The Perfect Neighbors

by Sarah Pekkanen

  *GNOME!

  Whoever STOLE my garden gnome bring it back TODAY or ELSE! —Mason Gamerman, Daisy Way

  • • •

  What in the world had happened to Harry at the Halloween parade?

  Kellie had thought Tessa was the nervous one in their relationship. Kellie had invited Addison over a few times to play with Noah, assuming Tessa would drop him off, but Tessa had hung around the entire time. It wasn’t that Kellie minded—Tessa was perfectly pleasant and Kellie was happy to make a pot of coffee and sit down for a talk. But she did feel a little judged. Was Tessa checking out her house—checking out Kellie herself—before deciding if she would leave Addison there unsupervised?

  As for Harry, he had always been in the background, like Muzak in an elevator. No, no, that was unkind. It was just that Harry didn’t stand out. He reminded Kellie of an absentminded professor. Sometimes in the morning, when he walked the kids to the bus stop, he’d look right through Kellie until she gave a little wave, at which point he’d snap to attention and smile.

  Once you broke through his fog, Harry was pleasant enough. He’d even tried to convince Jason and his father to install computers at their hardware store rather than the old-fashioned cash registers they insisted on using (both Jason and his dad had recoiled, as if Harry had suggested hiring strippers to lure in customers).

  At the Halloween party, she almost didn’t recognize Harry. He was wearing a silly cap with long braids spilling down the sides. She complimented him on it when they bumped into each other by the line for the moon bounce.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I like your Sharknado hat.”

  She grinned and rolled her eyes. Jason had ordered them matching hats that made it look like a shark was about to take a bite out of their foreheads. They were ridiculous, but Jason was a fan of the campy movie—she’d come home just the other night to catch him watching it for the fourth or fifth time—so she’d given in.

  “Have you gotten your fortune read yet?” Kellie asked, motioning to where Shannon Dockser had set up her little booth with a purple curtain.

  Harry shook his head, his braids swinging.

  “She’ll probably tell you that you’re going to come into a lot of money,” Kellie said. “Either that or to beware of a dark-haired stranger. I’m not sure if Opal is capable of telling any other fortunes.”

  Harry laughed, and after Noah and Addison finished bouncing, Kellie and Harry went their separate ways, and she hadn’t given him another thought. Kellie had been trying to keep Mia from doing yet another cheer (really, was it normal for such a dainty little girl to have such a loud voice?) when she heard a man’s panicked voice floating above the noise of the assembled neighbors.

  “Addison! Addison!”

  It was Harry. He was running after a little boy who was Addison’s size and who was also wearing a Ninja Turtle costume. But Kellie knew that little boy wasn’t Addison—Addison was dressed up as Donatello and the boy Harry was chasing was Leonardo (the two Ninja Turtles looked alike, but they had different-colored masks, a detail Kellie had absorbed from one of Noah’s frequent lectures on the subject). Besides, that little Ninja Turtle was holding the hand of Fred Dutton of Crabtree Lane, which meant it was Fred’s son Daniel.

  As Kellie watched, Harry ran over to Daniel’s side and grabbed his shoulders, trying to pull him away from his father. “Addison!” he yelled. “Let go!”

  “Dad?” Daniel’s high, quavering voice must have pulled Fred out of his shock, because he stepped toward Harry.

  “That isn’t Addison!” he said. “Please take your hands off my son!”

  Harry released Daniel then, and Fred put his arms around his child and backed away. Harry looked around, scanning the crowd, his eyes wide. Kellie saw his face contort in terror beneath his hat with the long braids. His breath came in loud, ragged gasps.

  “Addison!” he howled.

  The scene was so bizarre it paralyzed Kellie; it was like watching a car accident unfold and knowing you were helpless to prevent it. Suddenly Tessa ran up to Harry’s side, dragging little Donatello by the hand. “Harry!” she said, grabbing his arm and shaking him.

  Harry seemed to regain his focus as he stared down at his wife. “Addison’s right here,” she said. Harry looked at his son as Addison pushed the mask off, revealing his face. “Dad?” Addison said. “What’s the matter? I was just getting some popcorn.”

  “It’s okay, Harry,” Tessa said, her voice shrill. “Everything’s fine!”

  Kellie heard someone ask, “What happened?” And another answered, “I don’t know. Is he a veteran? It seemed like a flashback.” People moved back to make space around Tessa’s family, leaving them alone in the center of a circle.

