cute hipster girls in black-and-white-striped tights, ruffled skirts, and Chuck Taylors. In the next, Kim Chi Wah Wah: Korean BBQ Tacos, an Asian man sears thin strips of meat while his wife takes orders at the window.
I race next door, where a middle-aged woman pours stripes of crayon colors onto a snowball of fluffy shaved ice. Across the street, we investigate Frankly Speaking: Purveyors of All Things Pork and find a frat-type guy selling hot dogs. Inside the KeBabulous! wagon a Middle Eastern couple skewers chunks of grilled beef and pepper.
I dodge mothers leading packs of children, bob and weave through coveys of tween girls giggling and trading bites, sprint past couples holding hands, studying menus posted on the sides of trailers. We gape into the windows of the final few trailers, breathe in the fragrance of sugar and vanilla that they exhale.
Aubrey is not inside any of them.
I stop in the middle of the closed street while what amounts to a block party eddies around me. A mother and her high school–age daughter, both of them whippet-thin, the kind that would share each other’s clothes, pass by, heading for the cupcake trailer.
“Snow Cap or Red Velvet?” the mother asks.
“You get one, I’ll get the other, and we’ll split,” her daughter answers.
I hate them both. Intensely.
Martin plows through the crowd, reaches me. “She’s not here.”
“Now what?”
Martin guides me away from the mob. “Cam, you haven’t eaten all day. I’ll grab some food and meet you at that park around the corner on our old street and we’ll reconfigure.”
Starved, out of ideas, and grateful to him for offering to brave the throng, I agree.
I could find my way to our old street a few blocks away with my eyes closed. The instant I turn onto it, the tumult falls away and I am back in my lost paradise. Our street, lined with tall sycamores so old their crowns have grown together to form a canopy that shades the road, gave the entire development its name. On either side of the road are one- and two-bedroom bungalows built after the war for the vets who came home but didn’t use the GI Bill to go to college. Instead, they worked in the ladder factory that used to be nearby or got jobs as plumbers, painters, electricians.
The street is spruced up far beyond what it was the last time I visited several years back. The faded gray asbestos shingles that had covered most of the houses when we lived here have been removed by the new hipster owners and the houses are painted bright, imaginative colors: Periwinkle with lime green and pimiento accents. Mustard with cobalt blue trim. Seeing all the rebellious colors makes my eyes ache. I can almost not look at the tiny duplex where Martin and I lived, where we drank wine at sunset in the backyard, and decorated joke Christmas trees with souvenirs of our happiness. The place where Aubrey was conceived. The new owners have converted it into a single house with one porch and painted it soft lavender with chocolate trim.
I sit in the little park at the end of the street and my heart constricts with a pang of melancholic longing as I imagine how I could have pushed Aubrey in her stroller to this park to meet the children of my friends for playdates. How they all would have grown up together and she’d have been part of a jolly swarm of girls eating cones of pink shaved ice together right now.
Martin arrives, deposits several bags on the table, and we dig in. “Oh, my God,” he says after his first bite of a taco piled with Korean barbecue, napa cabbage, cilantro, and tomato. He holds it out to me. “You have got to try this.”
The taco is a revelation. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat a taco without kimchi on it again.”
“Finish it,” Martin says. “I’m moving on to bachelorette number two.” He pulls out a crepe stuffed with a mixture of caramelized onions, goat cheese, roast chicken, and tarragon, splits it, and slides half over to me. It is heavenly.
I find it hard to hate a man who brings you exactly what you didn’t even know you craved. Food so good that it is impossible to worry while you eat it. Martin takes a bite of the crepe, puts it down, rolls his eyes back in his head, raises his fists up next to his ears, rotates them, and makes