No Diving Allowed by Louise Marburg

Author:Louise Marburg [Marburg, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T17:08:40+00:00

Attractive Nuisance

A week after the fourth of July, my dog Speedy nipped an eleven-year-old kid who wandered onto my property from the subdivision across the way. Speedy was a shepherd-husky mix and normally pretty docile, so I thought the kid must have been teasing him, asking for it somehow. The kid went home and cried to his parents, then his father came over and said he’d called the police. He was about a foot shorter than me and had a litigant’s righteous air. But either he was bullshitting, or the police forgot to come, because that was the last I heard about it.

The subdivision used to be a sloping meadow, a hazy stretch of long, tawny grass speckled with wildflowers from May to September. A guy down the road owned it ever since I could remember, but then he moved to an assisted living facility and the land was sold. Not long after, skeletons of houses appeared, and within what seemed like no time there was a neighborhood of mini-mansions and smooth tar lanes, two curved stone entrance walls, and a big sign that read The Meadows at Glastonbury in fake-fancy gold letters. I planted a row of fast-growing spruces so I wouldn’t have to look at the thing, and nailed up an orange No Trespassing sign on a tree by my driveway because I had a swimming pool behind my house and if somebody sneaked in and drowned in it I could have been held liable.

“He might still make trouble,” my wife Sally said about the kid’s father over breakfast a few days later.

“Trespassing is against the law,” I said. “He shouldn’t let his kid run around like that.” I didn’t have children and didn’t care for them, so Speedy biting the subdivision kid bothered me not at all.

“For pity’s sake,” Sally said. “The boy crossed the road. How far did you go when you were a child? I was all over the place.”

“There weren’t any perverts back then,” I said. Sally laughed at that.

“Remember razor blades in apples at Halloween?” she said. “I think that was one of those urban myths, but my parents wouldn’t let me eat anything but the wrapped candies.”

“My mother gave out popcorn balls,” I said. “Kids loved them.” I didn’t really know if that was true. What was true was that I loved them, and my mother. I’d grown up in the house where Sally and I lived; I bought my brother’s half when Mom passed.

“Maybe I’ll make a batch of my oatmeal lace cookies and take it over.” She cocked her head toward the subdivision as if she meant to bring cookies to every house.

I took a third piece of toast and coated it with strawberry jam. “You don’t know where they live.”

“They live on Buttercup Lane. In the Gone with the Wind house. It’s got a row of two-story pillars out front, couldn’t be uglier if it tried.”

It was so typical of Sally to know such a thing that I didn’t even bother to ask how.

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