  “We need to go now, Addison and Bree. Come on!” Tessa gathered up her kids and hurried off, ushering her family toward home. Kellie could hear her urging them on: “Hurry, hurry!”

  “Well, that was certainly odd,” Tally White said from behind Kellie. “Was he worried Fred was trying to kidnap that little boy? Doesn’t he know we live in one of the twenty safest communities in the country?”

  “I don’t know,” Kellie said. She excused herself and went over to Susan. “Whoa.”

  Susan shrugged. “Yeah.”

  They both stared at the retreating figures of Tessa’s family. Tessa was almost running now, yanking Harry along by the hand.

  “I thought something was a little off with her when they first moved in, but then she seemed to relax,” Kellie said. “Maybe Harry’s the one with the . . .”

  She fumbled for the word. “Issues?” That didn’t seem severe enough. Whatever Harry was dealing with was bigger. He’d been in a full-fledged panic at a neighborhood Halloween party on a sunny afternoon.

  Kellie felt a tug on her shirt and looked down to see Noah. “Can Addison still go trick-or-treating with us or is he in trouble?” Noah’s lower lip was trembling.

  “Oh, honey, Addison didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, kneeling down to give Noah a hug. “His daddy just got scared when he couldn’t find Addison.”

  “Like the time you lost me at the store?” Noah asked.

  “Exactly,” Kellie said (though technically “lost” was a subjective term, given that Noah had been hiding in the middle of a circular clothing rack, ignoring her as she shouted his name from two feet away).

  Kellie frowned as she thought of something. Addison had come over a few times after school, always accompanied by Tessa, but she’d never seen any of the neighborhood kids go into Tessa’s house. It wasn’t that Kellie was keeping tabs, but she usually did the pickup in the afternoons after school and it was easy enough to tell when someone had a playdate, because a new kid got off at the bus stop.

  And whenever she’d been out and about, driving down the street or biking with the kids or walking to the park, she’d never seen anyone go into or out of Tessa’s house other than their family. Even Noah had only been invited there once, to see a movie. He’d stayed less than three hours. It stood out in this neighborhood, where kids freely floated from yard to yard.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on with them,” Susan was saying, her voice low so no one else could hear, “but something definitely seems off.”

  • • •

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Are you kidding me? Not only is the owner of the apparently HUGE dog letting it poop on my lawn—which is bad enough—but now the dog owner isn’t bothering to clean up when his dog poops on the sidewalk in front of my house. Do you have any idea of how disgusting it is to step in dog leavings when you’re getting into your car to go to work? I’m with the person who suggested we start photographing the offenders and posting their pictures on the listserv. —Joy Reiserman, Daisy Way

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Once we catch them, let’s hang them in the v
illage square! —Frank Fitzgibbons, Forsythia Lane

  • • •

  Some of Gigi’s happiest mothering memories were of helping Melanie and Julia pick out Halloween costumes. The three of them would snuggle together on the couch, flipping through magazines for inspiration. “How about a shepherdess?” Gigi would suggest, her arms around her girls. “Or a wizard? Maybe Peter Pan?”

  Early on, Melanie and Julia had been delighted by her suggestions. Gigi had painted their faces and pieced together outfits from odds and ends she’d found around the house: strips of an old sheet for the year Julia was a mummy, some gold glitter for Melanie’s fairy dust. At age seven Melanie had dressed up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, with Julia as her sidekick, Toto. Melanie had adored the movie, but the green-faced witch had terrified her. She’d bury her face in Gigi’s lap whenever the Wicked Witch appeared on-screen. Back then, Gigi had had all the answers to Melanie’s problems. She’d loved having the answers: “Of course there are no witches in real life.” “No, a tornado could never take you away from me.” “Don’t you know I’d never let anyone hurt you?”

  Even when Melanie was a preteen, and some of her friends were dressing in costumes too sexy for young girls—cats in black stockings and leotards, or pop stars in miniskirts and heels—she still seemed innocent for her age. Halloween remained a childish pleasure. At twelve, she went trick-or-­treating as a pizza, wearing a giant cardboard box, then she came home and gleefully sorted through her candy, picking out Jolly Ranchers for Gigi because she knew they were her mother’s favorite.

  Somewhere between the ages of fourteen and fifteen, though . . . that’s when Melanie had started to change.

