The annual Labor Day block party is next weekend! We’ll be having our final planning meeting this Monday evening at my house at 7:00, or whenever you can make it before Law and Order comes on at 9:00. Refreshments will be served. :-)

Amber Griffin: We might be late bc we have dance practice for the West Indian Day parade, but we’ll be there!

Candace Tompkins: Get it, young ladies! If you’re lucky, I’ll show you some moves at the meeting.

LaTasha Clifton: X__x

Jen Peterson: Yay! Looking forward to hanging with Count!

Jenn Lithwick: Super excited to help plan our first block party!

Kavaughn Murphy: I’ll be there after the community board meeting. Folks are seeing if there’s anything we can do about the VerenTech deal but looks like it’s too late.

Chapter 3

Sydney

MY PHONE VIBRATES IN MY POCKET AS I WALK THROUGH THE front door of the house.

I switch the plastic bag containing chips and salsa to my left hand and tug the slim rectangle out. My stomach flips when I see the label MOMMY’S LAWYERS pop up. I never updated the contact to Gladstone and Gianetti, which would be easier on my nerves every time they called. I consider sending them to voicemail, but Mommy needs me to handle this shit since she can’t.

“Hello, this is Sydney Green,” I say in a pleasant voice as I turn to the mailbox hanging next to the door. I haven’t checked it for two weeks, and a quick flip through the envelopes shoved into it makes me wish I hadn’t. Scammy credit card offers; collections notices from hospitals, ones here and in Seattle; the water bill; the electricity. The latest bill from the retirement home, too. I’ll have to try to figure out a payment plan next time I force myself to go out there.

“Hi, Ms. Green.” The cool, familiar voice of the receptionist at the lawyers’ office. “I’m sorry there’s been such a delay in getting back to you about your mother’s case. I hope she’s doing well?”

I flip the mailbox lid shut and start down the stairs.

“She’s hanging in there. She’s about as tough as they come,” I say. A peek over the railing shows that no one is early for the meeting at Mr. Perkins’s and lingering within earshot. “Any news about the situation?”

“As you’ve been told, with cases like this there often isn’t any recourse. But Ms. Gianetti has found some things that she’d like to share with you and your mother that might be helpful moving forward. Can she give you a call on Thursday morning at eight thirty?”

“Yes! Yes, that would be great. I’m—I’m really hoping we can get this figured out. It’d make Mommy so happy, especially with everything else going on.”

“Will she be on the call?” the receptionist asks.

“We’ll see how she’s feeling,” I say.

“Of course,” the receptionist says, followed by an awkward pause. “There’s the matter of the payment . . .”

I scoff. Chuckle. Some combination of the two sounds. “Don’t worry about that. I sent the next payment by check, so you should be getting it in the mail soon.”

“Right,” she says. “Great. Talk to you Thursday at eight thirty.”

“Thank you.”

I slip the phone back into my pocket with shaking hands. Okay. Thursday. I try not to get my hopes up, but if it was bad news they would’ve told me, wouldn’t they? This isn’t a medical diagnosis.

I take a deep breath and head next door.

The garden-level entrance to Mr. Perkins’s house is shrouded by the leaves of the plants that fence his windows—they started as clippings from my mom, like so many of the plants in flower boxes and pots lining this street. The leaves brush my face as I walk in, soft and smelling like Mommy’s green-thumbed hands.

The door is unlocked and ajar, and I huff an annoyed sigh as I step inside. “How many times do I have to tell you to lock this door?”

No response, apart from the low murmur of television announcers and the drone of the air conditioner.

More familiar scents greet me, even if Mr. Perkins doesn’t—Folgers coffee grounds, newspapers as old as me and stacked as tall, moldy carpet, though the old carpet had been pulled up at last after Hurricane Sandy.

When Mrs. Perkins was around, she called this part of the house City Hall because people would pop in to talk about neighborhood business like local elections, how to deal with troublemakers of both the criminal and police varieties, and who needed help and wasn’t asking for it.

It still serves that function, but with so many of the original neighbors gone and the new ones skittish, it’s more town hall than city.

