The Perfect Neighbors

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “Fine,” Joe said. “Let’s give her a minute to cool down and I’ll go talk to her.”

  Was Joe’s congressional campaign going to harm their already fragile family? Gigi wondered.

  When their congressman had been indicted for the phone sex incident dubbed Tootsie Takedown (the congressman spent much of the secretly videotaped hotel room encounter discussing his fetish) and Joe had floated the idea of running in the special election, Gigi had nearly laughed out loud. Joe, a politician? Sure, he’d served on the Newport Cove council for a few terms. He’d even run for the school board, and lost by such a narrow margin it had almost felt like a victory. But this would be a sea change.

  “Do you really want this?” Gigi had asked. They’d just finished making love on a lazy Saturday morning—their sex life had always been zesty—and they were lying in bed together, her sweaty leg draped over his. One of the things that Gigi adored about Joe was that he never rolled over and fell asleep afterward. Some of their most intimate talks had been postcoital.

  “Yeah,” he’d said. He’d nodded, as if to confirm his decision. “I do.”

  Gigi had known Joe was frustrated with his law firm job for an environmental organization. He believed in the cause, but his boss was a control freak and the organization felt stagnant. He wanted to do more. Maybe this campaign was his destiny. Joe’s mother had been a huge fan of the Kennedy family even before she married a man who shared the common surname, and she’d named her son after Joe, the oldest of the four Kennedy boys—brother to John F., Robert, and Ted. Joe had been the one his parents had pinned their hopes on to be president, but he was killed in World War II.

  Joe wasn’t the only one who wanted his life to feel more meaningful. Since moving to the suburbs and having kids, Gigi had felt a little . . . watered down. She’d been working as a part-time art teacher at the community center, which helped fill her days, but Gigi had found it more and more difficult to suppress her yearning for her old self, the woman who had marched in support of Planned Parenthood and who had helped stage a sit-in to save an ancient redwood tree near her childhood home in California.

  This would be Joe’s campaign, but she would stake a claim in it. They’d always worked well as a team. This would be their next adventure together.

  Gigi had rolled over and kissed him. “Okay,” she’d said. “I’m in.”

  She was the first voter he’d had to sway, and he’d done it effortlessly.

  The primary would be held in November, at the same time as the general congressional elections. If Joe won the Democratic nomination, he’d proceed to the special election against the Republican candidate in the spring. It felt like a long way away, but already Joe’s calendar was filling up with events, as was hers: ribbon cutting ceremonies and Rotary Club meetings, school fairs and fund-raising dinners.

  To Gigi’s surprise, early reaction to Joe had been even more positive than he’d hoped. He was running on the promise of reform. He’d be one of the negotiators in Congress, a fresh face with real-world experience who would break down the gridlock and actually get things done. At least that’s what his candidacy statement promised.

  What Gigi hadn’t expected, though, was the intrusion of so many other people in their lives, the constant honing and shaping of not just Joe’s message, but of Joe himself. Of their family.

  “Chin up, Gigi,” the photographer called.

  And so they left an empty space in their family portrait for Melanie, a little hollow corner on the edge of the steps where she’d once sat and played patty-cake with Gigi, near the garden where Melanie had long ago planted sweet peas with her adorable miniature trowel. The warm earth under their bare feet, the taste of sweet, tart lemonade, Gigi’s belly, beautifully swollen with her second daughter . . . Gigi could still see Melanie tugging at the hem of her shorts, her brown eyes shining with delight over her pudgy cheeks as she tended to her plants. “Mama! They growed!”

  Gigi felt a touch on her shoulder. Julia. She covered Julia’s hand with her own, blinking back grateful tears. At least I still have one, she thought.

  Maybe, she thought as the camera clicked again and again, the photographer could work a little magic on her, too. Erase the sorrow from her eyes and the tightness from her smile. Add a smiling Melanie to the shot and make them a picture-­perfect family, at least for one frozen moment.

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Here’s an idea. Let’s photograph the people who don’t bother to clean up after their dogs and post their pictures on this listserv. A little public shaming might help our neighbors be better citizens. —Bob Welsh, Magnolia Street

  *Re: Used Car

  I don’t have a used car for sale but I know someone whose daughter had success with CarMax. —Tally White, Iris Lane

  • • •

  Moving to Newport Cove had been the right thing to do, Tessa thought as she smoothed the blue down comforter over Addison and eased the Matchbox race car out from his fist. There were no reminders here, no kitchen floor that still seemed to bear faint bloodstains no matter how obsessively Tessa scrubbed them, no driving past the house that had been sealed off with yellow crime scene tape.

  Tessa paused, watching Addison sleep, as she had on so many nights recently when her insomnia had struck. She wished she could slip into his dreams to see if they were happy. She waited for him to make a small sound, or smile, but his face remained soft and inscrutable.

  It had thrown her when Kellie brought up having Addison join the soccer team. Tessa knew Addison would love it, but he’d be around other adults—strangers. Still, soccer practice was held outdoors. Tessa could sit on the sidelines. She could watch over her son.

