The Red Maple
“Either get that junk off your house, or I’m calling the police!”
Mrs. Whitmore was standing at the end of our driveway in a long gray coat buttoned to her chin. Eighty-one years old. Five foot nothing. Pointing one bony finger at my sons like she was casting a spell.
Max froze on the front porch with a staple gun in his hand.
Theo dropped the milk jug he was holding. It bounced down the steps and rolled into the grass.
I came out the front door with a roll of duct tape around my wrist like a bracelet.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
“Is something wrong?” She swept her hand at our house. At the bedsheet ghosts hanging from the porch rafters. At the cardboard tombstones stuck in the flowerbeds. At the lanterns lined up along the front walk. “Look at this. Look at it. It looks like a landfill exploded.”
Theo’s face crumpled.
He’s seven. He made the tombstones.
My name is Laurel Pierce. I’m thirty-nine.
I live in a little white Cape Cod on Larkspur Lane in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, with my two sons. Max is eleven. Theo is seven.
My husband, Joel, died two years ago this November.
And after Joel passed away, Halloween became our thing.
It was always Joel’s thing first.
He was a shop teacher at Elm Grove High. Twenty-two years. He could build anything out of anything. A birdhouse out of an old drawer. A go-kart out of a lawnmower and a shopping cart. A cello stand out of a hockey stick for a girl in his third period who couldn’t afford a real one.
And every October, he went crazy.
Not store-bought crazy. Joel never bought a single Halloween decoration in his life. He said store-bought stuff had no soul.
“Anybody can buy a plastic skeleton at Target,” he’d say. “It takes a real artist to make one out of PVC pipe and pool noodles.”
So he made everything. Every year. With the boys.
Ghosts out of old bedsheets, stuffed with plastic grocery bags so their heads were round. Lanterns out of empty milk jugs, with faces cut into them and battery tea lights inside. Tombstones out of cereal boxes, painted gray and lettered with terrible jokes.
HERE LIES LES MOORE. NO LES, NO MORE.
I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK.
RIP JOEL’S DIET. 1987–1987. 