Alder Street had more pumpkins than railings. Their plastic grins counted. The wind off the breakwater carried that iodine taste that lives between your teeth and your name. The EXIT sign in the rec hall window buzzed late, then on time.
Names travel on candy if you don’t pin them. People say it soft in Caldera, same tone you use for wet steps.
Nora kept a hand on Eli’s backpack so he wouldn’t slip loose the way first-graders do when candy makes gravity optional. He wore a paper crown that kept listing to port; she righted it every third step, the way you fix a frame on a boat.
“Take one,” she said, for the twentieth time, because some words only work if you say them out loud.
Eli nodded with the certainty of the very small. “One,” he said, and held up one finger that had chocolate in the fingerprint.
They reached 230 Alder—brown steps, a damp welcome mat, a jack-o’-lantern bowl on a chair with a tongue-depressor sign stabbed into the pile.
TAKE ONE
Happy Halloween 🙂
The pile was heaped like a dare.
A clean-coated man in a neat collar stood just beyond the porch light’s reach, stroller handle in one hand, the other in his pocket. Silver gull-wing pin on his lapel. He checked the block with a cashier’s patience, the kind that already knows the change.
“Go ahead, bug,” Nora said.
Eli took one. No hesitation. Good kid. The mini hit his bucket and the bucket clacked against plastic—small bell.
Then he looked at her, looked back at the bowl, and in the motion a hundred children learn from a hundred older children, he took a second and palmed it quick, the way you hide a penny you plan to pull from behind an ear.
Nora opened her mouth to say no, but he was proud of being quick, the porch light was warm on his foil crown, and she was tired in the way that makes you pick your battles wrong.
“Just—” she started. He smiled at her with all the teeth trying to be permanent.
Her phone vibrated. The chat header that always said Mom turned to a single dash. Favorites showed — where Eli lived. She searched her own kid and got a spin. The map app said No Results for the name she’d written on forms while pregnant like it would protect them both.
Her heart shrugged like it had forgotten a verb.
“Hold up,” she said, thumb already refreshing.
Eli tugged her sleeve. “Can we go to the big skeleton?” He pointed down the block where a plastic femur the size of a lamppost leaned on a hedge.
“Give one back,” Nora said, voice too soft. She cleared her throat. “Eli. Put one back.”
His lip ran a small experiment in betrayal. “But I’m little,” he said, trying out a loophole he’d heard in someone else’s mouth.
The neat man with the gull pin took one polite step closer to the edge of the light, enough that the metal flashed. His eyes didn’t change. His pen made a quiet mark in a little book without looking down.
“Buddy,” Nora said, her best key. “You took two.”
He glanced at the bowl like it might object with a rule of its own. It grinned a sharpie smile. Wind lifted the top layer of foil and set it, a dry click.
Her phone buzzed again. Mom’s thread threw a question mark, then went back to the dash.
Shame cracked under Nora’s shoes. Not guilt—she had thieved nothing—but she had let a small wrong assemble itself on her watch. She set a hand on Eli’s shoulder the way you grab a railing in heavy weather.
“Put one back,” she said. “And write your name.”
“What,” he said, offended by homework in the wild.
A girl in a yellow jacket with a paper lantern paused and offered Nora a square of chalk. Her father gave the nod men give when they hope you won’t make them talk. The girl said, solemn: “You have to write it.”
“Thank you,” Nora told her. The street eased a notch.
Crouching is contagious. Nora crouched by the chair and Eli folded beside her. The bowl smelled like old plastic and new sugar and the faint chemical leaf of dry-erase. Nora’s hand shook enough to make the chalk line thick.
“Write it big,” she said. “Your whole name.”
He did, tongue out in concentration: ELIJAH, clumsy and gorgeous across the white slat. He added the last name the way he’d seen her sign permission slips, pleased to know where it goes.
The chalk squeaked. The hairs on Nora’s arms stood.
A boy in a skeleton hoodie drifted close, the look kids wear when they want a story that will make sense later. Down by Bay, the courthouse bell tried to ring and made a swallowing sound. The EXIT sign across the street found the beat for a breath.
Nora took air and said the thing she didn’t know she knew. “I keep Elijah.” It felt like a signature more than a sentence. She said it again because some doors require two knocks.
The chalk line thinned, then went sharp, as if the chair decided to remember. The foil on top of the bowl settled; the tiny crinkles lay flat.
“Salt?” the lantern girl asked, producing a fast-food packet with a practiced hand.
Nora tore it. She drew a narrow line on the plastic rim. It hissed. Cheap steam or not, it marked. Eli’s eyes went wide; he grinned in spite of himself. The neat man’s mouth pinched and pretended to relax. His pen made another tidy scratch.
Nora’s phone buzzed. Mom slid back into her chat like a magnet remembering metal. Favorites put Eli where he belonged. Nora’s stomach unclenched.
“Theeey fixed it,” the skeleton boy announced to the small attentive universe.
Eli looked at the extra mini in his palm like it had someone else’s name. He set it back on top of the pile, cheeks hot. His fingers shook and he noticed.