The walls are still covered by the dark wood paneling of a bygone era, and there are still boxes full of papers, books, and lord knows what else stacked along the walls. He’s not quite a hoarder, but Marie Kondo would advise him to let some of this stuff go.

I know why he doesn’t. Mommy’s room is still how it was the day she left, minus her favorite blanket. I thought she’d want to take that with her, to have something familiar. When she’d been at the hospital the first time—well, the first time after I came back from Seattle—she’d complained about the cold and kept reaching for the crocheted blanket that was usually at the foot of her bed at home.

An odd draft passes through the hallway, cool in a way AC can’t replicate. “Mr. Perkins? Count?”

I walk into the darkened den, with its hodgepodge of couches and chairs picked up from the Goodwill over the years. The blackout curtains are drawn, and Mr. Perkins is napping on his torn and duct-taped La-Z-Boy. Count snores at his feet, the most useless guard dog ever. The light of the television, tuned in to the Home Shopping Network, shifts shadows over both of them, but after a second I realize that what I’m seeing isn’t just the play of light creating an illusion of motion or my sleep-deprived brain playing tricks on me.

Mr. Perkins is jerking in his sleep—small, isolated movements all over his body. Count is doing the same at his feet. Unnatural twitches and spasms that I might have confused for a seizure if it wasn’t moving through both of them. If it didn’t spark a sudden fist of nauseous worry that presses against my diaphragm.

Count whines and growls as his legs twitch.

“Mr. Perkins?” I try to call out, but my voice is a barely audible whisper, like in a bad dream. Like when I walked in and found Mommy . . .

No. No.

Clammy sweat dampens my skin and anxiety fizzes through my body like an Alka-Seltzer tablet made of fear. I fumble for the light switch, forgetting where it is even though I’ve seen it a thousand times. My shaking hand passes over dusty paneling for a frantic moment that goes on for far too long, until the webbing between my thumb and index finger finally bumps up under the switch. I slide my palm up to flip it on.

I clear my throat. “Mr. Perkins?”

He startles awake, finally, eyes wide as they turn to me. For the briefest moment, there’s no recognition, just terror, and then he places a hand on his chest and exhales.

“Lord. You ever have one of those nightmares where something is just standing over you, watching, and you can’t move?” He rubs his hands down his arms, smoothing away goose bumps. “Like your arms and legs are just locked up?”

Mommy used to call that the devil at your elbow, and that same devil has been visiting me for months now. Drea says it’s anxiety and gave me some Ambien to make me sleep, but that made it worse.

“You’re okay now, though, right?” I ask.

He glances at me and smiles reassuringly. “I’m fine. Shouldn’t have had roti for dinner, that’s all. Too heavy on my stomach.”

“Hard to resist good Trini food,” I say as I scratch at my shoulder. I glance down to make sure there are no new bites. “How many people do you think will show up tonight?”

“Maybe ten? Not like it used to be, when this whole den would be full and Odetta would make her sweet lemonade . . .” He trails off, hand gripping the arm of the chair as he stares at the floor. His shoulders rise and fall and then he nods decisively. “Let me go get the refreshments from the kitchen upstairs.”

“I can get it.”

“Sydney, you tryna make me feel old? I got this.” He smiles, seemingly having shaken off the remnants of the nightmare. “Count’ll help me out.”

Count hefts himself to his feet with a wuff and follows him, bumping into Mr. Perkins’s legs when he stops short and turns back to me. “Oh, I found some papers for you that might help with your tour, in Odetta’s things. In that folder over there.”

His wife had been a librarian who’d loved doing programs about the history of the neighborhood. I know it must have been hard for him to look through her stuff to find this for me, but he’d done it to support this dumbass plan of mine.

“Thanks,” I say.

He and Count trot off, and I replace the accordion folder on top of the TV with the bag of snacks, pull open the curtains to let in the evening light, and settle into one of the room’s mismatched armchairs.

Neighborhood Things is scrawled in Mrs. Perkins’s handwriting on a white label in the corner of the folder.

I undo the stiff string wrapped tightly around the tab and gently tug out the paper at the top. It’s a reproduction of a pamphlet that was probably made on an old crank-style copy machine, given how yellowed with age it is.