There’s a storm drain in front of my house on Maple Hollow Lane.
It’s nothing special. Just a rectangle of iron bars set into the curb, about two feet wide, where the street dips down at the bottom of the hill. Every house on our street drains toward it. Every gutter, every downspout, every driveway. When it rains, all the water from eleven houses comes rushing down the hill and pours through those iron bars into the pipe underneath.
And every fall, when the leaves come down from the big oaks and maples that line our street, that drain clogs.
My husband, Danny, was the one who figured that out.
It was our first October in the house. Eight years ago. A big storm came through on a Saturday night. Danny and I woke up at two in the morning to the sound of rushing water. We went to the front window. The whole bottom of the street was a lake. Water up over the curb. Up into our front yard. Creeping up our driveway toward the garage.
Danny pulled on his boots and his raincoat and went out into it. I watched him from the window, wading out into the street with a rake and a flashlight in the pouring rain. He knelt down in the water. He pulled out armfuls of soggy leaves from the drain. Handful after handful. He threw them up onto our lawn.
After about ten minutes, I heard it. A deep, sucking gurgle. The water started to swirl. And then it went down, all at once, like somebody had pulled the plug in a bathtub.
He came back inside soaked to the skin, grinning.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” he said, dripping on the kitchen floor. “Might as well be us. We’re at the bottom of the hill.”
After that, he cleared that drain every fall. Every time it rained hard. Every time the leaves came down. He’d go out with his rake and a pair of rubber gloves and clear it before the water had a chance to rise. He never asked anybody for help. He never told anybody he was doing it. He just did it.
The neighbors never knew. Their basements stayed dry. Their cars stayed dry. They never once thought about why.
“That’s the thing about stuff like this,” Danny told me once. “Nobody notices when you do it. They only notice when you stop.”
Danny died four years ago. A heart attack. At thirty-nine. On a Tuesday afternoon at the warehouse where he worked as a shift supervisor. They said he was dead before he hit the floor.
Emma was six.
That first October after he died, I was standing at the front window at midnight during a storm, watching the water start to rise at the bottom of the street. And I remembered.
I put on his old raincoat. It came down to my knees. I found his rubber gloves in the garage. I took his rake. And I went out into the rain and knelt down in the street and cleared the drain.
I cried the whole time. I don’t think anybody could tell, with all the rain.
I’ve done it every fall since. Every storm. Four years.
Nobody ever noticed.
Until I stopped.
My name is Kate Donnelly. I’m thirty-seven years old. I work as a pharmacy technician at the CVS on Route 9. Ten in the morning until six-thirty at night, five days a week. It doesn’t pay much. Fifteen dollars and forty cents an hour. After Danny died, I sold our big car and kept his old Honda. A 2009 Civic. Silver. A hundred and sixty thousand miles. It’s the most reliable thing in my life. Or it was.
We still live in the same house. The little gray Cape Cod on Maple Hollow Lane, with the white shutters and the porch swing Danny built. The mortgage is tight. Everything is tight. I know exactly how much is in my checking account every single day. Usually not much.
But Emma and I are okay. We have each other. We have the porch swing. We have Danny’s old flannel shirts, which Emma sleeps in. We have pancakes on Saturday mornings and movie nights on Fridays with a big bowl of popcorn between us on the couch.
Emma is ten now. She’s in fifth grade at Lincoln Elementary. She has Danny’s dark curly hair and his brown eyes and his habit of chewing on the end of her pencil when she’s thinking. She’s quiet and kind and a little shy. She reads three books a week. She wants to be a veterinarian, or maybe an astronaut, depending on the day.
She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
Vanessa Hale moved onto Maple Hollow Lane two years ago.
She bought the big white colonial at the top of the hill. Four houses up from mine. It had a three-car garage and black shutters and a perfectly round boxwood hedge out front. She had it professionally landscaped the week she moved in. New flower beds. New stone walkway. A fountain.
She was divorced. Recently, I think. She had one daughter, Sophie. Same age as Emma. Same class.
The girls became best friends almost immediately. On the first day of fourth grade, Sophie sat down next to Emma at lunch and asked what she was reading. It was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Sophie had just finished it too. By the end of lunch, they’d decided they were both secretly Ravenclaws.
Sophie is a sweet kid. Blond, with freckles and braces and a loud, honking laugh that makes everybody else laugh too. She’s nothing like her mother. Sophie is easy. Sophie is warm.
Vanessa is… well. Vanessa is Vanessa.
She’s forty-one, I think. Tall and thin and very blond and very tan, always. She wears yoga clothes that cost more than my weekly paycheck. She goes to Pilates every morning at seven-fifteen. She owns her own business. Something with interior design. She has a lot of opinions about throw pillows. Continue HERE
