By summer the new house was up, the new neighbors were in. The Schaeffers. We didn’t like them, what they’d done to the Bradleys’ house. We were a street of brick Capes built in the forties, with mature trees higher than our rooflines. The Bradleys’ twin oaks had been felled when the house was razed, replaced by a single sapling that stood no higher than the tallest of us. We guessed dogwood, but wouldn’t know for sure until it blossomed the following spring.

And this new house! The yellow siding hurt our eyes, disoriented us when we stood in our front yards. The roof pitched skyward at staggering angles. We knew about teardowns. We’d seen them, first in nearby neighborhoods, then in ours. They crept closer, street by street. We knew the market forces at play—the valuable land, the older homes, the proximity to the central city, the jobs there.

The new house filled the lot, leaving little yard in which children could play. Or so we thought when the foundation was dug, then set, and the house framed, ever higher. But then, once complete and the Schaeffers had moved in, there were no Schaeffer children—just Mrs. and Mr., Donna and Steven, impossibly young, Donna with blonde curls that fell past her collar and Steven with dark hair and a beard, trimmed short, edged with precision, the way their lawn was edged where it met the curb, the driveway, and the slate walkway that curved toward the front steps and porch. The landscapers arrived every Friday morning in a pickup, two men in the cab and two in the bed sprawled among power equipment and gasoline cans. They piled out and their machines roared for ten minutes, no more, whether the lawn needed it or not. Then they were gone.

The turf had been trucked in from a farm in Pennsylvania that supplied golf greens and fairways. It would have been wonderful grass for barefoot children. We wanted to take our shoes off and run barefoot on it ourselves. But the Schaeffers never trod on their lawn, barefoot or not. They entered and exited through the garage (the only one on the block), in one of two cars, a sedan or an SUV. The electric door rumbled up and down. And in their wake, each time, coming or going, was their black-and-white cat. Callie. It said so on her collar. She trod on the Schaeffers’ immaculate grass. She trod on ours, too, with its crabgrass and clover. And she used her sharp voice to call to us whether we were near or not.

We missed more than the Bradleys’ house, of course. We missed the Bradleys. Or the idea of the Bradleys. The Bradleys of long ago.

Our families were young when we first moved here. The Bradley girls, Jamie and Celia, wore their hair in pigtails then, tied in pink and white ribbons. They went to pre-school at the community center with our children, slid on the slide, bounced on the bouncy bridge. In another year or two, we walked our children to the corner, where the school bus collected them at eight in the morning and dropped them off at three in the afternoon. We carpooled to soccer, stood on the sidelines and cheered. We celebrated birthdays and exchanged presents, trick-or-treated at each other’s houses, shared dishes at block parties.

By sixth grade some of us had moved our kids to private schools. Scooters and skateboards replaced bicycles on the curbs and front lawns. The Bradley girls gave up their pigtails and the pink and white ribbons. Then the scooters and skateboards became cars. Jamie Bradley took her mom’s car one Saturday and didn’t return for a week. There was talk of a kidnapping, though we weren’t aware that the police had been called. She returned with a sunburn and a tattoo. Someone said she’d gone to the beach with a boyfriend.

We saw them less after that. We heard that Tom Bradley hurt his back, had had an unsuccessful surgery. But on those rare occasions when we spotted him he looked okay, if a bit stooped. But who wasn’t? It hurt getting old.

At night Jamie Bradley parked her car around the corner, and sat behind the wheel as the stereo played and the dashboard glowed along with the screen on her phone, which she held in one hand, and the tip of her cigarette, which she held in the other. Those of us with dogs would come across her on our evening walks, smoke and low music wafting through her half-open windows.

The changes were incremental. We watched our kids grow the way we watched the hours turn on a clock, or the days, months, and years turn on a calendar. We knew how it worked. We remembered our own childhoods, our striving for freedom and the privileges assigned to adults. But now, from this side, it felt different, laced with regret and our own mortality. Still, we expected it would continue—this slow-motion building and unraveling, both at once. Our kids would grow up and leave, first for college and then for forever—for jobs and careers and families of their own. Wherever their lights took them. We didn’t expect collapse.

