Lukewarm

Every frosty morning for eleven winters, Joan Petrie scraped the windscreens on Rata Crescent, and every frosty morning we let her.

Twizel gets proper frosts. Not the polite white dusting they get up north, but minus eight, minus ten, the kind that turns the tussock to glass and freezes the dog's water bowl into a single puck you can lift out whole. By June the crescent is dark until well after seven. You go out with your keys and your breath hangs in front of you like a speech bubble with nothing in it, and there is the car, blind, every window furred white.

Except on Rata Crescent it wasn't. Not since Don died.

She started the winter after the funeral. Somebody saw her at quarter past six in Don's Swanndri and a pink beanie, working down the street with a plastic scraper and a jug of water from her kitchen tap. Not hot water. Never hot. She told the Hendersons' boy that on the first morning, when he came out with a steaming kettle to help: "You'll crack it. Lukewarm, love. Lukewarm does the job." She'd been a science teacher at the area school for thirty years, and she said it the way she must have said a thousand things in a classroom, as a fact that was going to be true whether or not you liked it.

By seven, every windscreen on the crescent was clear. Nine houses, eleven cars, the Hendersons' boat trailer once, as a joke. Then she went home, and the light in her kitchen came on, and that was that.

We said thank you, the first year. We left things on her doorstep: a box of feijoas, a bottle of something at Christmas, a card from the Lims with a drawing of her by their youngest that gave her six fingers on each hand. She never mentioned any of it. By the third winter we had stopped saying thank you, the way you stop thanking a streetlight.

The hedge was the problem. It had always been the problem.

Don had planted it in the eighties, before most of us arrived, a line of macrocarpa along the north side of their section. By the time any of us bought on Rata Crescent it was nine metres of dark green wall, and from May to August it put a shadow across the bend in the road that the sun never touched. The rest of the crescent thawed by eleven. That strip stayed white all day. In a hard week it went black. Black ice is the worst kind, because it looks like nothing at all.

In July, Ollie Henderson put his ute into the power pole on that bend. Nobody was hurt. The pole leaned for a month, and so did the street.

There was a group chat. There's always a group chat. Gary Lim started it, but it could have been any of us. Someone needs to say something about the hedge before a kid gets killed. Thirty-one messages later there was a letter to the district council, drafted by Gary, tidied by Sheree at number four, who works in an office and knows how to write "we wish to bring to your attention". It said the hedge was a hazard. It said the owner had been approached informally (we hadn't). It asked the council to require its removal.

I signed it first. I want that on the record. It was Sunday night, it was a PDF, and I put my name in the little box at the bottom with my finger, and then I made a cup of tea. By Tuesday every house had signed except one.

The letter was supposed to be anonymous. The council officer who came out to look at the hedge didn't know that, or didn't care. He stood on Joan's front step with a clipboard and read her the names.

The next morning there was a frost of minus nine.

We came out, one by one, in the dark, and stood beside our cars with our keys. The windscreens were white. All of them. Gary's, Sheree's, the Lims' two, the Hendersons' new ute, mine.

Across the road, the light in Joan's kitchen was on. Behind the ranchslider you could see the shape of her, at the bench, in the dressing gown, holding a mug with both hands. She didn't look out. She didn't need to.

Nobody said anything. We went back inside for jugs.

That week we learned a lot about frost. We learned that a credit card bends but a library card snaps. We learned that the de-icer spray from the Four Square is mostly a smell. Gary learned what Joan had told the Hendersons' boy eleven years earlier, when he poured a kettle of boiling water down his windscreen and it cracked from corner to corner with a sound like a gunshot, and he stood there in his slippers saying a word that carried, in that air, right to the end of the street.

We were late for things. The Lim kids missed the bus twice. Sheree scraped a hole the size of a dinner plate and drove to Omarama looking through it like a submarine.

And nobody waved anymore. That was the other thing that froze. You'd come out at seven and there would be three or four of us at it, hunched, scraping, breath going up, and nobody would look across. Not at each other and not at the house with the hedge. As if we'd all agreed on something without discussing it, which I suppose we had, on Sunday night, in the little box at the bottom of a PDF.

The council's reply came in the third week. The reply said the hedge stood on private land and the road issue would be managed with grit and a warning sign. The sign went up the next day: a yellow diamond with a car on it skidding sideways. It was the only new thing on the crescent that winter that anybody talked about.

The hedge stayed. We had lost the street, and we hadn't even got the hedge.

On the Saturday I was awake at half past five, for no reason I could have told you. I lay there working out what I'd say to her, and every version started with "I" and went downhill from there. In the end I got up, filled a jug from the kitchen tap and held my wrist under it until it was the temperature of nothing, the way you test a baby's bath, and I went across the road in the dark.

Her car was a little white Corolla. I'd never noticed it before. It had been parked in her drive every morning for eleven years, and she had never once done her own windscreen first.

It took me twenty minutes. I did it badly. The water froze in the wipers before I got to the back window. My fingers went from cold to sore to something worse than sore. Halfway through, the kitchen light came on, and I made myself keep going and not look up, and when I finally did look up, she was standing at the ranchslider with her mug.

We looked at each other through the glass for what felt like a long time. Then she pulled the curtain across.

I went home. I didn't know if that was a yes or a no. I still don't, if I'm honest.

On Monday there was a frost of minus eleven, the coldest of the year.

We came out in the dark with our jugs and our scrapers and our cards.

Every windscreen on Rata Crescent was clear. Every one. Gary's new one, Sheree's, the Lims' two, the Hendersons' ute, mine. Scraped clean to the rubber and wiped dry so it wouldn't refreeze, the way only one person on the street had ever bothered to do it.

Except for a small square, low down on the driver's side of each windscreen, left white. Neat edges. About the size of the little box at the bottom of a form, where you sign your name.

Across the road the kitchen light was on. Nobody went over. We stood there in the cold, eleven cars, nine houses, and one by one, without a word, we bent down and scraped off our own.