The Twins' Friend Moved Away on the Same Night

Our twins have never agreed on anything with less than forty minutes of arbitration — except Old Pete. From age three they reported him identically and independently: an old man, gardening gloves, 'smells like matches,' who talked to them over the back fence when they played outside, but only when the fence lady's washing was out. The fence lady was Mrs. Aldercott, eighty-something, three doors down; her garden backs onto the strip behind ours. We assumed Old Pete was some pensioner friend of hers we'd never met, until the afternoon I mentioned him over the fence and she went curiously still and asked what the man wore.

Gloves, I relayed, and 'a hat like a triangle sandwich.' Trilby, she said quietly, and changed the subject with the firmness of a woman closing a cupboard.

Her husband, our other neighbours later told us, had died a decade before we moved in. Gardener. Pipe smoker — matches, endlessly. Peter.

We chose not to interrogate it. The twins were happy; Old Pete's reported conversation was garden advice and mild jokes; whatever was or wasn't at the fence line was gentler than television.

The night Mrs. Aldercott died — peacefully, in her sleep, her daughter found her in the morning — both twins woke us. Separately. Twenty minutes apart, from separate rooms, ages five and a half. The first said Old Pete came to say he's moving away because 'his missus finished.' The second, who could not have heard the first through two walls, said Old Pete says thank you for playing, and he's 'taking the fence lady to the other garden.'

We learned about Mrs. Aldercott at noon the next day.

Nobody plays at the back fence anymore; the twins, seven now, prefer the front. Her house sold to a young family. Their toddler, the new mother mentioned recently, laughing, keeps waving at the empty back garden. We didn't laugh. We said: he's friendly. Tell him the twins say hello.