Good Neighbors

by Joanne Serling

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Joanne Serling

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Jacket photograph by Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Hardcover Edition: February 2018

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Serling, Joanne, 1966-author.

  Title: Good neighbors : a novel / Joanne Serling.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | New York : Twelve, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034571| ISBN 9781455541911 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781478941415 (audio downloadable) | ISBN 9781455541898 (open ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Married people—Fiction. | Neighbors—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.E75 G66 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034571

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-4191-1 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-4189-8 (ebook), 978-1-4789-4141-5 (audiobook, downloadable)

  E3-20171216-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: What We Thought We Knew

  Feathers

  Leftovers

  Offerings

  Notes on How to Behave

  A Foreign Place

  Darkness

  Selective Hearing

  A Misunderstanding

  Retreat

  Sleeping

  Leftovers, Again

  Hide-and-Seek

  Thank You for Thanking Me

  A New Beginning

  Almost Perfect

  Dresses

  A Disagreement

  Prayers

  A Gift

  A Storm

  A Visit

  The Wound Always Stinks

  Garbage

  Missing

  Glass

  The Window

  Epilogue: What We Knew

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Mission Statement

  Newsletters

  To my family

  PROLOGUE

  What We Thought We Knew

  WE KNEW WE LIVED on the nicest street in the nicest neighborhood in Fair Lawn. A neighborhood with views of a golf course. Grand houses. Wide-open sidewalks.

  We knew we were never going to be the kind of parents our parents had been: hopelessly authoritarian, yet clueless and also uninterested in parenting. We knew that no matter what kind of parents we were, our children would most likely suffer from our mistakes and good intentions. Or disappoint us. That they would never be as smart or as swift or as popular as we imagined we had been. That they would very likely never grow up to live in a neighborhood quite as nice as this one. Our good fortune as much of a blessing as it was a mystery to us: born of hard work and birth order and a kind of easygoing luck that we were the first to acknowledge having benefited from. Our luck carrying us to this street at the same time at the same stage in our lives, when our children were two and one and some of them infants.

  We knew that we would never have been friends if we didn’t live on the same street at the same time with kids the same age. But we were happy to have found each other. To have discovered each other’s good-natured camaraderie. Eager to watch our kids play freeze tag. Eager to share cocktails on a Saturday night. To throw pool parties in heat waves and make chili during snowstorms.

  We knew that we knew almost nothing about each other that we didn’t want known. But the things we knew drew us closer. We hated strivers. Abhorred social climbers. Were impartial to religion, yet felt obligated to carry on the traditions we’d been brought up with. Some of us Jewish. The rest of us Catholic.

  We were modest. We were moneyed. We were all of us self-made and the most successful siblings of our respective families. A fact we laughed about as soon as we knew each other well enough to admit it. That our extended families weren’t as smart or as kind or as socially mobile as we were. More serious issues didn’t get mentioned, but nonetheless trailed us. Perverted uncles. Troubled sisters. Brothers who were white-collar criminals. The weight of the secrets pressing us deeper and closer together. We were eager for each other’s friendship and reassurance. Convinced that our friends could do for us what our spouses were supposedly doing but simply couldn’t: alleviating the boredom and the isolation of middle age, helping us to navigate this strange furlough called parenthood.

  FEATHERS

  PAIGE INSISTED ON BUYING Indian headdresses. Faux leather bands. Intricate beading. Dyed and colored feathers. They were hideous. Impractical. Quite possibly racist. Still, I defended her.

  “It’s cultural,” I told Lorraine when she called to complain about them.

  “How are presents at Thanksgiving cultural?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a Christian thing. Like a stocking stuffer?”

  Silence from Lorraine, who was Jewish and didn’t know from stocking stuffers. Aware that I didn’t, either.

  “Who cares?” I asked, gesturing toward Lorraine on the phone, even though I knew she couldn’t see me. Lorraine no doubt pacing her office, her team of admins pretending not to hear her through the glass-walled partition. Not that it mattered. Lorraine, a trim, athletic blonde with the kind of freckled face and easy demeanor that made everyone like her, no matter how much she gossiped.

  “It’s rude, for starters,” Lorraine said. “Now we all have to chip in forty bucks for a stupid gift that our kids don’t want and don’t need. It’s a neighborhood leftovers party in a cabin in a park. The whole idea was not to spend money!”

  “They could put on a skit while we’re eating,” I offered, walking toward my front hall mirror to examine myself, my dirty blond ringlets mashed against the side of my face, my green eyes staring back at me skeptically.

  “It’s just so Paige! Who buys a group gift without asking first?”

  “Let’s just forget it and next year we’ll make sure she doesn’t do anything without permission,” I suggested, idly fluffing my hair with my fingers before walking away from the mirror and heading up to my second-floor office.

