Ten o’clock Friday morning I’m on the porch in the landlord’s burgundy robe, smiling at a tall woman who has clear blue eyes and slightly curly light brown hair – she looks like an athlete. She might be thirty-five. Her fingernails are glistening and perfect in the morning light. ‘I’m a friend of Elliot’s. Tina Graham – he didn’t mention me?’

Elliot is the landlord. I tell her Elliot’s out of the country until August, which is true.

‘You must be Bergen, am I right?’ She flaps open a legal-size suede-covered clipboard and reads, ‘B-E-R-G-E-N’, sliding a forefinger along under the letters as she spells my name.

‘That’s me,’ I say.

‘Sorry to bust in on you like this,’ she says, closing the folder and stepping past me into the dark foyer. ‘Elliot was supposed to tell you about me.’ She smiles as if we’ve settled something. ‘Maybe if we have some coffee I can explain – that’s a pretty robe you’ve got.’ She picks up the day-old newspaper.

‘I just rent,’ I say. ‘The house, I mean.’ Elliot’s spending a year in Singapore on a cultural exchange. I leased the house – a forties bungalow done in lobster-pink stucco and trimmed with black wood and culvert tile – for the year. The neighbourhood is steep driveways and cars parked in yards, wood-frame houses, dirty white paint. Kids in striped shirts go by in groups of three or four, one of them always dragging a stick he uses to ward off dogs. Elliot told me he didn’t care about the money.

Tina leads me into the kitchen. ‘Listen, do you play squash? Maybe we could play later.’ She drops the paper on the table and points at several different cabinets. ‘Coffee?’

‘Sure,’ I say, showing her the coffee.

She takes off her jacket, rolls up her shirt sleeves, washes her hands with the Ivory. ‘No beans?’

I shake my head. ‘Sorry.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘The grinder didn’t work last time anyway.’ She finds the filters in the cabinet above the coffee maker and glances at me while she puts eight or nine measures of coffee into the machine.

I rub my face. I start to say I’ll make the coffee, but she playfully elbows me aside and takes the pot to the sink for water.

‘Elliot should have explained this deal.’ She gestures toward the coffee maker. ‘I don’t like to drink things I can’t see through. How about yourself?’

The kitchen is small. I have to get out of the way as she moves from counter to cabinet, getting cups, starting the toast, collecting the silverware from the dishwasher. I sit at the breakfast table and play with the newspaper, spinning it absent-mindedly, thinking about the girl who delivers it. She’s rough, young and sexy – I’ve only seen her up close once. Yesterday. After picking up the paper, I tripped on the front step trying to wave to her. She stopped to see if I was hurt. I invited her to dinner, but she told me she couldn’t because she wasn’t really a paper girl and she had to go to class. So I said what about Friday, and she said OK.

That awkward stuff has been happening to me. I bump into doorframes, hit my head on cabinet doors, trip on the legs of the bed – one morning last week I fell down trying to put the orange juice back into the refrigerator.

‘They call you Jerry, right?’ Tina says from the kitchen. ‘OK if I call you Jerry?’

‘Sure.’ Through the French doors there’s a courtyard filled with big-leafed plants and twisted vines that hang from a large tree. The court is paved with Mexican tile – blue, white, rose, yellow – and built around a bird fountain. The sun is bright but thin – a winter sun, even though it’s May – and the courtyard is still shadowy and wet looking. There’s a foot-high crucifix made of coloured glass embedded in the part of the garage wall I can see from the breakfast room.

Tina comes around the counter balancing two cups of coffee, one on top of the other, the way waitresses do at diners. In the other hand she’s got a plate stacked with toast, and, on top of the toast, the butter dish out of the refrigerator. ‘Sloppy,’ she says, raising both hands slightly. ‘But it gets the job done. You like toast?’ She puts the cups and the toast on the table, then returns to the kitchen.

‘Looks good,’ I say, unstacking the coffees. ‘What’s this deal with Elliot?’

She comes back carrying my peach preserves and a big jar of Welch’s grape jelly. ‘Well, I’m here three, maybe four times a year, last couple of years, anyway. Always stay with Elliot. We were in school together – St Dominic’s in Mobile. Same class with Snake Stabler, you know? The quarterback? Here, try this peach. It’s really delicious.’

She spoons peach preserves on a slice of toast and pushes it across the linoleum tabletop on a napkin.

‘I handle specialties, stuff you can’t find ordinarily, stuff I pick up here and there. Right now it’s housewares – Tupperware quality but no name, so it’s cheap. Or I can go the other way, get you a thousand-dollar vacuum cleaner. Best damn vacuum cleaner you ever saw.’ She shakes her head and stares over her raised coffee cup out into the courtyard. ‘Absolutely vacuum you out of your socks – I demo’d it in Virginia and sucked up a cocker spaniel. Not the whole thing, just the tail. I got it out right away. I thought it’d be broken or something. It was cut up pretty good and didn’t have much hair, but it was OK. I was scared to death. The woman took the demonstrator and gave me a cheque.’

She backs away from the table and takes off her shoes, using the toe of one foot on the heel of the other. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘It’s a terrible imposition, but do you mind if I stay? That’s my deal with Elliot – I stay and buy the dinner.’ She picks up her shoes, putting a finger in the heel of each. ‘Tell you what, you check me out. Meanwhile, I’ll catch some sleep.’ She hooks the heels of her shoes on the table edge, folds a slice of toast in half, then dishes grape jelly into it. ‘Sandwich,’ she says, picking up the shoes again. ‘Fair enough? Which bedroom do you want me in?’

I go to the office and call Larry, a friend of Elliot’s. I tell him what’s happened, and he tells me it’s fine, he knows Tina. ‘She’s great,’he says.

‘Good looking,’ I say. ‘But she’s a monster. Six feet if she’s an inch.’

‘Six two,’ he says. ‘So wear boots and go to a monster movie.’

‘Funny,’ I say.

‘I’m serious,’ he says. ‘She loves ’em. She’ll make all the noises like the creatures, whatever noises they make – I saw an alligator movie with her once and she yawned menacingly all night.’