December Park(113)

We slowed down as the numbers on the houses grew closer and closer to 1597.

“There it is.” Peter executed a casual arc in front of the driveway, then headed back down the street.

The rest of us followed suit and came to a stop a few blocks away.

“So how do we do this?” I asked. This neighborhood had very few nooks and crannies to hide in. I felt like we were overly conspicuous just being on the street corner.

“We do it like ding-dong ditch,” Michael said, “only we leave the letter behind.”

“Who goes?” Peter asked.

“Scott, you’re the fastest,” I said. “You can knock and run away quicker than any of us.”

He nodded.

“What about the rest of us?” Adrian asked. He had dropped off my handlebars and was now sitting on the curb. “We need to hide, but we should be someplace where we can watch what happens.”

We all looked around.

Peter pointed at a high fence between two houses across the street. “We can hide behind the fence.”

“Yeah, okay,” Adrian said. He turned to Scott. “Do you think you can knock and make it all the way back here before Mr. Mattingly opens the door?”

Scott looked at the fence, then the Mattingly house, gauging the distance. Scott had never been part of an organized sports team in his life, though pretty much every coach at school was after him to go out for their respective teams. “I think I could do it,” he said finally.

“Just be careful,” I told him.

We wheeled our bikes across the street and down the narrow strip of lawn that ran between the fence and a two-story Victorian with puke-green aluminum siding.

Scott came with us, holding the sealed envelope. He kept glancing over his shoulder, perhaps trying to convince himself that he could make the run without getting caught.

“You gotta wedge the envelope in the doorframe,” Peter told him. “This way, when he opens the door, it’ll fall at his feet.”

Scott bent one knee and held his sneakered foot against his butt for a few seconds. He repeated this stretch with the other leg. When he finished, he took a deep breath, and both Michael and Adrian clapped him on the back.

“I’ll be back in thirty seconds,” Scott said, then he was off.

He jogged up the block toward the Mattingly house, a two-story A-frame with sky-blue siding and charcoal shutters flanking the dormer windows on the second floor. In the driveway was a maroon Subaru with a Stanton School bumper sticker that read Go Cows! in navy-blue lettering on a gold background.

Scott leaped up the porch steps in one long-legged stride. He tucked the envelope between the door and the frame, then banged the brass doorknocker against the door three times. The sound echoed down the street. Scott turned, jumped off the porch, and sprinted in our direction.

We watched through slats in the fence. Somewhere a dog barked.

Come on, come on, come on, I willed Scott.

“Come on, come on,” Michael whispered. It was as if he were narrating my thoughts.

Scott hopped the curb, dashed across the lawn, and joined us behind the fence a mere second before the Mattinglys’ front door opened.

A slim woman with blondish hair piled high on her head came out. When the envelope fluttered to her feet, she stared at it without moving. Then she picked it up and examined both sides of the blank envelope. She looked up and down Beauchamp Drive. For a second, I thought she stared straight at me, capable of locking onto my eyes despite the distance and the fence between us. Then she retreated into the house and shut the door. The brass doorknocker jumped.

“That must be his wife,” Adrian said.

I turned to Scott, who was bent over with his hands on his knees. He was breathing heavily, but when he saw me looking, he gave me a calm and confident smile.

“What do we do now?” Peter asked.

“We wait and see how Mr. Mattingly reacts,” Adrian said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“What if his wife just throws the letter out without showing it to him?” Michael asked.

Adrian looked at him. “Would you?”





The five of us sat behind that fence for over an hour, watching Mr. Mattingly’s front door. We expected anything to happen at any minute—Mr. Mattingly to burst out of the house clutching the letter, climb into his Subaru, and peel out into the street while leaving streaks of rubber on the driveway. But that didn’t happen. No one came out of the Mattingly house.

When a face appeared in an open window of the puke-green house beside us and someone said, “Hey, you kids,” we all got up, gathered our bikes, and took off. As I biked, balancing Adrian on my handlebars, I glanced over my shoulder at the Mattingly house one last time. There was nothing to see there.

Because Michael had to go back to summer school on Monday, we let him pick what we would do for the rest of the afternoon. He elected to catch The Killer Shrews at the Juniper. Even though the titular shrews were actually mangy-looking dogs donning ridiculous oversized teeth and strands of fake hair woven into their fur, we all laughed and had a great time. For the time being, we forgot about Mr. Mattingly and the Piper, content to lose ourselves in the nicotine-soaked upholstery of the theater seats, the patches of molasses on the floors, and the indiscriminate scatter of popcorn that stuck to the soles of our Adidas. When the protagonists attempted to escape the killer shrews by lugging around old oil barrels on their heads, we shouted and tossed Jujubes at the screen.