following in his brotherâs footsteps, with a pocketful of fake I.D.s and those pointy black boots. He probably had some bottled beer cooling in the creek behind the high school. âIâll bet you do,â Hennessy said.
The half of the lawn Hennessy had mowed had already grown as tall as the wild side. He stopped in the Oliverasâ driveway and looked up at the chimney. The crows cackled to one another, then edged out of their nest and peered down at him. Hennessy had to pull on the mowerâs starter three times before it caught, and when it finally did, the engine started with a roar that sent the crows circling into the sky, screaming. It took Hennessy nearly an hour just to finish the front lawn. At first the crows tossed stones at him, but after a while they gave up and went back to the chimney; they watched him carefully as he worked.
It wasnât a good job, but it would do, although the lawn was still uneven in patches. McCarthy would be showing the house in the evenings, and you could get away with a lot in the dark. Hennessy was sweating hard; he took off his shirt and wiped his face with it, then opened the chain-link gate and dragged the mower into the backyard. He stopped only for a moment, beside the grapevines. In August the grapes always turned purple; because there had been no one to harvest them, they had dropped to the ground in overripe mounds. It was getting darker, already it was difficult to see, and Hennessy had to work fast if he wanted to finish tonight. And even though Hennessy worked without stopping, the children on Hemlock Street fell asleep to the sound of his lawn mower, and on all sides of the abandoned house neighbors could finally throw open their windows, thankful that at last the disturbing odor of the Olivera place had been replaced, at least temporarily, with the crisp scent of newly cut grass, a scent that made your throat tighten and reminded you exactly how good it was to live here.
On summer evenings like these, when the children were tucked into bed, safety hung over the neighborhood like a net. No one locked windows, no one locked doors. The G.E. refrigerators hummed and the stars were a brilliant white. In the morning, the traffic on the Southern State would be loud enough to wake sleepers from their beds, but at night the parkway was nothing more than a whisper, lulling the children to sleep beneath their white sheets and their quilts patterned with rocking horses. The later it grew, the more the hands of kitchen clocks lingered on each hour. A summer night lasted longer here than it did in other places. The chirp of the crickets was slower, and when children fell out of their beds they never woke, but instead rolled gently under their beds, still clutching onto stuffed bears.
In the moonlight you could see that, even after six years, everything still seemed new: lunch boxes and bicycles, couches and bedroom suites, cars parked in driveways and swing sets in the yards; there werenât even any cracks in the cement. When the potato farms were being torn apart and the builders were bulldozing the sandy earth, the fireflies grew so confused that they left one night in a shining cloud. But this year they had returned and had stayed on for an unusually long time to drift through the rosebushes and the crab apple trees. None of the children who grew up here, or even those who moved here from apartments in Brooklyn or Queens, had seen a firefly before, yet they immediately knew what to do, as if their response to the bugs had been tacked to their brain waves. They ran inside for empty pickle jars and filled them with the fireflies theyâd trapped in their hands. Beneath these childrenâs beds were green globes of light that never dimmed until morning. Good night, these children had been told, and they always believed it. Sleep tight, theyâd been told, and they always did. When monsters appeared in the closets, or under the catalpa trees, the