Tonight the Streets Are Ours

They both cracked up. A few more parents moved away. “It’s a basketball game,” Lindsey said loudly. “It’s okay to get a little rowdy.”


“Wooo!” Arden shouted toward the court, to support Lindsey’s statement.

“Wooo!” Lindsey agreed. All the bleachers within a six-foot radius of them emptied.

Once the game had ended, Arden drove Roman and Lindsey home, despite Lindsey’s protestations that she could run home the way she came. “Please don’t,” Arden said. “Just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap.” In the car, Roman seemed subdued, even for a child whose basketball team had just been totally crushed for the hundredth time this season.

“You killed it out there, Huntley,” Lindsey told him. “You wiped the court with those guys. I bet they’re scared to come back next time.”

Roman had been in the game for all of six minutes, and Lindsey was a terrible liar, but it was possible that a child might believe her.

Roman didn’t seem to be paying attention to her, though. “I don’t know where Mom went,” he said.

“To New York, Roman,” Arden said. “You do know.”

He shook his too-big head. “I saw her in the stands, though. I saw her while I was playing. But she wasn’t there afterward. Why wouldn’t she come say hi? Because we lost?”

Arden and Lindsey exchanged a glance. “She wasn’t there,” Arden said. “I promise.” But there was a tightness in her chest. If her mother had been there, she would have noticed—right?

“Yes, she was,” Roman insisted. “She was sitting right under the exit sign.”

Then Arden realized what had happened. Roman hadn’t been wearing his glasses, so of course it made sense that he would have gotten confused, from a distance. “No, Roman,” she explained, and she felt so bad for him, her baby brother, who had so much learning to do about the world and all of its disappointment. “That wasn’t Mom. That was just me.”





Arden’s mother explains herself

It was funny that Roman thought their mother would come home for his basketball game, because the next day, she sort of did. Not in a literal, physical sense. But she sent a letter. It was addressed just to Arden, and her father hand-delivered it while she was sitting in her room doing homework on Monday after rehearsal.

“No,” Arden said when he handed it to her. “What is this? No.”

“Your mother asked me to make sure you got this.”

“And what, you just do everything she tells you now?”

“I think doing this particular thing makes sense,” Arden’s father said. “You won’t take her calls. You don’t respond to her e-mails. I think you should hear her out.”

“Do you know what she says in here?” Arden asked, weighing the unopened envelope.

“I have a pretty good idea.”

Arden gave an impatient snort. “I don’t have time for this. There’s a huge math test tomorrow that I’ve barely studied for, and I’m supposed to call Chris in twenty minutes, and Naomi is freaking out over some costuming thing, and I can’t rearrange my entire life just because Mom has written a letter.”

“Fine,” her dad said. “I don’t have time for this, either. It’s pro day for a lot of big college teams, and I need to keep track of it all.” He turned and left her room.

A minute too late, Arden said, “Oh, Dad, that’s not what I…” She sighed. She hadn’t wanted to fight with her father. But the person she wanted to fight with wasn’t there.

A letter. Could there be a more one-sided form of communication? A letter was saying, I’m going to state my thoughts, and you can’t argue with them because I’m not even there to hear you. All you can do is listen to me. A letter was not a conversation.

Arden threw it in the recycling bin. Then she fished it out and opened it. Her curiosity always got the best of her.

This is what her mother’s letter said: