Chapter 16: The Street

I crossed the street in Sam's flannel and my socks, and I did not feel the cold.

Sam came out behind me with his keys already in his hand.

He didn't ask what I was going to do.

He walked to his pickup and backed it out of his drive.

He swung it sideways across the mouth of mine and left it there.

The moving truck was halfway down my driveway.

Its engine rumbled, and it had nowhere to go.

I stood in front of its grille.

"Stop," I said to the driver. "You're blocked in, and you're loading from a house you have no right to empty."

The driver leaned out of his window.

"Lady, I've got a work order with her name on it."

"It's my house."

"Jo." Colleen came down the porch steps with her hand still on Cody's shoulder. "Don't do this to him in front of the neighbors."

Doors were opening up and down Linden Court.

The man next door stood on his lawn in a bathrobe.

Two of the carpool mothers had come out in leggings with their coffee.

The woman with the ponytail stood at the end of her walk with her arms folded.

"I'm not doing anything to him," I said. "You're taking a fifteen-year-old out of his school on a Saturday before sunrise."

"I'm his mother. I decide where he lives."

"Then ask him."

"He's a child."

"I'm not going," Cody said.

He said it quietly, but the street was quiet too.

Colleen's smile stayed on her face and went hard.

"Baby, we talked about this."

"You talked." He pulled his shoulder out from under her hand. "You said Jo was dangerous. You said she shoved you."

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