edges down around my ears. When I could stand it no longer, I threw my sheet and blanket off, stormed down the hallway and through the living room to the front door, and flung it open. The night was ringing with hammer blows and a whining drill and men and women shouting to each other. Several wore headlamps, and they’d set up high-powered lanterns in several strategic locations. I can only imagine what I looked like to those who might’ve seen me, hair wild from tossing in the bed, pale and naked, standing in the doorway, spotlighted by the lamp above my front door. My fists were clenched and I was on the verge of crying out in protest. I stood there a full five minutes before slamming the door as loudly as I could and retreating to my bed. • By sunrise, I’d given up on sleep. They’d gone through my yard and were hard at work in the Chippendales’. The palisade sagged in various places, and groups of boards hung loosely in their fastenings. Hart and Nery and Manny and Cora and Harvey were nowhere to be seen, but a new work crew, consisting of Sandy Williams and her son Miles, John Barrow, Sr., the Eskowitzes, and Neil Cotter, had taken over. “John!” I called. He turned and waved. “Aren’t you going to work today?” He said something unintelligible. “What?” “Took the week off!” he shouted, and turned back to the palisade. “Can you do that?” I called back. “Can a mailman do that?” I had a dreadful vision of come home to discover the entire neighborhood hard at work, everything ladders and work belts and hammering. There would be a refreshment table in the middle of the street full of finger foods, a plate stacked with burgers and hotdogs, coolers of beer and pop, and they would’ve begun a walkway around the top of the palisade along which children would already be running, even as their parents called, “No running on the palisade!” The Patel children, who were the most enterprising in the neighborhood, would be wearing cardboard armets with working visors and carrying long sticks with a string attached at both ends, and they’d carry backpacks full of sticks for quivers of arrows, and they would peer over the tops of the barricade and fire burning arrows at invading hordes.
I was not far off. By the time I’d come back, there was an army of my neighbors working on the fortification. They worked in shifts. They had a system. A small team would dig a trench, and another team would construct a portion of the wall, and then together they would insert the pre-constructed section into the ground. A third team worked further back, securing loose posts and adding crosspieces and braces. There must have been a fourth group that went looking for wood. They had gone through the Chippendale and Cotter yards and would soon begin the Linds’. And it appeared as though they’d somehow gotten permission from the landlord who rented to the college girls to build around the very rearmost part of the property. Delilah and Dana had set up lawn chairs in their front yards and sat there in their bathing suits, watching. Even Leo Bombadier had emerged from his home and joined the building crew, although his role consisted mostly of standing several yards away from the actual work, drinking his wine and occasionally mumbling. People from nearby streets stopped to look. There was a visit from a pair of police officers who looked on suspiciously, conducted a series of interviews, leaned on their cars while scratching their heads in the sun, and left. Around this time, I received another letter from Rosie. It was the first time I’d received two letters from her in as many weeks—typically I got no more than one every month or two, and I wondered at first if this was some act of rebellion against her mother. I was both unnerved and excited at this idea; I wasn’t sure I wanted our relationship to become an extension of her dissent, but I hoped that her opposition to her mother might escalate to the point where she revealed her address. I would’ve written her under a pseudonym. One of the friends she’d told me about, perhaps. I would’ve told her that if she ever wanted to visit, her room was still available. That she could come anytime she wanted, and that I could send her money for a ticket. I could send her money even if she didn’t want to visit. I could have asked what she needed. She never wrote about being too cold at night, or not having enough to eat, but I wasn’t sure these were things she would’ve thought to mention in her letters. Her newest was a three-page long paragraph about bowling. She had been to a bowling alley with Mark Welch every day after school for a week, and she believed it to be the most amazing place she’d
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