’t step out.
“They’re seeds,” he said. “They’re biodegradable. Birds eat them.”
“Corey, they were in her HAIR.”
He shrugged. “So rinse it out. It’s a porch. Stuff comes off porches.”
“Stuff doesn’t come off. You spit it.”
He smiled like I’d told him a joke he’d already heard.
That one stayed with me through supper.
All winter I’d taken his boxes in. Fourteen of them, I counted later, stacked by my coat hooks till he got home.
In January I jumped his truck in my bathrobe at six in the morning.
In February his pipe went, and he was at his girlfriend’s, and he called and asked me to let the plumber in. I stood in his kitchen two hours.
I never once asked him for anything back.
Paisley turned ten on the last Saturday in June.
We did a little cake on the patio, just the three of us, candles and the good plates.
Halfway through the song, three shells came down and stuck in the frosting right next to the one.
Paisley stopped singing.
I went up with frosting still on my thumb.
He laughed before I even got a sentence out. Head back, the whole thing.
“Lady, you live UNDER me. BE GLAD IT’S ONLY SHELLS.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Means it could be a lot worse, Janina.”
And he shut the door.
I stood on that landing a long time.
The shells I could sweep up. The laugh I couldn’t.
If I yelled, he’d tell the whole block the lady downstairs lost her mind over sunflower seeds. Melvin would hear it that way too. Melvin likes things quiet.
So I didn’t yell.
I went down, scraped the frosting off where the shells had landed, and we finished the cake.
Paisley ate around the spot.
Sunday morning, 6:39. Tick. Tick. Tick.
I went out in my slippers and stood over the table and looked at them.
And I smiled.
Traci says that’s the part that scares her when I tell it.
I went in and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table until it was gone.
By the bottom of the cup I knew.
Nothing broken. Nothing I could get a ticket for. No screaming on the landing.
It took the rest of Sunday, one trip to the hardware store and a long phone call with Melvin.
Monday I was outside by 6:25.
Coffee in my hand. My phone face down on the table. Friday’s worksheet still under the sugar bowl.
At 6:38 his slider rolled open over my head.
I heard the bag crinkle.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t have to.
The first shell hit the table an inch from my cup.
Nineteen years of being the easy one downstairs, and Corey Merritt was finally going to learn what I’d done with my Sunday.
6:38 on a Monday
I turned the phone over.
The screen said MELVIN TOLLIVER, 13:52, and the little speaker button was lit.
Above my back door, screwed into the trim where the old porch light used to be, sat a white plastic camera the size of a bar of soap. Thirty-four dollars at the hardware store on Sheridan Road. It pointed straight up at Corey’s rail, and since four o’clock Sunday afternoon it had been sending everything it saw to an app on Melvin’s phone.
Melvin had been on the line since 6:25. He’s seventy-one. He’s up at five anyway.
“That’s one,” I said.
“I saw it,” Melvin said.
Tick. Another one, on the worksheet this time.
Then I looked up.
Corey was at the rail in the gray sweatshirt, the bag in his left hand. His right hand held his phone out over the edge, aimed down at my table. He was taking a picture of it.
He did that every morning. I’d only found out Sunday night.
“Morning, Janina,” he said. “Rough night down there, huh?”
The phone on my table said, “Corey. What are you taking pictures of?”
He didn’t move for a second. The bag stopped crinkling.
“Is that Melvin?”
The coat hooks
I moved into the downstairs of that two-flat in Kenosha in 2007, the year Traci finished her aide course.
Melvin’s rent was $780 then, and it was $780 still. He raised the upstairs every time it turned over. Mine he left alone. He told me once it was because I was the only tenant he never had to drive over for. I call him about the furnace. I let the gas man in. When the gutter came loose I held the ladder for his nephew.
The patio came with the unit. Twelve by fourteen, poured concrete, a clothesline post nobody uses, and the table I bought the year Paisley started first grade so she’d have somewhere flat to write.
Corey moved in upstairs three years ago. He brought me a poinsettia that first Christmas with a card that said FROM YOUR NEW NOISE. I kept the card on the fridge till Easter.
That was who he was to everybody on the block. The guy who waves. The guy who’s on a headset on the porch at all hours, laughing with someone in Phoenix.
So I took his boxes.
The fourteen stacked by my coat hooks were mostly flat ones, shoes and printer ink. One wasn’t. In March a carton came that I could barely walk across the room. The side said 42-INCH DOG CRATE in red letters.
Corey doesn’t have a dog. Melvin doesn’t allow dogs upstairs. Ground floor only, because of the yard.
