“Are you sure this won’t be a bother?” I asked my friend Matthew.

We were on the way to his apartment to see my nemesis, his wife Courtney, so that I could meet their new baby, Annie – who had the name I’d planned to give my to-be-born-any-day-now baby if I had a girl. I’d been avoiding going over there for obvious reasons, but while debating whether or not to move my car for street parking, I’d run into Matthew on the street, so now I was stuck.

“Of course it won’t be,” Matthew said, genial as ever. I often wondered whether or not he knew about the mutual antipathy between his wife and me. Though our teeth were often bared, Matthew had a habit of being blissfully ignorant. “Courtney’ll be so happy to see you,” he said, as if to echo my suspicions. “She was just saying how starved she is for human contact. I suggested she go out to the store, but the baby keeps wanting to nurse, so she’s sort of stuck there.”

“Ummm,” I mumbled, knowing Matthew would take this as a “soon that’ll be me” sign of sympathy rather than a “the last thing I need to see is Courtney as Earth Mother with a nursing pillow” groan it really was. I prayed I wouldn’t have to hear the full account of her birth story.

“I’m so glad I caught you with nothing to do,” Matthew was saying as we continued walking.

“Hey,” I said, mock-seriously. “I have to move the car today. That’s hardly nothing.”

As he smiled, I realized something. We were right near the Magic Block – the street where you never had to move your car. The neighborhood old-timers who sat in front of Vinnie’s had let me in on the secret this summer. I realized I could steer our route past it, then take a gander to see if there were any vacancies. The thing was, if there was a spot, I would probably have to tell Matthew about the Magic Block. One more parker knowing the secret would make it that much more difficult to park there.

I had to take the gamble.

Getting to the block was easy enough; I just asked Matthew, “Can we go this way?” He looked confused; it was a less direct route, but he acquiesced without further questioning. Once there, I scoured the street for any open spaces. Sure enough, midway down the street, there was indeed a vacancy.

I turned to Matthew and asked if he could do me a quick but vital favor. Looking at me with earnestness, he nodded. Maybe it was the urgency of my tone, maybe it was that I was a million months pregnant, but I had the feeling he’d do just about anything I’d ask him.

“Will you stand in that spot, so I can bring my car around to park in it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” His tone was one of relief. But he called out to me as I headed back, his voice was filled with confusion. “But Eve, you know it’s not good for tomorrow,” he said, gesturing toward the street sign I knew was meaningless.

“I know,” I said, waddling as fast as I could car-ward. “Don’t worry about it.”

Soon enough, we were back on our way and approaching Matthew and Courtney’s brownstone. Though still clearly confused, Matthew hadn’t pressed me further on my peculiar parking.

I followed him into the building’s small vestibule, noting how the space was barely big enough for the both of us. “That’s what Courtney was like at the end, too,” he said, smiling blissfully as he unlocked the door to their parlor-floor apartment.

“Court,” he called as he opened the door, “I’m back, and I’ve brought Eve with me.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she called out in a tone that almost seemed genuine.

Bracing myself, I stepped in. The late afternoon light was low, spreading a golden hue throughout the apartment, a brownstone floor-through with a marble fireplace and intricate moldings. In the center of the living room, Courtney sat on an oversize couch. She wore a big, baggy cardigan – Matthew’s, perhaps – and had a hand-knit-looking blanket over her legs. Her normally blown out and styled hair was pulled back in a makeshift ponytail. A green velour-covered breastfeeding pillow was resting beside her. She was staring down adoringly at the swaddled little baby in her arms.

“She’s sleeping,” Courtney whispered in a voice filled with pride and love. Matthew, stroking the baby’s blanket, said, “Are you having sweet dreams, little angel?”

I looked at the three of them sitting there. It was as if the house had been sprinkled with fairy dust. They looked like such a sweet, loving family, and, I realized, that was exactly what they were now.

“So, Eve,” Courtney said, turning to me with a look whose warmth was unfamiliar, “this could be you any day now, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. Before I could add anything more, I felt a strange kind of leaking. I looked down to find I’d drizzled on their floor. “Any day or any minute,” I said. “I think my water just broke.”

And before I could think about whether or not Courtney was still my nemesis, or analyze the ramifications of leaking amniotic fluid in her living room, or register the shocked but excited looks on Matthew and Courtney’s faces, or spring into any kind of action at all, I realized that I was actually having a baby. All I could think was: “Thank God I have a spot on the Magic Block.”

Nineteen hours later, Noah Daniel Abramson was born. When they put him in my arms, he looked at me and sort of smiled, as if to say, “Oh, so that’s what you look like,” and I cried as I held him, knowing I’d never felt such joy.

When we came home from the hospital, we found blue balloons tied in front of our building and a note – “To Brooklyn’s Newest Resident, Welcome to the neighborhood. Love, the Guys at Vinnie’s” – taped to our door.

As for Courtney being my nemesis, I have to say: Who knows? The only thing I know for certain is that a whole new chapter of our lives is starting. And we are neighbors, after all.

As our new little family made its way up the brownstone staircase, Andy carrying baby Noah in his car seat, me wobbling behind, I looked back on the street below. There were little families like ours everywhere – I counted four strollers, two of them doubles, on our block alone. When we first moved here, I’d thought Brooklyn was the borough of ambivalence. Now it seemed like the borough of babies. But, more importantly, it felt like home.

The Brooklyn Chronicles is a work of fiction. The complete story can be read at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.