Save the Date(34)

It was the summer after Danny’s senior year, and Coke was running a bottle-cap contest—find the winning cap, win up to a quarter million dollars. Danny had figured out what the winning cap would say, and also that by tilting the bottles at a certain angle, he could see just enough of one letter to tell if it was a winner. And since I was six and didn’t exactly have pressing summer plans, I rode shotgun with him as we crisscrossed the tri-state area, going into every supermarket and CVS and convenience store, Danny working his way up and down the aisles, tilting the bottles and buying us candy that we would share and keep between us on the front seat. He’d found the winning cap—the one worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—on a Diet Coke bottle, in August, but I would have been just as happy if he’d never found it, if it had just been me and my brother, driving through New Jersey, windows down and radio on, singing along as the sun set behind us. Danny gave me twenty thousand dollars of it—much to the shock of my older siblings, who felt that a first grader didn’t need that kind of money—which my parents immediately took and invested for me. Danny used his remaining money to start a fund out of his Princeton dorm room, and of course my mom put the whole thing in the comic strip. And the next year, Coke changed their rules so that all you could see under the cap was a code.

“Such a great story,” Brooke said, setting the picture down and smiling fondly at it.

I finally found my necklace, and dropped it into my bag. “You should be all set,” I said, already heading for the door.

“Oh, great,” Brooke said. “Thanks so much, Charlie.”

“Uh-huh,” I said as I left my room. I could feel resentment bubbling up, even though I had volunteered my room and it wasn’t like I hadn’t understood what would happen. But as I looked back and saw Brooke pick up her suitcase and set it on the bench at the end of my bed, tucking her long hair behind her ears as she did so, I was annoyed anyway. I wouldn’t have cared if it was just Danny in my room, but somehow this girl was upending everything.

I walked straight over to J.J. and Danny’s room and knocked on the door—it was ajar, and it swung open. “I’m coming in,” I called through the open door, giving my brother fair warning. When I didn’t hear anything, I walked in, my eyes adjusting—I always forgot that my brothers’ room didn’t get as much light as mine. It was pretty close to what it had looked like when they had been in high school—cleaned out a little bit since the tag sale, but with the same decorations in place—Danny’s trophies, J.J.’s plaques, the chair in the corner shaped like an oversize baseball glove, and the decade-old posters on the wall of actresses in bikinis, all of whom now had cookbooks and lifestyle websites.

And filling the entire back wall were the Grant Avenue signs. I sometimes forgot just how many of them there were—some with just the sign, some with the sign and signpost, and some with only portions. RANT AVENUE, for instance, had a place of distinction toward the top.

In my mind, it was always blurred—what had happened with the Grant Avenue saga in real life, what had happened in the comic strips, and what had become family legend. But everyone agreed on how it started. When Danny was a junior, Linnie was a sophomore, and J.J. was still in eighth grade, the Grant Avenue sign started disappearing with some regularity. By the third time it happened, people—like the residents of Grant Avenue and the police—were starting to pay attention.

Both my parents denied that they knew it was going on, but I had clear recollections—even at five—of being in my brothers’ room and seeing the stolen street signs. Linnie had had one as well, propped up by her mirror. We were not the only Grants in Stanwich, so I’m sure focus wouldn’t have turned to us, except for the fact that my mom started featuring it in her comic strip.

Whenever the subject of the signs came up, when we were all sitting out on the back deck, our dinner long finished but nobody going in yet, or all of us in the family room, with books and board games, my mother would ultimately be the one who was blamed for what happened. “I wasn’t the one who stole them,” she’d point out, which was a word all three of my siblings took umbrage with.

But a few weeks after the first articles appeared in the paper about the missing street signs, a similar story line started in the version of Stanwich that existed in two dimensions in the comics section. She teased it out, with Donny and Lindsay having a secret, and A.J. eventually finding out about it—and then the reveal, on a Friday, of Cassie opening the door to Donny’s room and seeing the purloined street signs.

Suffice it to say that the adventures of the fictional Grant teenagers didn’t go unnoticed by people in real-world Stanwich. Suddenly, the police were on the doorstep and reporters were calling—first, just from the Sentinel, but then it started to gain national traction. It was a ready-made human-interest story—a comic strip leading to a real-life break in a possible case over, of all things, stolen street signs. My mother defended herself to us by saying she put it in the strip to teach my siblings a lesson, but I always thought it was more than that—I think part of her must have seen what an opportunity this was for publicity.

The whole thing ended up going to court, with a judge ruling that a comic strip about a fictional family didn’t provide sufficient grounds for a search warrant. My parents, alarmed that it was going this far—and by this point, I think they’d discovered just how high the penalty for stealing town property could be—got it settled quietly. My siblings never had to admit guilt, but, coincidentally, all of them spent a month doing community service that summer. My parents made a large donation to the Stanwich Public Works Department, a new Grant Avenue sign was installed, much higher than street signs normally were. And that seemed to be the end of it—at least for the Grants in the real world.