When Corey came for it he picked it up like nothing and stood in my doorway looking past me at the patio door.
“You ever think about going to live with your daughter?” he said. “At your age. These old places.”
“I don’t have stairs,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said, and laughed, and took his crate.
The February morning with the plumber, I’d stood in his kitchen next to the refrigerator for two hours because there was nowhere to sit. Stuck to the freezer door with a pizza magnet was a sheet of yellow legal paper in his handwriting.
Unit 1. Patio 12×14. W/D hookup? Ask M about Sept.
I thought he wanted a grill. I thought he was measuring my patio for a grill.
I didn’t think about it again until Sunday at the hardware store, with the camera box in my hands.
Sheridan Road
The kid in the hardware store was named Dante and had a ring through his eyebrow and did not think I could install anything.
“You need a hub for this one,” he said. “And Wi-Fi out back.”
“I have Wi-Fi out back.”
“And you have to share the feed if somebody else is watching it.”
“Show me how,” I said.
He did it on my phone right there at the register, with my reading glasses on his nose because he couldn’t see the little box either. When he handed it back he said, “Who’s it for?”
“My landlord.”
He looked at the angle on the box picture, straight up. “What’s upstairs?”
“A man who eats sunflower seeds.”
Dante didn’t laugh. He said his grandmother had a guy like that for eleven years and he wrote down the name of the screws I’d need for old wood trim.
Traci came by at two to drop off a casserole dish and found me on the step stool.
She stood there in her scrubs with her car keys still in her fist.
“Mom. Get down.”
“I’m almost done.”
“You’re putting a camera on Melvin’s house.”
“I asked him first.”
That wasn’t completely true yet. I’d asked him to call me back.
Traci set the dish on the patio table, right where the shells had been. She looked up at Corey’s porch and then at me, and I could see her deciding whether to say it.
“He asked me about you,” she said. “In May. Out by my car.”
I stopped turning the screwdriver.
“Asked what?”
“If you’d ever thought about moving in with me. He said it nice. He said he worried about you on your own back here.” She rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. “I said I wished you would.”
“Traci.”
“I do wish you would. I have the room. I’m not sorry I said that.”
She went back to her car.
That evening at 9:58 the camera sent its first alert to my phone and to Melvin’s. In the clip Corey comes out, leans on the rail, spits three shells onto my table, and then holds his phone over the edge and takes a picture of them.
Melvin’s kitchen
Melvin called back at ten after ten.
I could hear his TV going and then not going.
“Janina. I watched that thing. What is he doing?”
“Same as every night.”
“He’s taking pictures.”
“I saw.”
There was a long quiet on his end, the kind I know from nineteen years of furnace calls. Melvin thinks before he spends anything, including words.
“He sends me those,” he said.
I sat down on the kitchen chair.
“Since May. Every week or so, a text. Your table with junk all over it. Shells, leaves, a paper plate one time.” I heard him moving around his own kitchen. “He says he’s worried you’re not keeping up back there. Says you seem confused some days. He says you told him you’re moving in with Traci in the fall.”
“I never said that to him.”
“He said Traci said it.”
I didn’t answer that.
“He asked me if he could take your unit when you go,” Melvin said. “Him and his girlfriend. Krystal. She has a dog.”
I looked at the green dustpan hanging on its nail by the back door.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d think about it. I told him I’d have to see you were really going.” He cleared his throat. “Janina, I drove past in June. I didn’t stop. The table looked bad.”
I told him then. All of it. Fourteen boxes. The truck in January. The plumber in February and the yellow paper on the freezer door. The poinsettia. The cake.
I talked longer than I’ve talked to Melvin Tolliver in my life.
When I was done he said, “I don’t get into neighbors.”
“I know.”
“I never get into neighbors. It’s how I keep my buildings.”
“I’m not asking you to get into anything,” I said. “I’m asking you to be on the phone at 6:25 tomorrow and look at your app.”
He breathed out through his nose.
“He’s got an envelope on my desk, Janina.”
The slider
So that’s where we were at 6:40 Monday morning. Corey at the rail with his phone out. Me at the table with my coffee. Melvin on speaker between the sugar bowl and the cup.
Corey recovered quick. I’ll give him that.
“Melvin, hey. Good. Good, you’re seeing it. This is what I’ve been telling you about.” He waved the phone at my table like it was evidence in a courtroom. “Look at this. Every single day. She doesn’t sweep, she doesn’t—”
“Corey,” Melvin said.
“I’m worried about her, man, that’s all this is.”
“Corey, I’ve been watching the camera since 6:25.”
