There were only three proper houses in Daneville and all of them were on Sycamore Street. The biggest house is where Bertha Anne Nielsen lived, and the second biggest house belonged to her friend Agnes.  The third house is where Chancey lived, but Bertha Anne didn’t like him because he was a boy. There was a fourth house, but Bertha Anne didn’t go there much, because it was where Norman lived by himself. Everybody called him Nerm, and he was always grumpy. He never swept his porch, and his house had only one gable that sagged in the middle.

When Agnes came over, she would knock on the door of Bertha Anne’s house. She never rang the doorbell, because Agnes liked things to be old-fashioned, and the doorbell was electric and that was too modern for her. Bertha Anne liked old-fashioned things, too, except she liked to use the new-fashioned telephone for pretend calls to Agnes. Once she called Chancey, but she hung up quickly after she heard his voice.

Old Man Nerm had a doorbell, though, and one day Agnes and Bertha Anne decided to ring his doorbell and then run away. They hid behind the big tree in Bertha Anne’s front yard and peeked to see what the grumpy old man would do. They giggled and maybe Nerm heard them, but he just went back into his house and shut the door.

Then they had another idea, and it was to play a trick on Old Man Nerm and Chancey, too. They put a note on Nerm’s door, rang the bell, then hid away behind the tree. The note said, “Hi, Old Man Nerm. Chancey wants you to come out and play.”  As luck would have it, Chancey happened to walk by Nerm’s house right at the time Bertha Anne and Agnes hid behind the tree. Old Man Nerm opened his door, and the note fell to his porch with the leaves and unread newspapers. He picked it up and read it. He looked around and then waved to Chancey who waved back.  Then he went inside. Agnes and Bertha Anne thought that was very funny, but they got bored and went to their houses on Sycamore Street and spent the rest of the day having tea and moving the furniture around in Bertha Anne’s house.

One day Agnes, who was a year older than Bertha Anne, moved away from Sycamore Street and took her house with her. That left just two proper houses on Sycamore Street, and Bertha Anne was losing interest in both. Besides, Chancey’s house was beginning to fall apart. Its windows fell out and the roof sagged like Old Man Nerm’s house. When one of the gables broke, she didn’t go there much at all, and she pushed his house into a corner.

But one day, Bertha Anne was thinking about Agnes and out of the blue, Chancey came over. He rang the doorbell and Bertha Anne answered and invited him to wait on the porch. She went in and made tea and brought it to the porch and the two of them sat in the swing where everybody could see them and not think anything improper. Bertha Anne asked him how everything was going, and he said fine except his uncle Norman was not feeling well. At first, Bertha Anne didn’t know who he was talking about, but then she realized Norman was Chancey’s uncle. She was embarrassed because she remembered she used to tease Norman. She didn’t say anything about it because she was having a nice time with Chancey and didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere, and besides it was a long time ago when she and Agnes teased Norman.

Chancey seemed a very sad about Norman’s health, so Bertha Anne asked about him straight out. Chancey said Norman had been in the war a long time ago and was injured and sometimes the pain was too much for him and he had to go to the veteran’s hospital for care. Chancey said he wasn’t sure Uncle Norman would be able to come home, and that was sad especially because there were only a few people in Daneville, and it was going to be lonely. “I’ll miss my uncle,” Chancey said, “so I want to be your friend. Maybe you’re the only one besides my family who I can talk to.” Bertha Anne was nervous when she said, “Oh, why Chancey, I’d love to be your friend.” They both looked at each other for a long time without saying anything. Chancey drank his tea and then said he should be going home because he didn’t want to worry his family. He walked down Bertha Anne’s sidewalk and on down Sycamore Street, past the vacant lot where Agnes used to live and past Norman’s empty house where leaves were beginning to pile up again and newspapers draped sadly on the porch steps.

After that Bertha Anne didn’t see much of Daneville, Chancey, or Norman. She had grown up and become very busy. Daneville and its three houses had moved into a corner of Bertha Anne’s spare room in the new house where she lived with her husband and her two children, a boy and a girl. One day she was cleaning and when she came to that corner, she remembered the fun she used to have in Daneville. She looked at the houses for a long time until she had to wipe away tears running down her cheeks. The roofs of both were stacked against the wall. The trees had fallen over, and the swing on the front porch lay unused. She tried to fix the roofs, but her tears got in the way. She went to her bathroom for a tissue and then sat in the reading chair in her bedroom. Her cat hopped onto her lap and curled up to sleep. The afternoon light was dimming because it was already November. Soon it would be Thanksgiving and then Christmas, and Bertha Anne realized the holidays would be sad again this year because her father, Norman, had died of his illnesses and was never coming again. She thought of what it must have been for him in the Vietnam war and what it was like for him to come home sickly and often unhappy. As a girl, it was never easy when her father watched old war movies and saw pictures of wounded soldiers and wounded children and wounded women with babies. She remembered how she would go to her room to escape his outbursts, and somehow Daneville, Agnes, Chancey and Norman made it bearable. She hoped her father was happier now.

— RJ Stewart