Thirty years ago, give or take a few years, a couple lived on our street who would not speak to us. If we tried to engage with them in any way, even such a little a thing as to nod and smile in their direction, they would look away or stare right through us and never say a word. They had a teenage daughter—at least we assumed she was their daughter—who was pregnant; and there was a boy whom we took to be her boyfriend. He would park his car half a block away. We guessed he slept in his car. And when the girl’s parents left the house, he would go in and be with her.
We speculated that he was the father of the baby in her belly and imagined that the parents would not let their daughter have anything to do with him. So they got together on the sly. I knew nothing about them but made up all kinds of stories about them.
And then one day the girl was no longer there, and the presumed boyfriend no longer parked on the block.
Decades later, the old man died, and a woman with three grown or almost grown sons started coming to visit the woman with whom we had still never spoken. Once again, my curiosity was aroused. I imagined all sorts of stories about the middle-aged mother of three sons whom we took to be the same girl who had lived there and then vanished. We assumed the oldest of the three sons had been the baby in her belly.
After all the years of imagining who those mysterious neighbors were and what they were going during all that time, I pulled my imaginings together into a novella (34,000 words) that I titled Peaceful? Point, which is the name of the street the characters live on. In the novella, I explain that thirty-some-odd years ago someone painted that question mark on the street sign on the corner, and the city never bothered to correct it, and the residents liked the question mark on the sign.
Watch for me to publish Peaceful? Point sometime in the coming months. Also in the book are a retired English professor, an exotic dancer, a huge man with tattoos all over his face, a lesbian couple, and a kid who almost fell into a fight with an alligator. It was a fun book to write.