I confess that I had certainly taken more than casual notice of Jake in the six months he’d been my next-door neighbor. He was hard to miss. I’ve lost count of the number of young women who’ve temporarily taken up residence with Jake. And, as though his revolving-door social life didn’t garner enough notice, there were his continual remodeling projects, which had most of the neighbors wondering what he was going to do to his house next. Many days the buzzing of an electric saw and the thumping of a hammer would serve as background music as I plodded through my research. More than once, too, a glance out my window would show Jake, stripped to the waist, his glorious body glistening with sweat. The diversion would make me forget that I was a forty-five-year-old college professor on sabbatical and that I was... Read More