But then the Bradleys’ house went dark. There was talk of Tom losing his job, or getting a better job in a different city. There was talk of divorce. Did it matter? They were gone. The house was sold, then razed, the debris removed by a parade of dump trucks until all that was left was the hole for the foundation and the blocks that had formed it, half caved in. We came by to gaze in the hole. It was October, the sun out, the wind blowing, the temperature falling. No one spoke. Then the dump trucks removed the rest, and an excavator dug a larger hole for the foundation that would become the Schaeffers’ house.

While the Schaeffers were never outside, their cat always was, calling to us with her shrill voice. Her need for attention was insatiable. She followed us to our cars, stood too close as we pulled away, sat in the middle of the street, an obstacle to steer around.

The summer wore on. Crickets droned from lawns. Gnats swarmed. And Callie sunned herself on front stoops. We went to work, to the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the community pool. We left town for vacations. The older kids found jobs. By August we were bored. We busied ourselves getting our kids ready for the next step, the next grade, the next school. The chorus of crickets grew louder, anticipating, it seemed, the end of summer.

Someone suggested a block party. We hadn’t had one in years. Someone got the permits to close the street and made the flyers and those went in mail slots and were posted on telephone poles. We buzzed about whether the Schaeffers would attend.

We held the party on a Saturday afternoon at the end of the month. It was a sunny day. We returned home early from the pool to set up tables and chairs and orange cones in the street with posters:

BLOCK PARTY TODAY: 4-8 NO CARS

We arranged plates, napkins, and cups on a table. We wheeled out coolers with ice, soda, and beer. We opened bottles of wine and recorked them and sank them in a tub of ice. We prepared our dishes and brought them at the appointed time. Someone had grilled hotdogs. Someone had ordered pizza. And that’s when the kids arrived—the younger ones, those still in middle school or the later grades of elementary school, straight from the pool, with swimsuits and wet hair, and the older ones, standing like the gangly sapling in the Schaeffers’ front yard, the boys in baggy shorts and sports jerseys with mussed hair and indifferent expressions and the girls disguised as women with penciled liner around their eyes.

And Callie was there, too, at first on the periphery, her sharp calls coming from some unseen place up the street, from the hedge bordering the Rollins’s yard or the azaleas in front of the Walkers’ house. And then we saw her, creeping toward us, with a tentativeness that was new. Perhaps she was alarmed by our sheer numbers, by the two basset hounds tugging on leashes held by the Hills’ son. Still, Callie crept closer, all the while mewling. She circled wide of the dogs, through her own yard, then stopped near the curb, where two younger girls got her attention and scratched her head and stroked her long tail.

There was no sign of the Schaeffers, but it was difficult to know if they were home or not, unless we happened to see them coming or going in one of their cars, or unless it was dark outside and their lights were on and we could see them or their shadows through the windows. It was still early and wouldn’t be dark for hours.

We drank beer and wine. The kids drank sodas. We ate salads and pizza. Someone had wheeled their basketball hoop from their driveway and set it up at the end of the street, on the flattest part, where it dead-ended in front of a guardrail and a stand of trees. A three-on-three game commenced. Some high school boys against some dads. We could almost pretend it was like before, but for the newness of the Schaeffers’ house and the absence of the Bradleys’, but for the yellow siding and the dizzying roofline that cast the entire party—the tables and coolers and those of us who stood around them, the three-on-three game, the Hills’ basset hounds and the Schaeffers’ cat, playing with the two girls who’d found a couple of sticks and had Callie on her hind legs, pawing at the tips suspended in the air—in a premature shadow. A breeze dipped from the rooftops and the tallest trees, where the leaves stirred in the late-afternoon sunlight. Up the street, where our block ended, sunlight glinted. An SUV turned onto our street and stopped at the orange cones. The driver’s door opened and Steven Schaeffer stepped out, picked up one of the cones, and moved it out of the way. Then he got back in and drove down the street, into the shadow and into the party.