  “That’s what you said last year!” Lorraine reminded me. “And Paige brought the ‘washable’ window paint. Remember the lost security deposit?”

  It was true. I had said that. She had done that. B
ut what did it matter, really? Paige Edwards was unpredictable. Lorraine Weinberger was bossy. And Nela! Nela Guzman-Veniero could barely acknowledge us, claiming to be too exhausted from her job as a corporate lawyer in Boston, happy to leave the socializing to her husband, Drew, who owned a baseball card store on Main Street. He was more one of us than she was. Sort of. Not really. But we didn’t care. We cared but we’d made a trade-off—to accept everyone as they were in exchange for the comfort of the group’s camaraderie. That’s what we were now. A group. A thing. A neighborhood clique. The kind of friends who made up holidays to celebrate together, like this one, Leftovers Day, a senseless ritual that made us feel like we belonged to one another. Lorraine needed to drop the headdress complaint, not because Paige was right, but because being right was beside the point.

  “Just be overly solicitous when she presents the gift, then dump it in the trash as soon as you get home!” I said, turning on my computer. The whir making me feel productive even though I’d quit my corporate job four years earlier; my desk cluttered with bills and paperwork instead of writing assignments.

  Lorraine laughed. Lorraine said, “I just don’t understand her!”

  I agreed. I commiserated. I said, “I know what you mean!” Even though I didn’t. Not really. Paige wasn’t a mystery to me. I understood Paige in my own peculiar and hard-to-explain way: her dramatic flair and self-deprecating humor, her silk scarves and handsomely furnished Tudor. Hers was a life that functioned perfectly, as long as people didn’t know her well. Or didn’t question her. I didn’t question her. I didn’t look too closely. Her fights with other people were ceaseless and comical. The rookie cop who pulled her over for speeding. The naive mother who accidentally cut Paige off in the car wash driveway. Paige always eager to tell us about these incidents. Always eager to explain how awful the other party had been. And in the telling I’d shake my head. I’d murmur support. I’d pretend to understand her side of the story. But I always knew the other side, too. Could always feel the crevasse where the rest of the information lay.

  In my ear, Lorraine was saying, “We didn’t even tell her to buy a group gift this year. Did you tell Paige to buy a group gift?”

  “Well, I didn’t say she couldn’t buy a group gift,” I offered, hoping this would perhaps make Paige’s transgression all right, forgivable, at least to Lorraine. It was already forgivable to me in the way that all acts that weren’t deadly—and even some that were—could be made forgivable by me.

  A sigh from Lorraine, not content yet. Lorraine telling me again about Paige’s rudeness. Her presumption!

  I stood up from my desk and peered out my office window toward Paige’s herringboned Tudor, enchanted, as always, by the home’s grandeur: its handsome brickwork and stylish gardens. The house in the middle of our cul-de-sac circle; its kidney-shaped pool a frequent scene of our impromptu get-togethers. All of us eager to enjoy the soothing rush of the waterfall, the luxury of the whirlpool. Even though I imagined the gardens were barren now, the pool covered and puddled with water.

  Lorraine was still talking. Phones ringing in the background. Lorraine a corporate recruiter who spent her entire day on the telephone. In another moment, she was saying she had to go, but not before telling me how excited she was for our leftovers party.

  “It’ll be great!” I agreed, even though I knew the actual event would be loud, the cabin uncomfortable, the kids no doubt tripping over tree roots and other hidden obstacles. The women shouting at the kids to slow down, be careful, to not punch or kick one another, while the guys stood in the corner drinking from the makeshift bar, their halfhearted attempts to organize kickball or Duck, Duck, Goose never materializing into anything other than reminiscences about their own days as children. How much freer they’d been. And also more self-sufficient. All of it a salad of half-truths and carefully massaged memories, the ages of their independence no doubt older than they remembered, their parents more neglectful than they cared to admit to themselves. Not that it mattered. None of it mattered. Their memories weren’t the point. The party wasn’t even the point. The point was the group. Our neighborhood. The romantic and somewhat unlikely notion that we’d all wandered into this storybook setting and created something magical for ourselves. Something fulfilling and fun and full of future promise. Which never failed to surprise me. How I’d become the kind of grown-up I could never have imagined as a child. Someone happy.

  LEFTOVERS

  WHEN THE APPOINTED DAY came and the women were appropriately attired to chase the kids and still look like they belonged at a party—expensive boots, quilted jackets, soft fuzzy sweaters over T-shirts and leggings; when the wine had been uncorked and too many appetizers consumed; when the kids had been fed and were busy with a hired babysitter playing charades, we finally sat down for dinner: sticky cranberry relish, leftover corn casserole, dark turkey meat that had been sliced and made ready for sandwiches. The dinner half consumed when Paige announced her big news by tapping on a plastic wineglass with a knife, blushing, then fidgeting, then bursting out, “We’re adopting.”