  She’d realized after she’d reacted so strangely to Mia’s question at the bus stop that simply moving to another town wasn’t enough. They needed to prepare so they didn’t call unnecessary attention to themselves. So she and Harry had been practicing. At night, after she was certain the children were asleep, they’d go into the living room and fling questions and accusations at one another. Harry wasn’t very good at the role play. He jiggled his leg when he recited his story, and his eyes always drifted up to the left. Police called those tics a “tell.” If the female detective who’d questioned them before they’d moved ever interrogated Harry, she’d hone in on it.

  Last night, Tessa had come into the kitchen, where Harry had been doing the dinner dishes. She’d decided to start without giving Harry any warning.

  “Where were you on the night Danny Briggs died?” Tessa asked, just as he’d reached to flick on the garbage disposal.

  “What?” he’d asked, flinching, his hand freezing.

  “Dammit, Harry, you’ve got to get better at this,” she said. “You look guilty!”

  “I am guilty!” he’d shot back.

  She’d decided to ease off. He was still so fragile.

  But this neighborhood—well, had they moved here a year ago, things would have been very different. She’d have drunk three glasses of wine at the neighborhood gathering instead of the single one she’d slowly sipped. She would’ve done an impression of Mason Gamerman ordering Noah away from his rosebushes. Tessa was really good at impressions, a talent she always used to trot out at cocktail parties. Her Sarah Palin was almost on par with Tina Fey’s. She would’ve offered to host the next Wine and Whine night, where she would’ve mixed up a giant pitcher of her special sangria. But blending in, not standing out, was her goal in Newport Cove. So she smiled politely and asked questions but never revealed much about herself. At Back to School night, instead of volunteering to become the room mother, as she had every other year, she signed up to launder the art smocks and clean paintbrushes. It was a task she could do at home, alone.

  She thought about Gigi’s husband, Joe, whom she’d
met when she’d come in to the Wine and Whine night. He’d tried one of the brownies she’d brought, still warm in their pan, and had been overly enthusiastic about their taste. He’d inquired about her family, and had heartily welcomed her to the neighborhood.

  As they’d talked, Tessa realized she and Joe had opposite agendas. His was to stand out in people’s memories, to make an impression. Hers was the opposite: To blend in. To not be noticed.

  They were both campaigning.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Newport Cove Council Members voted last night to install dispensers that will contain free plastic bags for dog waste! Starting next week, you can find these on the corners of several of our streets, including Tulip Way, Iris Lane, and Camellia Court. The dispensers will be marked with the icon of a squatting dog. Feel free to take a bag—or two!—whenever your furry friend needs one! —Sincerely, Shannon Dockser, Newport Cove manager

  *Bunions

  —Tally White, Iris Lane

  *Re: Bunions

  Ignore that last email. It was in error. —Tally White, Iris Lane.

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Does this mean we’re at the “tail end” of this discussion? —Frank Fitzgibbons, Forsythia Lane

  • • •

  The thing about being a real estate agent was, you actually needed a house to put on the market before you could make money. There were some homes—like the charming, well-constructed Cape Cod Tessa’s family had bought—that practically sold themselves. You could stick a sign in the yard and accept a contract a day later. Others, optimistically called “fixer-uppers,” were salvageable if you could just get buyers to see the potential. You did that by emptying out the clutter so they looked bigger, scrubbing the walls and floors and windows, and perhaps hiring an architect to draw very simple plans designed to inspire daydreams.

  Then there were houses that fell into the third category: the Titanics. Kellie’s first listing was on a collision course with an iceberg.

  Kellie absently chewed on the end of a pen, conjuring a picture of the house in her mind and searching for the best way to minimize the visual assault. The house itself was low and squat and gray. It reminded Kellie of a mushroom, a food she’d always despised. Its roof was squished down miserably on top, like a hat a mother had stuck on the head of a protesting boy. The yard was long and narrow and landscaped in a spectacularly ugly way. There were brown pebbles instead of grass, and a few manicured shrubs that looked like overgrown bonsai. Most bizarrely, a miniature lighthouse stood proudly in the center of the backyard, despite the absence of water in the vicinity. The lighthouse had a set of stairs that led to a tiny upper room containing a straight-backed chair and small table beside a window.

  Kellie had gotten the listing because Jason’s father, who was one of the nicest men on the planet, had sold the owner the materials he’d need to construct the lighthouse, and the two had become friends.

  “So what did he do with it?” Kellie asked during one of their weekly family dinners while Mia nibbled on a slice of American cheese and Noah heaped nothing but raw baby carrots onto his plate and Jason’s sister’s son devoured Caesar salad in what seemed like a deliberately ostentatious way.

  “His kids used it when they were young, as a playhouse or something,” Jason’s father said. “After they were grown I think he mostly sat in it and looked out the window.”

  That’s so sad, Kellie thought, picturing a lonely man, perhaps one who’d dreamed of living by the ocean, forced to scale down his hopes, dying inside a little bit more with each passing day, yearning to feel the spray of salt water against his face one last time. She looked at Jason to see if he was thinking the same thing, but he was focusing on buttering a roll.

