Eighteen

“Perhaps those ones you have with you have been spoken for?”

She shook her head. “N-n-no,” she said, finally coming out of her daze. “No, ma’am, they aren’t.”

I bought the rest of the box, and took it home. She thanked me politely and stared after me as I crossed the street. By the time I had set the candy inside my foyer and returned to my car, she had disappeared inside her house.

“What the hell are you doing buying all this candy?” my husband asked that night. “I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

“You’re so gallant,” I said. “Now, by my count, there’s a missing canister. Are you going to share any of it?”

He gri

“I agree,” he said. “But are we converting to a new religion?”

I explained what had happened with Daisy.

“You,” he said, “are too easy.”

“Gallant again.”

A week later, Ricky came by and asked if he could wash our car. “Sure,” I said, and paid him a dollar more than he’d asked, on the theory that honestly earned money might start to appeal to him. He washed our car every weekend until the rains started in November.

He was always charming and polite. My husband agreed that we were better off making a friend of this kid than an enemy. Sarah Cummings told me I’d live to regret my kindness.

With the November rains, the Nabbit’s lawn grew taller; fast food containers littered their front yard. Their dog, a mangy Bassett hound that smelled as if it had never been bathed, continued to use neighbors’ lawns as his outhouse. (If American factories had the output that dog did, we’d be the most productive country in the world.) Nola stayed up late and laughed louder than the music she played. When she left for work, the hound bayed all day.

The Suburban Avenger knew it was an old trick. She placed the paper bag filled with gathered dog droppings on the front porch, lit it on fire, rang the doorbell and ran. With glee, she watched Nola Nabbit stomp the fire out. You can use old tricks on some dogs, the Avenger mused…

The Cummings put up a low wrought iron fence and planted Italian Cypress on the side that bordered the Nabbits. The Fredericks, on the other side, did the same, but planted rose bushes. The Cummings called the police whenever the music was played after ten o’clock. Nola started turning the radio off exactly at ten, and shouting “Good night, you old bitch!” toward the Cummings’ house.

Around Thanksgiving, Mrs. Ogden, a seventy-year-old woman who lived next door to us, asked me to keep an eye on her house while she paid an overnight visit to her granddaughter. When she returned, she discovered that her home had been burgled; her jewelry, her stereo, a small television set and her secret stash of cash were gone. I felt guilty, even though Mrs. Ogden didn’t blame me in the least. “You have to sleep sometime, honey,” she said. “I wasn’t hiring you as a guard. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get some of it back. I etched my driver’s license number on the stereo and T.V.”

As it turned out, the thief was caught trying to fence Mrs. Ogden’s stereo and later arrested, tried and convicted. The thief was Ricky Nabbit.

I didn’t hear much about him for a couple of years. Sarah told me that he didn’t get much of a sentence, partly because his father, who lived in a trailer park about five hundred miles north of us, had agreed to let Ricky live with him for a time.

About the time Ricky left, Nola got a new boyfriend. Doug seemed to be as rough a fellow as most of the others, but soon we all noticed a change. No loud fights or partying sounds late at night. The yard was cleaned up. The place still wasn’t painted, the hound continued to leave its calling cards, and Nola drank less but still swore like a sailor. Still, on the whole, things seemed to improve. We couldn’t even come up with a nickname for Doug.

“It’s been fairly quiet,” the neighbors would say to one another. They always looked at the Nabbit house when they said it.

Then Ricky came home.

He was over sixteen by that summer, and much taller. He had filled out, become stronger. He seemed less lively than he had been at fourteen, and there was a surliness in his expression that had not been there before.

At night, we began to hear Nola shouting. Doug left a week later. Daisy seemed quieter and paler. Of her, we only saw a girl carrying books to and from the house. And, as I did every year, I bought a case of her candy. I was getting better at giving it away before my husband and I ate more than a single can of it.

Ricky’s friends started coming over to the Nabbit house to play ball. Ricky had been kicked out of the baseball league some time before (for stealing more than bases from the opposing team), but his love of the game remained. He practiced on the front lawn.

“Hey, batter, batter,” I would hear them chant, day in, day out. They played with a light plastic ball, shouted “I got it,” “Foul ball,” and “No way am I out,” “Steeee-riiiiike!” as well as certain other remarks that would have cost a Boy Scout his good sportsmanship badge. Ricky was not Boy Scout.

The shouting and the noise was a

Ricky ignored all of us. He became industrious enough to mount a light on the garage roof, illuminating his small playing field for night games of catch. That this light also illuminated our bedroom was not something Ricky was thinking about. Ricky, we had discovered, didn’t think about other people, except as a means to an end.

The Suburban Avenger had been waiting for this night. The Nabbit’s car had been parked in front of her house, doors unlocked. She secured the frozen anchovy under the seat springs, driver’s side. She might not be present when the discovery was made, still she would know that revenge had been, well, reeked…

It was a su

Two boys, Ricky and a kid he called Ted, stared up at the broken window. Although no one else played baseball anywhere near my home, I suspect they would have run away without owning up to the damage. But to Ricky’s great misfortune, Sarah had been in her front yard when the baseball was thrown.

Nola came out of her house, too, ready to defend her chick against Sarah-until she saw the window.

“It’s Ted’s fault,” Ricky said immediately. “He was supposed to catch it.”

I reached down and picked up the ball, which had been prevented from going though the window by the screen.

“Hardball?” Nola shrieked. “What got into you, Ricky? Playing with a goddamned hardball!”

Ricky had no answer.

Looking nervously between Sarah and me, she grabbed on to her son’s elbow and said, “This is going to come out of the money you earned at the swap meet, Ricky.” I groaned inwardly, wondering which of my neighbors’ stolen goods might be sold to pay for my window. “I think you owe this lady an apology,” Nola went on. I got a grudging “Sorry,” from Ricky and Ted.

She eyed the window. “I think I’ve got a piece of glass that might fit,” she said. “Ricky can fix it.”

“No thanks,” I said, envisioning Ricky with an opportunity to case my house for a future burglary. “I’d rather have a professional glass company do it.”

The glass company charged forty-five dollars to fix the window. That left us with the clean-up. I did that myself. I told Ricky he could pay me back in five-dollar increments over nine weeks. He smiled and said that would be fine.