Corey looked down at my back door then. I don’t think he’d once looked at it before. He found the little white box on the trim and stared at it.
“I watched you come out,” Melvin said. “I watched you open the bag. I watched you spit on her table and then take a picture of it. I watched you do it last night at ten, too.”
“That’s not…” Corey said. “Okay. That’s out of context.”
“What’s the context?”
Corey didn’t have one ready.
He looked at me. I picked up Friday’s worksheet from under the sugar bowl and shook the shells off it into my hand, slow, one at a time, onto the concrete.
“Hang on,” Corey said. “I’m coming down.”
The slider rolled shut over my head. I heard his feet on the back stairs, the same stairs I’d climbed three times.
He came around the corner of the house in his socks and stood on my patio for the first time in three years.
“You set me up,” he said.
Twelve by fourteen
He did most of the talking. He’s good at it. It’s his job.
“Melvin, listen to me. She’s sixty-two. She’s alone back here. You’ve seen the pictures. Something happens to her on this concrete, who finds her? Me. I’m the one who’s home.”
“You’re the one who’s home,” Melvin said.
“I’m trying to HELP. I asked her daughter. Her own daughter wants her out of here. I’m not making that up, ask Traci.”
I drank my coffee.
“And she’s the one who goes through people’s stuff, by the way,” Corey said. He pointed at me. “Ask her what she was doing in my kitchen in February. Two hours. I asked her to let a plumber in. She’s reading my refrigerator.”
“I was standing next to it,” I said.
“See? She admits it.”
Melvin let him go a while. I’ve seen Melvin do that with the gas company.
“Corey,” he said finally. “What’s in the envelope on my desk?”
Corey stopped.
“Tell her,” Melvin said. “Or I will.”
Corey looked at the table, then at the camera, then at me.
“It’s a deposit,” he said. “For this unit. For September. It’s a good offer, Melvin. You said it was a good offer.”
“It’s two hundred dollars a month more than she pays,” Melvin said. “Nine eighty. Krystal signed it too.”
“Because it’s worth that. Look at it.” He swung his arm at my patio, the clothesline post, the table, the cracked dustpan on its nail. “She’s paying 2016 prices for a yard she doesn’t even keep clean.”
“She kept it clean for nineteen years,” Melvin said. “Until May.”
Nobody said anything. Upstairs, through his open slider, his headset alarm started beeping for a seven o’clock call.
“Your lease is up the end of July,” Melvin said. “I’m not renewing it. I’ll put it in writing today. You’ll get your envelope back in the mail.”
“You can’t do that over SEEDS.”
“I’m not doing it over seeds.”
Corey turned to me. His face was red up to the hairline. “You know what? Fine. Enjoy your patio. You’re going to die back here and nobody’s going to find you for a week.”
He went back around the corner of the house in his socks.
I waited until I heard the slider.
“Janina,” Melvin said. “There’s one more thing.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m not getting into neighbors again in my life.” He was quiet a second. “Seven-eighty is a 2016 rent. I knew it. I let it go because you were easy. I can’t do that anymore, not after I’ve seen what somebody will pay for it.”
“What do you want?”
“Nine-thirty. Starting September. I’m sorry.”
That’s $150 a month. That’s my Medicare supplement and then some.
I looked at the table, at the shell still stuck to the edge of my cup.
“Send me the lease,” I said.
The last Saturday in July
Corey’s truck left on a Thursday. Krystal drove the second load. She didn’t look at my patio once.
Melvin mailed me a key to the upstairs that weekend because the painter was coming Monday, and of course I’m the one who lets the painter in.
Saturday morning I climbed the back stairs a fourth time.
The porch was swept except for one corner behind a planter, where a little gray drift had collected against the rail. Wet from the night, split down the middle.
I went back down for the green dustpan with the cracked handle.
The new lease was on my refrigerator by then under the pizza magnet Corey had left in my mailbox with his last box. $930, signed, September first.
Paisley was at the patio table under me with her summer workbook, the one Traci makes her finish before school starts. She heard me on the porch and tipped her head back and looked straight up.
I swept the shells into the dustpan and carried them inside to the trash, and I folded the empty seed bag I found under the planter and threw that out too.
Then I leaned over the rail.
“Grandma,” Paisley said. “Is it raining gross?”
“Not anymore,” I said, and went down to sit with her.
If somebody downstairs from you has been taking in your boxes for years, maybe go knock on their door this week and say thank you.
For more stories about people standing up to others who cross a line, read the night train passenger who was told he didn’t need a whole seat and the mother-in-law who kept a telling picture on her fridge. There’s also the family dispute over a missing heirloom ring.