“Can I still have my one?” he asked, apology and wish tangled.
“Yeah,” Nora said, and because she was teaching both of them: “You kept the one.”
He nodded with dignity, weighed the bar like a king learning economics.
An old dog came up the sidewalk, big-headed and slow. He set his chin on the step and the chair remembered its manners. Eli reached without thinking and the dog accepted the pat like legal tender.
“Bruiser,” the yellow-jacket girl whispered, reverent, and lifted her lantern for him. It burned steady.
Down the block, a runner in a dark windbreaker lifted a candy from behind a rail—not the bowl, but close enough to fool a child—and pressed it into a toddler’s hand. The toddler squealed. The mother glanced at her phone and saw — where a name had lived five years. The noise she made started as a gasp and tried to be a swear.
“Not from the bowl,” Nora said before she knew she’d say it. “Not clean. Gifts carry names; grabs carry debt.”
The mother heard, snatched the extra back, kissed her kid’s head like she owned it (she did), and wrote a name on a porch step with shaking chalk. The lantern father tore a salt packet for her and drew a line the world could see and agree with.
The gull-pin man wrote in his little book the way cashiers count tills. He glanced toward the corner like the hour had a flavor he wanted. The metal pin shone like clean nails.
Nora pocketed the empty salt sleeve. Littering felt like asking for it. She checked Eli’s crown and centered it. He made a face that said crowns are for babies. She let it list again. Choosing your battles is a holy skill.
“Skeleton now?” he asked.
“We can,” she said, and to the chair and the bowl and the air: “I keep Elijah.”
The bowl stayed a bowl. Good grace.
At 236 Alder someone had taped over TAKE ONE with PLEASE BE HONEST — WE’RE TRUSTING YOU! The sermon made Nora’s teeth itch worse than the iodine. Two boys saw the sign and took two each, automatic as blinking. One phone hiccuped; the other laughed until its owner learned not to.
Nora rapped her knuckles on the rail so the wood had to be involved. “One,” she told them, not unkind. “Write it.”
They did, and the porch took their names the way a polite host takes a coat.
Bruiser paused at the bakery door and leaned his weight into the push bar with old hope. The door remembered its hours and declined, gentle and firm. He sneezed, offended, and moved on, loyal to the street that paid him in pats.
“Carry your own light,” the yellow-jacket girl said, to no one in particular, and lifted her lantern. Eli lifted his paper crown as if answering a toast.
They made the skeleton admire them, because that’s how you greet gods made of plastic. Eli posed with his bucket open. Nora took the picture and the little phone wrote Elijah under it like it had decided to behave.
Behind them, at 214 Alder, the bowl’s grin caught porch light and went mean. A teenager took one, turned his back, slid one up his sleeve. The bowl said nothing. His group chat forgot his name. He froze, put the second bar back like pouring a drink down a sink, and traced his name on the chair with the chalk the skeleton boy handed over.
“Good,” Nora said, to the kid, to the chair, to the part of the night that listens.
The courthouse bell worked up a decent breath. Not a ring. Not yet. The EXIT sign held the beat for three full seconds. The wind carried the bay up Alder and put a penny on every tongue.
When they turned for home, Eli’s hand got quiet in hers, the way a hand does when tired is winning. He rested his head against her coat and jerked it back up because he remembered he was pretending to be big.
“Can I have my one?” he asked, looking for permission retroactively. He likes rules when they don’t bite.
“You can,” she said. “You kept it.”
At their building door she fished for keys and found them where they live, in the pocket the seamstress mended in spring. Eli breathed a circle on the vestibule glass you could draw a face in. Nora pressed her phone to the pane for the shot for Mom and felt stupid-happy that the contact knew its name again.
Inside, the directory screen hiccuped, thought about erasing someone, chose no. She took it as a sign and told herself not to be superstitious. She failed a little.
On the landing, Bruiser had installed himself for a rest and the building had built itself around his patience. He lifted his head when they passed. Eli patted him once, serious. The dog accepted the receipt with grace.
At their apartment door, Nora turned the key and spoke to the wood because she knew how and why. “I keep Elijah,” she said softly. “And I keep this house.”
The deadbolt remembered yes.
Inside, the lamp clicked the way it clicks. The heat did its small work. Eli kicked off his shoes into the same gravity they obey every night. He looked at the single mini in his palm and then at her like he was about to try an argument about bedtime.
“Trade you,” she said. “One bite for one story.”
“What story?”
“The one where a plastic bowl tried to take my kid and the whole block said no.”
He smiled the kind of smile that warms a room. He climbed onto the couch and built a fort out of an old quilt and his small moral victory.
Down on Alder, the neat man’s shoes turned toward the corner where the street meets the line by Bay. He checked his watch. The second hand hesitated, then obeyed. He set his book on the rail for a moment—promise, or threat—and walked on.
Nora locked the door. She said it one more time, because a promise is a thing you keep by repeating it.
“I keep Elijah.”
The lock agreed.
