The Other Side of the Block

A few days in and the block was starting to feel like theirs.

Mama had the curtains up. The potted plant from the old place was on the porch step. Fred had the mail route figured out — knew exactly what time the carrier came, knew to check twice because sometimes the box on the end was slower. Ace had claimed his spot on the porch railing: one leg hanging down, back against the post, a good view of the whole street in both directions.

It felt, for a few days, like it might actually be okay.

He was sitting there that afternoon when he saw them coming.

Three Tabby cat teenagers on bikes rolling down the street — the big one in front, two others flanking him, all moving with the slow deliberate ease of kids who had never been told to hurry up for anybody. Ace didn't know them yet. He just watched the way you watch anything new on a block you're still learning.

Fred was at the mailbox at the end of the driveway, bent down picking up the newspaper.

Across the street, a patrol car sat at the curb. Two Siamese cat officers behind the windshield, watching.

The big Tabby cat didn't stop. He barely even slowed down. He just leaned off his bike as he passed and said something — aimed directly at Fred's back — and kept pedaling.

Ace heard it from the porch.

He won't repeat what it was.

What he will say is what Fred did, which was nothing. Fred stood up straight, newspaper in hand, and watched the bikes go past. His jaw tightened once. That was all. He did not chase them. He did not shout back. He just watched them turn the corner at the end of the block and disappear, and then he looked down at the newspaper in his hands like he was deciding whether to keep reading it.

Across the street, the patrol car pulled away from the curb. Slow and unhurried. Both Siamese cat officers turned their eyes toward Fred as they rolled past — not stopping, not speaking, just looking at him — and then they were gone.

Fred watched them go.

Then he folded the newspaper under his arm and walked back up the driveway.

He didn't say anything about it at dinner.

That night the block went quiet.

Not the good kind of quiet — not the radio-down-the-street, neighbors-on-porches quiet that Ace had started to recognize as the sound of a neighborhood at peace with itself. This was the other quiet. The kind that meant everyone had gone inside. The kind that meant something was about to happen or had already been decided somewhere Ace couldn't see.

He was in bed when he heard it.

The crash came first — sharp and sudden, the sound of glass meeting pavement — and then the light. Orange and immediate, flickering up through his curtain. He was at the window before he was fully awake, and what he saw in the front yard was a small fire burning in the grass, a broken bottle at the center of it, the shape of teenagers on bikes already disappearing down the street.

He heard Fred's footsteps in the hall. The front door opened.

Ace came out of his room and found Perlie in the hallway. She had her hand on the doorframe, watching Fred stand in the open doorway, looking out at the yard. The fire was already dying — more smoke than flame now, a dark circle in the lawn. Fred stood in the warm light of the house with the cool night air coming in around him, and he looked at what they had done to his yard, and he didn't move.

"Fred." Perlie's voice was quiet. Careful.

"Don't call the police," he said.

She didn't ask why. She already knew why.

Fred stood there for another long moment — one hand on the doorframe, eyes on the street — and then he went to the hall closet and got the bucket and the pitcher. He walked out to the yard in his good shirt and put the fire out himself. Came back in. Closed the door. Washed his hands at the kitchen sink.

Ace watched him do all of it from the hallway.

"Go to bed," Fred said, without looking up from the sink.

"Dad—"

"We're still here," Fred said. "That's the answer to whatever you were going to ask."

Ace went to bed.

He lay there in the dark looking up at the ceiling and thought about the way his father had stood in that doorway — not afraid, not shaking, not reaching for the phone. Just standing there absorbing it and deciding, in that same quiet absolute way Fred decided everything, that this was not going to be the thing that moved them.

They had driven three days to get here. A cat realtor had turned them away cold. That afternoon a Tabby cat on a bike had said something to his father's back while a patrol car full of Siamese cat officers watched from across the street and did nothing. And now somebody had thrown fire into their front yard.

And his father's answer to all of it was: we're still here.

Ace put both hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

If they wanted the Parkers out that bad — they must be exactly where they were supposed to be.

He decided to remember that part.