I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It by Rita Rudner

you have any questions about how this street works, you just ask me.”
    “I have a question,” I asked. “How do we get clickers to raise and lower the gates?”
    “I’ll take care of that,” Mitch replied confidently. “In the meantime, here is the code—just punch it in. The code is changed every three months for security reasons.”
    “What a nice man,” I said as he walked away.
    “He wants money,” my husband muttered under his breath.
    I have to explain that Sycamore Road is a private street. To stop hurried drivers from using it as a shortcut, it was gated at both ends, and as a result it’s now no longer the city’s responsibility.
    My suspicious husband turned out to be right. A few days later a bill arrived in our mailbox. It wasn’t for a lot of money: $125 every three months. With it, we received a list of all the people on Sycamore Road and their phone numbers. Stars were next to the names of residents who had paid the fee. There was an X next to the names of those who were delinquent.
    “What does he do for these dues?” my husband complained, mentally adding up how much money this came to each year.
    “He takes care of the road,” I explained.
    “What does he take care of?”
    “He makes sure it’s OK.”
    “Does he feed it? Does he take it to the movies? It’s a road. What does he do that requires forty thousand dollars a year?”
    “Let’s just pay him. We don’t want an X next to our names; we want a star.”
    The next day the clickers that controlled the movement of the street gates appeared in our mailbox.
    “See, he gave us clickers,” I said excitedly, happy to have evidence that we were getting something for our dues.
    “Wait a second, what’s this?” my husband questioned, pulling out a sheet of paper from the envelope. “Fifty dollars? Fifty dollars for clickers? Where is the bill that shows us how much he paid for them?” he whined.
    “He went and got the clickers. He has to be compensated for his time.”
    “I bet he’s got a stack of them in his garage. He just wanted to make sure we paid our dues before he gave us the clickers. I’m not paying him for the clickers.”
    “We have to. We’ll get an X.”
    Sycamore Road was a quaint little street. People jogged, dogs walked, deer even occasionally meandered through our backyard. One day I spotted Mitch stooping down and inspecting a crack in the pavement. I ran back home.
    “I saw Mitch do something! He was inspecting a crack in the blacktop.”
    “That’s going to cost more money,” my husband insisted.
    “No. That’s what the dues are for. I promise. He takes care of the road.”
    In the following days, yellow Xs began to appear on all the cracks on the road.
    “I guess the cracks didn’t pay their dues,” my husband quipped.
    A note appeared in our mailbox: The upper portion of the road will be repaved on the twenty-second of April and the lower portion on the twenty-fifth. Please use the opposite entrances.
    I was vindicated. There it was—proof that our money was being used for something tangible. What the note didn’t mention was that the road was not the only thing being resurfaced; Mitch had also included his extensive driveway. This turned out to be something that a poker player would refer to as a “tell.”
    I was too timid to tackle him about it, and ultimately so was my husband. We just kept paying our dues and feeling slightly aggrieved.
    Mitch Kemp died a few years later. He was the victim of a sudden heart attack. His wife was the one who was the most shocked. Mitch had not only kept all of the road money in a secret bank account, but he was using it to pay for his mistress in France. Unable to face the people on Sycamore Road, Mitch’s wife put the house up for sale and moved away.
    Turns out the people with Xs by their names had been right. If only I hadn’t wanted a star.
    I blame my kindergarten teacher.
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I never fully understand what goes on in dry cleaning. I know they