“Watch out,” someone called to the kids on that end of the street.

“What’s he doing?” someone else asked.

Steven Schaeffer inched his way. Kids parted toward the curbs and the girls playing with Callie raced across the Schaeffers’ lawn, clutching their sticks like batons in a relay race, leaving Callie in the grass, looking confused and peeved. We could make out a figure in the passenger seat through the tinted windows. Steven turned into his driveway as the garage door lifted to reveal the second car, a floor-to-ceiling shelving system on three walls, and the clean space where he parked the truck. We gaped. The brake lights glared. Then the door lowered and they were gone.

One of the kids had the good sense to reset the cone that Steven Schaeffer had moved aside. We turned our attention again to the party, to the neighbors in attendance. The basketball game recommenced. Perhaps it had never paused. But time had elapsed—no more than a minute or so—since the SUV turned onto our street and then disappeared behind the garage door. The shadows had shifted, grown longer, and we stood deeper inside them. The Schaeffers’ snubbing cast a pall, it seemed, dampened the party’s spirit. Was that what had happened? We’d been snubbed? The party was for them, we understood, as well as for us.

But then, after a few minutes, their front door opened and Donna Schaeffer appeared with a platter of orange and green veggies, and Steven Shaeffer followed with a bottle of white wine. Donna wore a long dress, the color of sand, and a white sweater draped across her bare shoulders. Steven wore a pair of plaid shorts, a blue shirt with a collar, and loafers with ankle socks. We might have wondered for a moment if it was all for us. We might have thought they were too dressed up for our party, what with the kids, some still in their bathing suits, and the pizzas and the hot dogs and the sweat emanating from the basketball game. But here they were—surveying the crowd in the street in front of them. It seemed to get brighter in that moment. It seemed that the shadows we stood in receded a step.

Then Donna Schaeffer lifted the veggie platter ever so slightly, and tipped her head and craned her long neck as her sandals found the two stairs that joined her front porch and the slate walkway that led to the driveway. It was an elegant move, practiced over years arriving at nice parties in nice clothes with nice food. She walked toward us, Steven in tow, across the immaculate lawn.

Someone consolidated snacks onto a single plate to make room for the veggies. Donna placed them there, and Steven sunk his wine bottle into a cooler with ice. Then they turned to face us and we moved en masse to greet them. We made a circle, a crush of the polite and the curious, and overwhelmed them with glad-you-could-comes and so-nice-to-meet-yous. We shook their hands. We pointed out our houses and our kids. We told them about our jobs, the schools we’d attended, how long we’d lived here. We let them nosh and mingle. The Schaeffers uncorked the bottle they’d brought and poured two cups. Then they turned and admired their house. Perhaps they’d never done so from this vantage point. It was an impressive sight, no doubt, in the waning daylight with the blue sky tinting autumn gold.

Then one of the girls who’d been playing with Callie asked about the cat.

Donna Schaeffer paused, the edge of the clear, plastic cup near her glossed lips, which formed the basis of a smile. “Which cat, dear?” she asked.

“Callie,” the girl said.

We glanced around, expecting to find her among us, somewhere within eyeshot.

“Your cat,” the girl finished.

“But we don’t have a cat,” Donna Schaeffer said.

“Yes, you do!” the girl said.

“Yeah!” The second girl had appeared at the first girl’s side. “She’s black and white and she’s got a loud meow.”

The two girls looked at each other and began mewing. Together. A chorus. Over and over. Their imitation of Callie was remarkably accurate.

“That cat!” Steven Schaeffer said. “He’s not ours.”

“She,” one of the girls corrected him.

“We’re actually a bit afraid of him.”

“Her!” the other girl said.

