Across the Street

His friends were the kind who appear when you’re buying and vanish when you’re not.

And Corinna would sooner sit in a hot dark house than spend a cent of the savings she guarded like a dragon.

They could have booked a hotel.

They didn’t, because that would have meant admitting, out loud, with a credit card, that the money had never been theirs.

I watched some of it from an upstairs window across the street, and I won’t pretend I felt nothing.

I felt a great many things, and not all of them were noble.