What Marjorie Ptak Remembers
Five houses. Four families. One thing nobody on the street talks about.
- 01 — The Fence Went Up in Two Days
- 03 — The Truth in the Backyard
- 04 — What the Street Agreed to Call It
- 05 — What Has a Name
Marjorie Ptak had lived at number two since 1979 and could tell you what every family on Briar Lane drove, in order, going back to a brown station wagon with a bad muffler.
She made Nora sit at the kitchen table, which had a plastic cloth on it, and she put out store cookies on a plate because you do not hand a person a package.
"Your mother," Marjorie said, "was the only one on this street who ever brought anything back. Casserole dish, ladder, anything. Everyone else keeps it and feels bad about it for years."
They talked about the funeral, and then about the roof at number six, and then about the survey, which Marjorie already knew about, because on a street with five houses there is no such thing as a private letter from the county.
"They'll want to pull the fence," she said.
"Maybe just a corner of it."
"Mm," Marjorie said, and got up to move a spoon that did not need moving.
Nora asked the question sideways, the way you ask a question you have carried since you were eleven. She said she'd been thinking about that summer, and did Marjorie remember how fast the fence went up.
Marjorie sat back down. She was quiet long enough that the refrigerator became audible here too.
"Two days," she said. "Tuesday and Wednesday. He worked Wednesday night with a light."
"You saw that."
"I see the street," Marjorie said, without apology. "That's not a crime. A person has windows."
She said the light had been on in the Halvorsens' yard until about one in the morning. She said she had thought about calling somebody and had not, because what would she have said — a man is standing in his own yard. She said the sod came Thursday, which was strange, because nobody sods in August unless they have a reason to cover something before the weekend.
Then she said the part Nora had not expected, the part that made her put the cookie down.
"Karen Halvorsen came over that Thursday and asked me what I'd seen. Not what I'd heard. What I'd seen."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I'd been asleep." Marjorie folded her hands. "And then she cried at my kitchen table for twenty minutes and never said one word about why, and we have said good morning to each other for thirty-one years since."
Outside, a car came down the road that goes nowhere else, and both of them looked up, because that is what you do on a street with one way in.
“A neighbor is a person who has been keeping your history without being asked to.”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