“Terrified, more like it,” Donna Schaeffer said.

“No one knows whose cat it is?” Steven Schaeffer asked.

We assured them that we’d all thought the cat was theirs, seeing how it had arrived when they did.

“Maybe the cat belonged to the folks who owned the old house,” Steven Schaeffer said.

“The Bradleys!” we said, then noted that they hadn’t had a cat.

“Hmmm,” Steven Schaeffer said.

“Creepy,” Donna Schaeffer said.

“Where is she?” one of the girls asked.

“Let’s ask her where she lives!” the second one said.

They cupped their hands to their mouths and called together—“Callie! Callie!”—using the approximate pitch and cadence with which they’d mewed. They turned in tight circles—one clockwise, the other counter-.

And then the cat appeared beside a fledgling bush at the corner of the Schaeffers’ house. The girls kept calling, while Callie walked with her long, sleek stride the length of the slate walkway, then climbed the front steps and sat on the porch, facing us. The girls tittered but the rest of us sensed a shift, a challenge from cat to homeowner, a claiming of territory, a mounting of tensions.

She lay on her side, and the girls ran toward her, across the Schaeffers’ weedless lawn, oblivious to the breach of property, the concept of trespass, and the possibility that Donna and Steven Schaeffer might not be one of us. The girls sat on the front steps and flanked the cat, each with a hand on her exposed side. She raised her head and the girls scratched the top of it.

Donna Schaeffer glanced at our faces, the neighbors she’d just met but didn’t know. An exasperated expression spread from her eyes to her brow and across her forehead. The tip of her nose reddened, perhaps reflecting the sky where the sun was starting to set. “You mean she’s a stray?” she asked.

We shook our heads. We’d thought she belonged to the Schaeffers.

“She’s not ours!” Donna Schaeffer said.

She stepped onto the curb, but not onto her lawn. She balled her hands into fists and set them on her hips, her elbows forming sharp angles, but it was Steven who spoke instead: “That cat followed us into the garage the other day. We pulled the car in and shut the garage door. She was by the door leading into the house, waiting to be let in.”

We might have laughed. It sounded funny—Callie expecting to be let into the house, as though she lived there. We’d all assumed this was the case. We had to adjust our assumptions.

“Girls!” Donna Schaeffer called.

They looked up with narrowed eyes.

“Move the cat, please. She doesn’t belong to us. She doesn’t belong there.”

They shrugged, as if to say the cat goes where she wants. But then they stood and carried her across the lawn and across the street into the Warrens’ yard, where there were thick hedges, beneath which we’d seen Callie hide during thunderstorms. They set her down in the grass and the cat ran, the girls chasing after her.

Donna Schaeffer stood on the curb at the edge of her property, facing us in the street. Steven joined her. He glanced about and sipped his wine. There was nothing left to say, apparently. Or so we thought, until Donna Schaeffer said, “That cat must belong to someone.” She said it like a question, and searched our faces for shared affirmation, for agreement.

“Should we call animal control?” she asked.

It wasn’t a question we expected. She was a cat with a collar, even if the collar didn’t have an address or a phone number. Still, she lived here. Someplace nearby. There were houses that backed to ours, a labyrinth of streets and sidewalks and footpaths and addresses and families with pets. We couldn’t know them all. Our faces must have said this, because Steven Schaeffer waved an open palm, as though to calm Donna, as though to indicate, perhaps, that she’d crossed a line.

But Donna had retrieved a phone from her pocket, was pressing buttons. In the next moment the garage door growled and yawned. She folded her arms across her chest, the phone in one hand, the empty cup in the other. “It’s cold,” she said to Steven, who brought his open palm around her shoulder. She smiled at him and we looked away, and in the next moment they were heading up the driveway and through the open garage and inside the house.