  She and Jason had never experienced the ESP some long-married couples seemed to share. It hadn’t bothered her in the past. But lately, Kellie had been flipping through the New York Times’ Real Estate section at work, and she’d found herself covertly turning to the Style section to read the stories of newly married couples. She’d scour the details like a private detective, trying to puzzle out why people were drawn to each other. Some of the men were ridiculously romantic. One actually said of his bride, “I need her like I need oxygen.” Kellie wondered if, after a decade of morning breath and debates over whose way was the most efficient to load the dishwasher, the groom would still be making such declarations. Passion always yielded to contentment, didn’t it? Fireworks fizzed into gentle sparks. It happened to everyone.

  Still, it would be nice if Jason did something unexpectedly romantic once in a while. She hadn’t felt this absence of a quality in him before. Jason was a good guy, through and through, cast in the same mold as his father. Unlike some of the other dads Kellie knew, who tried to be the fun parent and cherry-pick all the desirable activities, like taking their kids to the park, or out for ice cream, Jason actually scheduled dentist appointments and drove the kids there. He bought gifts for them to take to birthday parties. For years, Noah had been the hit of the toddler party circuit because of the real tool belts filled with tiny screwdrivers and nuts and bolts Jason had assembled for gifts.

  “More roast?” Jason’s father asked.

  “Sure,” Kellie said. “Thanks.”

  Her father-in-law reached out with the tongs, rejecting the first piece he scooped up in favor of one that looked a little more rare, which she preferred.

  “Here you go, honey,” he said, sliding it onto her plate.

  Jason’s mother was talking about taking all the grandkids out on a nature walk this weekend, where they’d surely gather flowers and grasses for some sort of craft project she’d create, and his father was turning to Jason to discuss a new distributor he was thinking of using while Jason nodded and chewed his roll. Kellie looked at the faces of her family while they finished eating, thinking of how much she loved them.

  Oh, they were all so pleasant! Even Jason’s sister was only smug about the eating thing, and it could be Kellie was imagining that. Maybe she was overthinking things. Or not thinking about them enough. Something was off. But sugar always helped when you felt out of sorts.

  Kellie stood up. “I’ll bring in dessert,” she said. She’d gotten a box of brownies from A Piece of Cake, the best bakery in town, which was just down the street from her new office. Everyone groaned in mock protest, but she knew the brownies would disappear in two minutes. These weekly family dinners followed a routine. A roast. Jason and his father discussing work. Jason’s mother fretting about whether the roast was too dry. Kellie reassuring her it wasn’t, that it was even juicier than last week. Everyone insisting they were too full to eat dessert. Everyone devouring dessert. It was always the same.

  “You’re so domestic!” Kellie’s irresponsible younger sister, Irene, had exclaimed when she came to visit from L.A., where she was pursuing a career as an actress. It hadn’t sounded like a compliment.

  Kellie slipped into the kitchen but instead of picking up the white cardboard box from the counter, she reached for her iPhone and began to tap out a text. Seeking the advice of a more experienced real estate agent was the logical next step. She had a lemon of a house to sell and she wanted to move it quickly. Should she tear out the lighthouse? Have someone take up the pebbles and replace them with sod? It was hard to know how much to invest in the house. She needed an expert opinion.

  It was only natural she ask Miller.

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Can we “bag” this discussion now? (Last one, I promise.) —Frank Fitzgibbons, Forsythia Lane

  • • •

  Susan swept through the doors of Sunrise Community Assisted Living Center, carrying a copy of a new large-print nov
el and a small canvas bag.

  She took the elevator, which was wide enough to accommodate three side-by-side wheelchairs, to the second floor. There were probably stairs somewhere around here, but she’d never been able to find them. She made her way down the long hall to Mr. Brannon’s room. He shared a suite with another man, also a widower, named Garth.

  Susan had tried to tease Mr. Brannon (he’d insisted she call him Charles, but she privately always thought of him as Mr. Brannon) when he’d moved in, saying that he and Garth would be the Casanovas of the second floor. “You’ll be fending off the ladies,” she’d said. “Look out!”

  Mr. Brannon had smiled, but the warmth hadn’t reached his eyes, and Susan had felt guilty for making the joke. She wondered if he’d wanted the suite, rather than the private room he could afford, because having another person close by was a comfort. On lonely days he could pretend the shuffle of slippers across the floor simply meant his beloved wife was in the next room.

  Susan knocked on the open door to the shared living room. Garth was busy tinkering with something on a table—he’d been an engineer long ago—and it took another two sharp knocks for him to hear.

  “Hello, Susan!” he bellowed (Garth was a bit deaf). “Charles, your granddaughter’s here!”

  Garth persisted in thinking she and Mr. Brannon were genetically related, despite copious visible evidence to the contrary (Mr. Brannon was as white as the inside of a biscuit, for starters). But Susan didn’t mind. Her own parents lived in Germany now, where her father had been born, and her grandparents were deceased. It was nice to have a surrogate.

  Mr. Brannon lifted his head from the book he was reading in the easy chair by the window. He was wearing slacks, a crisp white button-down shirt, and dress shoes. He always dressed well. Soft white tufts of hair floated above his ears like clouds.