Safer

Safer by Sean Doolittle

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Authors: Sean Doolittle
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played football for Iowa State. Now he was a marketing VP for the local cable company. Though we insisted that we didn’t watch much television, he set us up with the premium channel package as a housewarming gift. Melody worked in the human resources department at the First State Bank of Clark Falls. She introduced Sara to her yoga instructor.
    Trish and Barry Firth both worked for her father’s business,a commercial glass distributor, Trish in the employment office, Barry in sales. They had twin toddlers: a girl named Jordan and a boy named Jacob. Upon discovering that we were expecting— a fact Trish somehow intuited long before we’d chosen to mention it to anyone—Barry delivered to our house, under cover of night, four unmarked plastic storage tubs packed full of gender-neutral infant wear. He winked at Sara, chucked me on the shoulder, and said, “Congratulations, you guys. Mum’s the word.”
    Michael Sprague lived in the rambling Craftsman between the Firths and Roger Mallory. He’d spent some time in our neck of the woods, having studied at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, New York. He’d returned to Clark Falls five years ago to take care of his ailing mother, stayed after meeting his partner, Ben, and now ran the kitchen at The Flatiron, an upscale restaurant on the riverfront.
    We learned that Ben worked as a corporate trainer, and that he’d recently taken some kind of temporary contract job in Seattle. That was all we knew about that.
    Michael had converted their backyard into a roaring vegetable garden; he kept the whole circle in fresh produce through the summer, plus a dozen different colors of squash in the fall. Visiting one night, he hugged each of us and thanked us for moving in.
    “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Everybody’s terrific. You’ll like it here. I’m just saying that if we’d tilted any farther to the right my house might have fallen over.”
    Sara invited Roger Mallory over for dinner to thank him for our new alarm system, brought to us courtesy of Sentinel One Incorporated, a local home security company. One call from Roger, and a crew showed up with spools of cable and power drills. They left us fortified with enough special wiring to lock down a minor military position, installing the whole works free of charge.
    “Stop thanking me,” he told us, polishing off the last of the kebabs. “The owner and I were on the force together. I sendhim plenty of business. Besides, I got him free ad space in the Chamber of Commerce brochure. He owes me one.”
    On a given night, you could leave our front door and find somebody out visiting with somebody else. You could watch the Firth twins playing in the common with little Sofia, Pete and Melody’s four- year- old. You could always have a chat with Roger, who seemed to preside over the goings- on in Sycamore Court like everybody’s favorite uncle.
    We found ourselves doing all of these things, and it didn’t take long before we felt at home.
    Nobody is going to care about Michael Sprague’s vegetable garden. Nobody will care what our neighbors do for a living, or how many channels we get on our television. Nobody will care that Sara and I lost a baby in August.
    From here on, the only thing anybody will care about is me and Brit Seward.
    “Are all these boxes full of books?”
    That was the very first question she asked me, the Monday morning after the emergency meeting of the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Association. Melody, who didn’t work Mondays, had sent Brit over to deliver a hand- labeled DVD containing our news broadcast, which Pete had somehow procured through the cable company. Sara had gone to campus to meet with the dean; I was at home, still unpacking. I’d only asked Brittany inside because the guys from Sentinel One were busy working on the front door.
    “All books,” I said.
    “
All
of them?”
    “That’s exactly what the movers said.”
    She put her hands on her hips and scanned the rampart of

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