A couple years ago:

The noise started on Wednesday and blared for days. Finally, I knocked on Ann's door to ask her to turn down her TV.

I thought she might have been dead in there, but I saw her on the porch a day or so after the volume spiked. With her front door open the sound of infomercials and endless programming roared.

I called next-door, which was pointless.

You have to go over there, Jerry said. I had come home from work and found him clicking through TV stations with the remote. He would listen for a few seconds, then click. Click. Click.

What are you doing?

I am trying to find the channel Ann has on, he said.

Go listen to the answering machine, he said.

When Ann had finally had enough of something, we got the call. Kendra. KENDRA! It's Ann. I am not sure … it's Sunday. Are you there? Kendra?

I heard her phone fall and hit the coffee table. Shit, she said. I imagined her heaps of pointless notes and lists and envelopes in rubber bands crashing down. The table was dragged to the center of her shabby living room beside a couch where she slept, woke, ate, slept again, and lived.

You have to go over there, Jerry said.

Since our bedroom was far enough away from Ann's booming television, we were able to sleep, but as soon as we passed a window facing Ann, we heard commercials. We listened to romances, a comedy with its sharp cracks of laughter, and pauses just long enough to make us think the small electronic pieces inside her set had blown.

I walked up her rutted drive and skipped the rotted step to her porch. I tried knocking. I banged. I tapped the windows with my ring, thinking the sharp sound would carry through to her. I finally just opened her door. She was dressed, unlike the time I caught her naked and swaddled in loose skin dangling like a faded dress.

She asked, can you hear that!

I turned to her TV and started pushing up and down arrows. When the volume was normal again, I asked her why she left it on for so long and so loud. Summer heat glued itself to my skin and I went home. My life was lighter. Ann's life was a cluttered path to the TV.

I don't remember her answer. She is in Florida now with her daughter and the house sits next-door, staring at us.

Ann wrote a letter to me weeks ago, and I have still not answered.

How's that letter to Ann going? Jerry has asked me a hundred times, but I don't know why I am avoiding it.

Ann told me she thought her mother was in the house with her. If Ann was 80-something at the time, whatever poked her and nudged her while she slept was not her mother.

It's her, I know it, Ann once said. She is with me. She was trying to wake me up. Jesus, framed and dusted, hung on her wall watching the heavens as his halo added a warm hue of gold to his embossed profile. Does a devout woman also believe her mother has crawled back from beyond to kneel in the piles of filth in this room to poke her daughter?

Yesterday I was down on the ground with the rose bush and saw its misshapen growth. Road salt, winter boots, and a neighbor's plow had torn its limbs away. Looking at Ann's empty house on the hill next-door I pictured time like a string sewing the days together.

Lily would have been more practical and efficient. Lily would have bitten her.