Chapter Twenty Six
A Street That Watered Its Own Roses Again
A year is long enough for a street to decide what it intends to do with a bad memory. Ashbury Lane reached its decision the way it reached most of its decisions, slowly, in the open, and one porch at a time.
Spring returned to Laurelhurst with its usual generosity. The maples along the curb opened their leaves. Lawns shook off the gray of winter. At the corner, the young couple who had bought the yellow house in the fall hung a swing from their porch beam, argued happily about the chains, and by the second week of April the entire street held an opinion about the swing.
Evelyn Porter took her coffee on her porch in the mornings, the same as she had for thirty one years, and watched the neighborhood go about the business of being ordinary. Reporters still called her now and then. The polite ones got tea and the whole story, told plainly. The rude ones got a view of her door closing and nothing else.
When new neighbors asked what had happened on the street the year before, Evelyn did not lower her voice. She told it straight. A police officer with thirteen years on the force had stopped a woman in front of her own home and demanded to know whether she lived there or only worked there. When the woman asked him, politely, for his badge number, he laughed in her face. Then he turned her own garden hose on her and held it on her for forty five seconds while his young partner stood frozen beside the patrol car. The woman was a federal judge. The whole thing was on camera. The officer lost his badge and the story he had been telling himself about who he was. Evelyn told it the way other people read a weather report, and then she asked if anyone wanted more coffee.
The roses at 422 Ashbury Lane came back in their season, as roses do when somebody tends them. The bed along the fence greened first, then budded, then opened in the last week of May into a color deep enough to stop strangers on the sidewalk. People slowed as they passed the house. Some of them knew why they were slowing. Some only knew the garden was worth the look. Both kinds were right.
The patrol cars working the Laurelhurst beat were driven now by officers who waved. It was a small thing, and everyone on the street understood that it was also not a small thing. One morning a young officer got out of her cruiser to help an older man two doors down lift a fallen branch off his walkway, and before he could think to ask, she gave him her name and her badge number, pleasantly, the way a person hands over a calling card. The man repeated the number all the way back up his walk, pleased as a boy with a prize.
The street refused, finally, to be only the place where a bad thing had happened. Children took back the sidewalks with chalk and bicycles. The mail carrier learned the names of the new dogs. A fence line quarrel between the two families was settled with a borrowed ladder and a plate of something baked, and Evelyn carried the news across the street to Naomi with the gravity of a woman filing a dispatch. The fence quarrel, she reported, had produced more raised voices than the police had managed on Ashbury Lane all year.
Naomi listened with the expression of a woman who had never expected anything else. She had lived at 422 long enough to know that a street is not the worst morning it ever had. It is the sum of ten thousand ordinary mornings, and the ordinary ones had been winning again for months, one watered garden at a time.
On the last Saturday of May she worked in the rose beds in the early light, sleeves pushed up, a bucket at her knee, tying back a cane that had leaned too far toward the fence. Evelyn crossed the street with two mugs and stopped at the gate, the way she had stopped there a year before with a telephone in her hand. This time she was only carrying coffee.
"You were right," Evelyn said.
"About what, exactly," Naomi said. "I make an effort to be right about a great many things."
"About it passing. You said the street would be itself again by the time the roses came back. I did not believe you."
Naomi stood, brushed soil from her hands, and took the mug. "The street was always itself," she said. "That morning was the interruption, Evelyn. Not the other way around."