A story by Marisa Valotta
Everything
is
perfect
here
One summer evening, we found a pair of gray cotton shorts in our driveway, bundled in a slouching heap like a dead possum. Our mother screamed at us not to touch them, then called the police. I imagined what it must have been like to get this call, to expect a report of a murder or a fire but instead, there’s a frantic woman on the line babbling about a pair of shorts in her driveway and how it’s upsetting her kids. I wasn’t upset and neither was my sister, but we stayed quiet as our mother clutched us against her.
When the neighbors spotted the police car parked in front of our white mailbox, they all decided it was the perfect time to mow the lawn, even though the grass in every front yard was already meticulously trimmed, as it was at all times. Up and down the street they emerged from their identical red-bricked homes, as if some higher power had called upon an army to preserve the integrity of the neighborhood. The officer found a wallet in the back pocket of the pants and discovered that they belonged to a man who lived down the road. The officer said he’d go down to the house to return the pants and make sure the man was there. Part of me hoped he was wandering the neighborhood pantsless; it would’ve been the most exciting thing to happen all summer.
​
When I asked my mother about the man the next morning, she told me that the officer found him at home, that he wasn’t walking around the neighborhood in just his underwear, and thank goodness because what a scandal that would have been.
Soon after this, I heard that the man who lost his pants set his house on fire. Whether he started it on purpose or on accident, I never found out, but my mother said he was off his meds again. “I can’t believe they let people like him live in a neighborhood like ours!” she said. I didn’t know who “people like him” were, but I wondered what kind of medicine kept you from leaving your pants in the neighbor’s driveway and setting your own house on fire. I wondered why someone would need medicine to keep them from doing these things.
I didn’t know where the man lived until the first day of school started. On the school bus, we passed by a house missing its back door. The frame was singed black, as if the fire inside had burst through the door and gripped onto the outside of the house, trying to pull itself through. If it hadn’t been for this small bit of black, you’d have never known there was a fire. Was the whole inside of the house charred and ashen? Was the pale yellow exterior hiding the darkness inside?
I learned that the man had kids. Did those kids know not to leave their pants in driveways? Did they live inside a blackened, flame-licked house disguised with a yellow smile? If I looked at their knees, would I see traces of the soot that must surely cover every inch of the place they called home?
Many years later, I’ve forgotten about all of this until I walk by the house. There’s a pool in their backyard and a door covering what used to be an ashen hole. The house feels like a secret now, and a perfect one. The grass is lush green and neatly trimmed like all the others in the neighborhood. The round pool holds clean, cool water that kids splash around in. A dog runs around the yard while on the front porch, a woman holds a baby. She wears a light cotton dress that allows the summer breeze to cleanse the sweat from her skin. I don’t know if these are the same people who lived in the house back when it caught on fire. I don’t know if these are the same kids who lived there before, older now, with a new sibling. I don’t know if the man who lives there is the same man who left his pants in my driveway when I was a kid. I know that the house is in the same place, at the top of a steep hill, on a corner in front of a stop sign that seems to melt into the hot pavement beneath my feet. I don’t know, but when the woman catches me looking, she smiles, and I smile back. Here, everything is perfect.