Ezoic
I had moved onto Cleaver Road with Mark and our boys three years before this story takes place. Ben was five then, Oliver was three, and the neighborhood was the kind of neighborhood we had wanted since before we had children to want it for: quiet streets, a school close enough to walk to, neighbors who mostly kept to themselves in a friendly rather than hostile way, the kind of place where people wave when they’re reversing out of driveways.
Denise and her husband Paul had lived in the house directly opposite for eleven years. I knew this because Denise told me, in our first conversation over the garden wall, with the tone of someone establishing seniority. She had the authority of the long-term resident, the person whose memory of the street predates yours and who therefore has a kind of informal jurisdiction over how things are done.
