You just don’t do that. You just don’t cut through the suburbs, through Mission Viejo, on your way home up the 5 freeway from San Diego, and roll up on Dardania Avenue like that. You don’t. You don’t intentionally accelerate past your old house on your way down to the second house from the corner where a woman is outside watering roses in a flower bed beneath the front window. You just don’t sit in your car, looking at the house where your childhood best friend Wes used to live and think to yourself, I should tell that woman that I used to spend more time in this house than my house up the street, because in this house, I knew what was coming next. You just don’t do that…but that’s what I did.
I got off the freeway at La Paz, up Muirlands, down Minoa until it swept left, where it mysteriously became Dardania and punched it until I almost got to Gloriosa, but not quite and sat across from Wes’s old house watching a woman water her roses.
I didn’t want to go in, that would be a bit much, but I just wanted her to know somehow that this is where Wes and his parents Mae and Glenn and his sisters Tiffany and Nicole and Uncle Larry, Aunt Donna, Aunt June, Uncle Arvid, Great Uncle John and Iris and Twila and Olga…they all let me borrow their family for a little while…that’s all.
Against my better judgement, I shut off the engine, got out of my car and crossed Dardania and stood on the sidewalk in front of Wes’s house and raised my voice over the spray coming out of the nozzle and said “Excuse me?” The woman, who appeared in her mid- forties, didn’t hear me at first, so I said it again. “Excuse me!” This time, she looked slowly over her shoulder to see the rando at the end of her driveway giving a weak wave. “I’m sorry to bother you” I said “but my best friend used to live in this house growing up.” I noticed that she kept the hose running, in case she needed to adjust the nozzle from the Shower setting she was currently using, to the Jet setting and aim for my Adams apple. “Uh huh” she said, keeping her eyes on me and slowly moving left in the direction of the front door. “I used to live up on the other corner where Minoa becomes Dardania for no reason?” I said, hoping to impress her with a shrewd takedown of the city planners. “Oh yeah?” she placated me, inching, inching left. “Yeah, our family kind of, fell apart and so I spent a lot of time in this house.” I could tell that was too much information, when in fact it wasn’t nearly enough, but it really didn’t matter. It was time to go for it. “Hey” I said “Is there still a little secret door in the back of that upstairs closet that you can crawl through to get into the Bonus room there above the garage?” She slowly turned completely around, looking me up and down very intently and let the water flatten a shower circle on the lawn before she reached over and turned off the hose bibb. Impossibly, she then said “Come on in”
And I walked through that house like a giant.
The Secret Door