The yellow flowers aren\u2019t daffodils, but Jerry believes they are. He stands on Young Street, on the sidewalk facing the Minors’ house, watching the bundled yellow petals twitch in the summer breeze. He imagines a gale bending and rending them, making them beat their heads against the porch steps like bells signaling his arrival.<\/p>\n
His car is parked in the Minors’ driveway. The Minors’ driveway is straight and honest. So, too, the sidewalk and the cobblestone path leading to the house. It\u2019s a bright afternoon. His black boots have lost their features against the sun-bleached concrete.<\/p>\n
He looks around him\u2014at the Minors’ house, at their neighbors\u2019, and at all those he can see down the line. These are good houses for good people. Culturally liberal, fiscally conservative, middle-class political moderates. Churchgoers, bake-sellers, rainy-day-nest-eggers. It\u2019s a rare find, these days, a neighborhood like this, and it makes him feel giddily like he\u2019s stepped into the wholesome and tolerant past. Two streets in any direction lie ghettos\u2014riffraff and deadbeats, the dredges closing in, the good and the decent hemmed in by them.<\/p>\n
Jerry has been on both sides. He\u2019s a success story, born into poverty, yes, but look at him now. This thought prompts him to freshen his uniform shirt, tucking it tighter where it\u2019s slackened from the car ride. His belt buckle glints in the sun when he straightens it, leaving a ghost image in his vision which takes seconds for him to blink away. It\u2019s hard for him to believe that only a few minutes\u2019 walk from here stands the sunken house where he grew up. His father, drinking and coming home late, not coming home. His mother\u2014but there\u2019s no need to get into that. No one would believe him, anyway, if he went into stories about her.<\/p>\n
What holds him here, on this sidewalk, is Mia, the Minors’ daughter. They went through school together. She was a spelling bee champion and student government treasurer and a beauty, too, he always thought. He can\u2019t remember now if she was the prom queen, or if he only thinks of her that way because she was that type, the same way you assume the boy who stands a head taller than the rest to be a starter on the basketball team. Jerry didn\u2019t go to prom. Jerry was nobody. C\u2019s and D\u2019s and dirty socks, who, as a kid, couldn\u2019t help but clean his teeth at his desk with a straightened paperclip, not even realizing he was doing it, soothed by the addictive scraping, unaware of those watching him. A nickname that stuck for years after, the grooves still in his enamel. He wasn\u2019t a jock, but he went out for football, mostly for the structure it brought, and as an outlet for his aggression. He played most of one season until he was sacked for beating the hell out of the team\u2019s quarterback\u2014or, at least, for trying. Jerry was a late bloomer.<\/p>\n
Mia wasn\u2019t his friend, but she was kind. That\u2019s a type, too, if a rarer one, the pretty girl who\u2019s sweeter than her looks require. She never openly mocked him, not that he could remember, and one time she untied her boyfriend\u2019s flannel from her waist and offered it to Jerry after a group of boys wrestled off his T-shirt and dunked it into a boys\u2019 room toilet. That night, he fell asleep clutching the shirt like a blanky, before returning it to her the next morning with a muttered, \u201cThanks.\u201d It runs in their family, he supposes, because he still remembers when her mother pulled over for him, with Mia in the car, and drove him home when he was struggling to carry bags from the Stop and Save. That memory is bittersweet and mostly faded to a flash image of the Minors’ expensive SUV idling in his parents\u2019 balding gravel driveway. He feels that spectral embarrassment acutely.<\/p>\n
It would be wrong to say that he worshipped her uniquely, because school took a lot of years, and there were a lot of girls to think about, but, in his own silent way, worship her he did. She was important to him as a kid, and that keeps him standing here now, hesitating.<\/p>\n
As if this thought has called her, the Minors’ front door opens, and Mia steps out onto the porch. She\u2019s dressed down, a T-shirt and shorts, hair in a sloppy bun. She hugs herself around her middle. \u201cCan I help you with something?\u201d she calls. There\u2019s hesitation in her voice. She doesn\u2019t know him in his hood.<\/p>\n
He swallows, steps forward up the cobblestone path; a man doesn\u2019t pull himself out of the mire, as Jerry\u2019s done, if he can\u2019t handle the most difficult situations. \u201cMia Minor?\u201d he says, as if he doesn\u2019t know her either. He stops onto the lowest porch step and hands her the usual packet of documents\u2014warrants, one for each member of Mia\u2019s household.<\/p>\n
She takes them, knows already what they are. The paperclip catches the light when she removes it to read what he\u2019s presented to her. She plays with it absently, worries it with her fingers.<\/p>\n
\u201cPlease go back inside and let your parents know that I have orders to bring the three of you in. Carry nothing with you\u2014no purses, medications, or personal effects. If your clothes have pockets, empty them.\u201d<\/p>\n
This old-fashioned street with their yard signs and bumper stickers and outmoded calls for civility.<\/p>\n
Mia studies him, tears up, nods. When she disappears into the house, he\u2019s relieved. The hard part is over. Nothing to do now but bring them in. Maybe Mia will sit in the front seat beside him, but it\u2019s more likely to be her father.<\/p>\n
He steps back onto the cobblestones. Then, with the toe of his boot, he kicks away the dead yellow petal he\u2019s trampled. Above him, the sun is pitiless. He clasps his hands behind him and waits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He couldn\u2019t help but clean his teeth at his desk with a straightened paperclip, not even realizing he was doing it, soothed by the addictive scraping, unaware of those watching him. A nickname that stuck for years after, the grooves still in his enamel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-m-c-schmidt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24779"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25641,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24779\/revisions\/25641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}