Chapter 4
Bratenahl, Ohio, is a strange little suburb.
In the space of just over one square mile, there is a real mixed bag of property offerings.
You’ve got your newer developments like Magpie Court, for the trendy millennials and the smug early retirees with huge savings pots who think they are millennials.
Then there are those big mansions I told you about—truly spectacular by any standard, at least from a distance.
Even the scruffy ones that the old fogies don’t maintain properly.
You’ve got a few super-modern houses, mostly built by basketball and football stars that are hardly ever in them, and on the edges of the township, tucked away behind the fire station, there are some streets of more modest homes from the postwar housing boom.
I always imagine that the people who live there—a mix of normal retirees and young, less affluent families—must get sick of having to look out across the untended back lots of the lakefront behemoths every time they leave their houses.
Most citizens of Bratenahl do make an effort, though.
Even the poorest of the rich folks put a flag up for the Fourth of July, spring for a cheap plastic basket of begonias beside the door.
In the clustered world of Magpie Court all the heavy upkeep is done for you, and the unspoken understanding is that if you must do more, then your Halloween scarecrow will be a tasteful chappie, and your Christmas lights will be virginal white.
Which is why the Evans house stands out.
Granted, Hailey Evans does manage to grow pots of red geraniums that tone nicely with the lavender, and the souped-up Jeep Cherokee they sometimes leave out in the driveway is unusually clean for a family car.
But there are cracks in the facade. Hideous, gaping cracks: cheap plastic pinwheels stuck in front of the hedges, bird sculptures of reclaimed metal on the lawn, wind chimes swinging from the corner of the garage. And the shoes. Oh my God the shoes.
I can only surmise that they went for some kind of rare flooring option.
Expensive, elegant, and utterly impractical.
The delicate nature of bamboo, maybe, is the only possible explanation for the piles of footwear that I have seen amassed on the Evans’s front porch: tiny Crocs and muddied running shoes, stilettos and snow boots, flip-flops and sneakers and fur-lined slippers and Wellingtons.
Golf spikes and ski boots and roller skates and .
. . it’s a miracle they can still access their own front door, the absolute hillbillies.
Let me tell you, growing up in my house, you kept your shoes in the closet or on your feet. Otherwise, you got hit with one right across your backside.