Chapter 23: Blue Doors

The first car came up the drive at eight on Saturday morning, and the last one at half past ten.

I hadn't invited anyone.

Frances had made one phone call, and the phone tree had done the rest.

By noon there were twenty-six people in my mother's yard, and nine of them were children.

They had brought folding chairs and paint rollers and a cooler of lemonade.

The old man in the loose suit had changed into overalls.

He walked the length of the fence with a level in his hand.

He told two grown men they were hanging a plank crooked.

"It's not a fence," he said to me. "It's a street. You can't have a street leaning."

The street was a long cedar plank, eight feet, that Nate had cut and sanded.

He had set it between two posts at the end of the gravel drive.

Fourteen brass screws waited along it.

The families came forward one at a time and set their numbers against the wood.

A seven.

A twelve.

A four, held by a boy of ten with his tongue between his teeth.

I stood back and watched each one go on.

The plank was already painted my mother's blue.

I had mixed it myself from the flake of paint I'd kept in an envelope since the first day.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Don't Need Your Blue Roses Anymore from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.