It grew quiet then. It seemed that the party was over, the festive atmosphere deflated. Even the younger kids who’d been playing tag and running around the basketball hoop had found something to calm them. We glanced at each other, at the yellow siding and the pitched roof and the open garage with its two cars and elaborate shelving, and we agreed that we missed the Bradleys, their brick Cape, so much like ours.  We missed their girls. The sun had set and streaked the high clouds pink. The older kids had gone inside to TVs or phones, or over to friends’ houses for who-knows-what. The food on the tables had long gone cold. The drinks in the coolers sat in melting ice. Then the Schaeffers’ porch lights came on, and we turned toward each other, realizing we’d been staring, and, in the next moment, the streetlights illuminated, and we wondered if the Schaeffers’ lights were controlled by computer, tied to the meteorological sunset, the way the county had the streetlights timed.

And what about the cat? Had she appeared when the Schaeffers arrived? Didn’t she belong to someone?

We admitted we’d been bothered by her near-constant presence, her outsized volume, her demands. Now we were bothered by something else.

And then she called, with her sharp, shrill voice. We turned toward the Schaeffers’, the front door and the lit porch, but it was empty. The mewing gained volume, insistence, an edge of desperation.

Callie stood in the garage, between the SUV and the door that led inside the house. She screamed. And again. The hard edges of the cars and the close walls amplified her voice.

“Callie!” The girls sprang forward and ran up the driveway and into the garage. No one tried to stop them. They cornered Callie by the door leading inside the house and scooped her up. Callie shrieked. The garage door lurched and growled and started down and the girls bolted. They ducked and made it out of the garage, spilling themselves and the cat on the driveway. Callie landed on her feet, of course. The girls scraped their knees. We raced to them. Their parents weren’t at the party, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t cry. They glanced around, wide-eyed for the cat, but she was gone again.

The garage door was closed. The front door, too. We expected they’d come outside to see what the fuss was, if everyone was okay, to apologize or warn us off their property. Something. The girls went and searched for the cat, while we retreated to the curb and discussed what to do. Confront them? Some argued that they might not have known anyone was in the garage, or that the door was on a timer and closed automatically, while others argued that Callie was so loud and the girls raised such a ruckus it was impossible that the Schaeffers wouldn’t have known they were there. It was intentional, these people said, reminding us that the house was equipped with security cameras—it said so on a sign posted in the garden. They were probably watching us now through the live feed, if not through the front windows from a darkened room.

We had to reevaluate. Some worried for Callie. Others noted that she was getting along fine, had the run of the neighborhood, and went where she wished, including inside the Schaeffers’ garage, and, if she was sly enough, into their house. This notion made us smile, even as we acknowledged the dangers.

The party was over. Callie mewed down the street, standing on the base of the basketball hoop in the near darkness. We went to clear the food and drinks and fold up the tables and check on our kids.

It wasn’t until weeks later, well after school had started, when we first noticed Callie’s absence. It must have started with someone. Word got around. We wondered when we’d seen her last. Everyone had a different notion. Crickets still sang from the grass, but the air had turned sharp. The Schaeffers came and went in their cars. The garage door opened and closed. We decorated for Halloween. The leaves turned on the trees and fell and crunched underfoot. The Schaeffers had theirs blown off their grass and hauled away.

By now we were getting used to the house—its size and scope and the dramatic angles of its roofline. It was only natural, like how we got used to the newer developments that crept farther out, along the highways that led from the city and replaced the farms and forests that had been there before.

Maybe, one of us suggested, Callie’s owner had taken her inside and made her an indoor cat.

No, someone else said. The Schaeffers probably trapped her in their garage, called animal control, and had her removed or worse.

No, a third said. Maybe Callie’s owner had sold their house, like the Bradleys had, and moved to a different house, a bigger house, in a new neighborhood.

We liked this last suggestion best.

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Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, LitHub, and Colorado Review. He’s received grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Maryland State Arts Council, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. He’s on the faculty of New Directions in Writing, which is affiliated with the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis.

 Bluesky: @danacann.bsky.social‬

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