  What had been a din of talking over talking suddenly collapsed into a moment of silence, of paying attention. Paige had our attention. She was adopting. Her husband, Gene, looked on solemnly, if a man that handsome could ever look solemn. His sandy hair, his hazel eyes, even his square jaw all conspired to make him look more like a playboy than like somebody’s middle-aged husband and father.

  “Well, you know we’ve been waiting, right?” Paige asked sweetly. Innocently. As if the adoption weren’t a loaded topic.

  Some of us knew. I knew. I’d known Paige the longest, except for Lorraine, who’d met Gene at some sort of fundraising dinner.

  I glanced at Nela. Nela and Drew lived in a sprawling ranch house right next door to the Edwardses. She had to know. But Nela’s face betrayed nothing, her emotional scale somewhere between bemused and uninterested at all times, the result of our failure to be either brown-skinned or her cousins. (“In Puerto Rico you don’t get involved with your neighbors!” she was always quick to point out, looking at Drew, her suburban-born husband, as if it were his fault she’d fallen into this mess.)

  In a moment, Lorraine lifted a plastic wineglass to toast the Edwardses, causing a commotion of cheering and clapping.

  At the far end of the table, my husband, Jay, caught my eye, his slim, narrow body pitched forward, his face wary. Was he or wasn’t he supposed to know about the adoption? Gene had never once mentioned it to him directly.

  I shrugged. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t a secret. Paige had been saying it for years. How much she wanted a second child. How she was dying for a ton of kids! Which I doubted. How much Paige truly loved children. Paige wore her motherhood like some sort of old-fashioned coat, belted and done up, proper and attractive from a certain distance. Her son, Cameron, always dressed in new clothes, told to behave, sit up straight, use his manners. Paige always smiling frantically, a thin veneer that rarely hid her irritation. Her desire to control the situation always shimmering just below the surface.

  “I know, world’s oldest mother, right?” Paige was saying at the other end of the table when the toasts had died down, her sleek silver hair curled delicately around her earlobes; Paige prematurely gray, which did nothing to detract from her considerable beauty. Or how chic she was.

  Lorraine said, “Give me a break, you’re barely forty.”

  Lorraine was the oldest living mother! She’d had her second child three years ago at forty-three. A surprise she hadn’t necessarily wanted, which she made no bones about admitting. Lorraine more interested in tennis and socializing than in the day-to-day business of parenting. Especially now that she was divorced. Evan gone with barely a ripple.

  “I had honestly given up,” Paige was saying at the other end of the table, her mood suddenly shifting as she dabbed her eyes with an orange paper napkin. “When the agency called over the summer, I thought it was to take us off the list because we’ve been waiting so long.
”

  We nodded expectantly. I wondered, was there an expiration date?

  “But then they offered us a preschooler,” Paige added shyly. “She’s just turned four. We met her in August.”

  She had?

  “So this could be better than a baby with unknown issues,” Paige said, looking around the long lodge table for agreement that no one was able to give her. Not until we knew which way she had chosen.

  “I mean, Cameron’s already seven. He’d rather have a sister he can play with. And she has no issues besides a lazy eye. So we said yes. Yes!”

  The women nodding more vigorously, our voices rising over one another to reassure Paige of the wisdom of her decision. We were all at least forty. Of course a preschooler was better! The men silent, swirling their wineglasses or chugging from beer bottles, embarrassed, perhaps, to be acknowledging Paige’s reproductive failures. Or maybe they were merely weighing the pros and cons of an adoption, whether they could go through with it themselves. I could go through with it. I had wanted to do it instead of having my own children. A fact which had shocked Jay and was never something he could take seriously. The risk of bad genetics. Of taking on an unknown story. Which was, of course, the whole point of it to me. To create a different kind of family than the one I’d grown up with.

  Next to me, Gene was loudly proclaiming, “We’re flying to Moscow in January. Two thousand bucks per ticket!” Gene shaking his oversize head, running his hands through his thick sandy hair. “Not even for first!” he complained.

  Now, here was a topic the men could warm to: the cost of things. The recession three years behind us, but still casting its sickly gray pall on us.

  “Inflation!” Jay asserted, suddenly coming to life at the other end of the table. Economic doom among Jay’s favorite topics.

  “When I was a kid, my dad took three kids to Europe on a salesman’s salary!” Gene boomed, shaking his head like he couldn’t imagine how his dad had managed it, even though we all knew that salesman was a euphemism; hadn’t Gene’s dad run a biotech company?