oversights

There was a knock at the door.

She was my neighbor, she became a widow a month ago, poor thing.

Her three children are abroad and she lives alone, like me.

She came to return a tomato that she had lent her on Tuesday.

Actually, she hadn't lent him any tomatoes on Tuesday, but it seemed indelicate to refuse her and I took it gratefully.

Later, at dinner time, while she was preparing the tomato to make me a salad, she made me think that perhaps it was I who had forgotten about the loan and not she who had invented it.

In fact, since the death of my wife, which will be two years soon, my memory of the immediate fails me.

The next day, I grabbed a couple of eggs from the fridge and knocked on my neighbor's door.

I told him: “Here, the eggs you lent me on Thursday”.

“Not having bothered you”, she said accepting them, “but they come in handy, I have an empty fridge”.

The truth is that she had not lent me any eggs on Thursday or any other day, but she received them so naturally that I doubted me.

Maybe she had lent them to me and didn't remember.

A short time later she appeared with a small cup of salt that she claimed to owe me.

I took it and incidentally gave him the two red peppers that I claimed to owe him.

In this way, we got into the habit of returning things that we had not borrowed or that we had forgotten to do.

They were always simple things: an onion, a leek, a pair of pliers.

One day when she came to give me back some ibuprofen, I invited her for coffee and we watched the news together.

Then she got up and proceeded to say goodbye to her as if she were the one who lived in my house and I in hers, of which she gave me the keys as if I had forgotten.

"That you leave your keys, clueless," she said.

Now I live in the house next door, which I think is not mine, although I wouldn't dare say so either.

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