Chapter 29: The Cookout
The first annual Maple Court cookout was Rosa Delgado's idea, which surprised no one, and was organized by Rosa with a clipboard, which surprised no one either, though Sarah said the clipboard had a different energy now — less ordinance, more invitation. The court petitioned the city, the city sent two sawhorse barriers and a sealed permit, and on the last Saturday of August the street closed at noon and filled, slowly and then all at once, with folding tables, coolers, lawn chairs, and the good smell of a dozen grills arguing gently with one another about whose smoke was finest.
Big Joe Marino arrived at eleven with a cooler the size of a steamer trunk and a face arranged for indifference, and was undone within four minutes by Rosa pressing a paper plate into his hand with the words, "You eat first. Men who work with trucks get fed before they get opinions." He ate first. He ate second, too, at Tom Weaver's grill, and third at the Chens', where the twins fed him a dumpling with their own hands and adopted him on the spot. Officer Kevin Doyle came in plain clothes with his wife and a store-bought pie he apologized for twice, and Rosa waved the apology off and cut him a piece of her own peach pie first, "for official purposes," and sat him in the shade with plate and fork and instructions not to be a policeman until dessert.
Mike worked the middle of the street in his good apron, turning other people's burgers with the concentration of a man defusing something. Marcus ran a shuttle service of tongs and ice. Sarah ran everything else, in the manner of a field marshal who has disguised herself as a hostess. The new neighborhood watch had a table with a sign-up sheet that nobody needed to be persuaded about, and by two o'clock every household on the court had a laminated card with three phone numbers on it, and the feeling — people remarked on it all afternoon — was less like a block party than like a town deciding, out loud, to be a town.
Late in the afternoon, when the heat had gone out of the day and the string lights Rosa demanded were strung from Tom Weaver's porch to the Chens' garage, the newcomers from the far end — the Patels, who moved in during the spring, after everything — finally asked the question the whole street had been waiting all day to be asked. "So what actually happened," Mrs. Patel said, "with the driveway? People keep starting to tell us and then saying, oh, you have to hear it properly."
Rosa settled into her chair like a queen into a throne she had earned. "Then you shall hear it properly," she said. "It began with a red Porsche, which parked where it had no more business parking than I have being queen of Spain. Every day, mind you. Every day. And boxes — the boy's whole life in boxes, stacked by the fence, because his mother had told him the street was his closet." The story Rosa told was, in every important particular, true. The Porsche got redder in the telling. The boxes got taller — "to the second floor, practically, I am not exaggerating, ask anyone" — and the morning the box fell and split open on the concrete, scattering the evidence of a fraud across half the street, became in Rosa's mouth a morning of thunder and destiny. "And this one—" she pointed her fork at Mike, down the table, "—this one just stood there with his coffee, calm as a lake, and said, 'Well. I guess we'll let the paperwork decide.' The paperwork decided!"
Mike, who had said nothing nearly so fine, and had mostly stood there with his heart going like a drum, caught Sarah's eye over the potato salad and saw her deciding, with great kindness, not to correct the record. Tom Weaver raised his cup. "To the paperwork," he said, and the whole table drank to the paperwork, lemonade and beer and Rosa's famous sangria, and the twins drank to it with juice boxes, solemnly, because the grown-ups had.
When the light went, the court ate pie in the near-dark and nobody hurried. Big Joe told the Patels about the morning he had towed the Porsche out past a silent street of witnesses, "easiest job I ever did, everybody standing there with their arms folded like a church choir," and Doyle confirmed, for the record and with a mouth full of peach pie, that it had been a very good morning for the law. And Rosa, having grown the story to exactly the size she wanted, folded her hands and looked down the long table at her street, full and fed and lit with string lights, and said the thing nobody wrote down because everybody already knew it: "You see? This is what the driveway is for."