Page 47 of The Overtime Persuasive

When we reach her street, I find an open space half a block from Side B. A genuine Old Town miracle.

Eva unclips her seat belt but doesn’t reach for the door. Instead, she looks through the windshield toward the row of brick buildings ahead of us. “Do you need to go home right away?” she asks.

“No.”

“I know they said on the news we’d get rain tonight, but do you want to go for a walk?” She turns toward me. “I saw some Halloween decorations earlier, and people get into the spirit with them around here. Get some fresh air with me?”

I don’t have to think about it. “Love to.”

We leave the succulent and brownies in the truck and start toward King Street.

At this hour, the restaurants are still busy, music and conversation slipping through open doors whenever someone comes or goes. A line forms around the window of the ice cream shop, and a couple stands beneath one of the streetlights, arguing over directions while both of them stare at their separate phones.

Eva leads me two blocks past Side B before turning down a quieter street. The noise from King fades behind us. Here, the storefronts give way to narrow brick homes, black iron railings, and perfectly manicured front gardens that look as if they’ve been measured with a ruler. Old trees stretch over the street, their branches meeting above us, shifting as if shaking hands with an old friend in the cool breeze.

The first decorated house is a redbrick row home with three carved pumpkins lined up on the steps. Black paper bats climb from the front door to the second-story windows, increasing in size as they go.

Two houses down, a skeleton sits at a tiny table in the front garden, one bony hand curved around a teacup. A second skeleton lies face down in the flower bed beside it.

“Poison.” Eva stops. “But who did it?”

I study the scene. “You’ve giving this more thought than is normal.”

“The store has an entire true-crime section. Keep up.”

At the next house, crooked foam headstones fill the small patch of grass between the sidewalk and porch. Low purple lights shine up beneath them, and a pair of plastic hands reach out of the mulch.

“Barry M. Deep,” Eva exclaims, stepping closer to read the names. “Oh, that one’s Doug Graves.” She looks at me and laughs, and everything inside of me goes warm at the sound.

The fourth house is that one house that is on every street in the world. It’s the one that commits to everything. All of the Halloween with some Thanksgiving snuck in there, too. Gauzy ghosts hang from the branches of a crepe myrtle tree, and tiny orange lights frame every window. A giant spider clings to the porch roof, and a witch has crashed headfirst into a hedge, leaving only her striped legs and boots visible. The amazing dichotomy of the whole scene is to look to the right of the house, where they’ve also set a blow-up “Tom the Turkey” into position and have a pile of hay bales scattered acting as seating for those who need a break, surrounded by cornstalks and smaller, tabletop-sized pumpkins.

“Yes! This is exactly what I needed tonight.” Eva laughs and claps her hands.

“I’m pretty sure there are Christmas lights along the back wall.” I point toward them, but she’s too busy taking in the hay bales and pumpkins to care.

“I love this stuff. Traditions.” She turns to me, her smile softening. “This is what I missed when Dad was on the road.”

That stops me. Of course she did.

“What did you do for holidays?”

“Before I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I usually spent Halloween wandering around a concert venue. Dad’s crew and backup band would set up stations so I could dress up and pretend I was going door-to-door.”

“So, the bass player handed out candy corn?”

“And the sound guy had M&M’s.” She laughs. “Exactly. Once I got older, one of the tour assistants would take me trick-or-treating in whatever city we happened to be in.”

“That sounds kind of fun.”

“It was. Sometimes.” Her gaze drifts back to the house. “But I was always the new kid wandering through someone else’s neighborhood alone.”

Something about that lands hard. “And you love Halloween.”

“I love all of this.” She gestures toward the decorations. “I’m an introvert to my core, but some things aren’t meant to be done by yourself. Trick-or-treating is one of them. At least in my book.”

“What about Thanksgiving and Christmas?”

“We were always home for Christmas, but Thanksgiving usually happened on tour. Everyone tried to make it special. Someone would track down turkeys, someone else would rent enough tables for the entire crew, and by some miracle, we’d all come together like one big, strange family.” She smiles. “It was nice. It just never happened in the same place twice.”