Breezes haven’t blown since last Sunday. From the plain states to Michigan, the center of the continent has been hit with warm fronts and the wind has gone too, as if the earth simply forgot to rotate once it reached mid-July.

One voice – a sharp, female voice – rises above the humid night. What she’s saying is too far away to be heard, but from the timing and the tone, I’ve inferred that she doesn’t have anything important to say. She’s not drunk – merely maximizing her turn to talk with volume so the others can’t help but listen.

At 11:30, it’s still sweltering and though this town couldn’t be more opposite than New York, I imagine that it feels like Manhattan in the summer. The streets are bare and windsept, there’s no traffic, certainly no taxis or lit skyscrapers, just darkened porches and lonely mailboxes, and yet I still can envision grimy New York fire excapes running like scaffolding up the sides of these beighe suburban grasses, hanging out above peonies and looking glasses.

Overnight, rains came and swept over the grass rutted by lawn mowers, beginning to crack in deep lighting blots broken into the dirt. Sidewalks and driveways turned the same color as a brown paper bag. I wore a coat to the car and the bag I was carrying to work was pockmarked with big rain drops. Big, brown lakes formed in the intersections and bypassed a steady flow of water down the gutters and into the sewers.

The landscape I see now couldn’t be more opposite. There is no evidence that it’s rained all summer. Only yellow grass and wilted plants.

Conversations die down as the hour moves past 11:30. Now it’s just the sound of the locusts in the bushes and this miserable heat that has taken all the hope from the streets, and made them a surprisingly hard place, but even so, the silly New York/Kansas amalgam passes as quickly as an early morning rain shower.

The gentlemen callers move around in the shadows and occasionally try to entertain her by choosing props from her nearby garage – a skateboard, basketballs to dribble on the driveway while they conversate, and in one instance a wheelchair to sit in. Their outlines are paper-thin on the profile and lanky. Nearly all of them wear baggy jeans and sleeveless shirts – some go shirtless – and they drive 4×4s and cars that sound as though if someone were to climb on the back bumpers and stomp, the shocks would blow away on the wind in one last ear-piercing howl. But, despite the obvious physical and social shortcomings that go with the age, they move with surprising confidence – not necessarily in themselves, but possibly because they know their chances of making a connection are good.

Melissa’s attitude and her sense of style – which again, is all we have to work from – says that she’s done more than entertained the notion of being with them. Crude as the suggestion might be and baseless – for all we know, she might be a do-gooder, involved in her school and a volunteer in a local community organization – we have reasons for our suspicions, chiefly a few necking sessions in parked cars, empty beer cans her friends have spread in our front yard and the drunken, midnight fireworks displays in the absence of her parents.

I am tempted to talk to her. One morning last winter, her car was buried a foot deep in snow. I was out clearing my car and almost stepped through the exhaust clouds to help her dig it out. I got the feeling she wouldn’t appreciate the help or that she might misconstrue my intentions, so I backed out watching her struggle with an under-sized window scraper.

Another time, before the morning in the snow, my wife and I saw her at the nearby sports bar sitting with her mother. It was after 10 on a Friday and there was a circle of empty beer cups on the tabletop. How she was allowed to stay there at such a late hour can probably be blamed on small town ethics and an aversion toward neighbors and the law. But her young face stood out when it ordinarily wouldn’t, not if she were surrounded by her classmates – people her own age whose faces are as fresh and youthful as hers.

We felt sorry for her – that she was glimpsing her full life now. That darkened bars and the hopes of finding someone in the neon signs or in dark driveways would be the bright spots in a forever small town life. Her mother married her high school sweetheart and they are still married to this day. They have Melissa who now seems to belong to no one except these optimistic boys who hopefully remain expectant of a reward that never comes.

But again, I make all these assumptions with no real knowledge, based only on impressions and mere deductions. I have crafted a whole life for this poor girl and it’s a dark one – all because we have never spoken. Next time I find her in the driveway, I am going to introduce myself – save her future, at least in my own mind, which I suspect makes me one of the few males with good intentions in her short life so far. And the strange part is, we distrust each other the most, which is why I shut the porch light out and go to bed while the June bugs return to their places in the flowers.