Chapter II
Introducing Our Next-door Neighbors
One morning Silvia and I lingered over our coffee cups discussing our plans for the coming summer, which included visits from my sister Beth and my college chum, Rob Rossiter. We wished to avoid having their arrivals occur simultaneously, however, because Rob was a woman-hater, or thought he was. We decided to have Beth pay her visit first and later take Rob with us on our vacation 10 trip to some place where the fishing facilities would be to our liking. However, summer vacation time like our plans was yet far, vague and dim.
While I was putting on my overcoat, Silvia had gone to the window and was looking pensively at the vacant house next to ours.
“I fear,” she said abruptly and irrelevantly, 11 “that we are destined to receive no part of Uncle Issachar’s fortune.”
Uncle Issachar was a wealthy but eccentric relative of my wife. He had made us no wedding gift beyond his best wishes, but he had then informed us that at the birth of each of our prospective sons he should place in the bank to Silvia’s account the sum of five thousand dollars. We had never invited him to visit us or made any overtures in the way of communication with him, lest he should think we were cultivating his acquaintance from mercenary motives.