  Maybe someone had hurt Melanie. Some thoughtless boy—or girl. Gigi wasn’t ruling anything out.

  And Melanie was going through an awkward stage. Acne dotted her chin and cheeks. Her hair was frizzy. She’d put on some extra weight, too, and Gigi knew how awful high school students could be to their peers. It probably didn’t help that Julia was turning out to be so lovely, and that Julia was always being invited to birthday parties and sleepovers. Melanie had never been in the popular crowd, but it hadn’t seemed to bother her in the past. She’d always been content with a couple of friends.

  Maybe kids were teasing her.

  Maybe it was the hormones in milk.

  Maybe it was just a phase. Ten years from now, she and Melanie could be sitting side by side on this very couch again, and maybe Melanie would lay her head on Gigi’s shoulder and say she was sorry for all the worry she’d caused her mother. Maybe they’d laugh about it.

  Or it could be drugs, in which case ten years from now Melanie could be . . . No! Her mind recoiled from the thought.

  Bulimia. Depression. It could be anything.

  The not knowing killed Gigi. How could she help when Melanie refused to talk to her?

  The uncertainty drove Gigi into being the kind of mother she’d vowed to never become. While pregnant, she’d envisioned herself effortlessly dancing the tightwire between being overbearing and present. She’d certainly do a better job than her own parents, who’d managed to be distant yet perpetually critical. Gigi had grown up in a house with no rules, and little affection. Her father was a musician who endlessly ruminated about missing his big break; her mother brought cloth bags to the supermarket and taught yoga long before it was fashionable, and was a fervent believer in getting her “me time.”

  “Not now,” was perhaps the most common phrase Gigi heard during her childhood whenever she approached one of her parents.

  As a little girl, Gigi had marveled at the families in her storybooks, wondering how much of the tales between the pages were fiction. Did real families actually do things like make trips to a farm to cut down a Christmas tree, then come home and decorate it together? Did other kids sit around the dining room table every night with their parents, who asked about their days? Did real-life fathers tuck in their daughters and kiss them on the cheek and leave the door open a crack so their little girls wouldn’t be scared of the dark?

  As a teenager, Gigi didn’t even have a curfew. It made no difference what time she came home—six o’clock, eight o’clock, two a.m. Her parents never checked on her. Sometimes they’d be around, and sometimes they wouldn’t. There would be food in the refrigerator, or there wouldn’t (though she could usually count on being able to scrounge up crackers and her mother’s oily, awful-tasting healthy peanut butter in the pantry). Her mother and father never checked to see if she’d done her homework, or drove her to gymnastics practice, or gave her a safe-sex talk. When Gigi was fifteen and her boyfriend wanted to sleep with her, she’d asked her mother for advice.

  “Do you want to?” her mother had asked.

  “Um, I guess so,” Gigi had replied, even though she wasn’t sure.

  “So go ahead, just use a condom,” her mother had said. So Gigi did. It wasn’t pleasurable; it had hurt. And two weeks later, her boyfriend had broken up with her.

  “But they love you,” Joe had said early on in their relationship. His brow had furrowed. “Don’t they?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Gigi had shrugged. And she supposed they did, in their loose, unobservant fashion. She’d glided through her childhood and adolescence with remarkably few scars. And she’d married a man she’d adored, a man who cherished her in return. So even though she’d made mistakes, she’d gotten the most important part of her life right.

  She’d heard people were unconsciously driven to repeat patterns, but she’d veered in another direction. She’d become the opposite of her own mother. She was too fluttery, too hovery, too worried. But how else could she be, when her brokenhearted/bulimic/hormonal/drug-using daughter was on the verge of . . . whatever it was?

  Both of her daughters had curfews, even though Gigi suspected Melanie had begun to sneak out at night. Gigi hadn’t caught her yet, but she’d noticed Melanie’s bedroom window was open one weekend morning, with Melanie’s shoes directly beneath it, as if she’d slipped them off when she’d climbed back in.

  Maybe she should get a lock for Melanie’s window. No, it would be better to catch her in the act.

  Gigi’s iPhone buzzed with an incoming message from a campaign volunteer, asking about the address labels Gigi was creating for Joe’s new brochure. She typed a response, then went into the basement to flip a load from the washing machine into the dryer. After she turned on the machine, she walked past the small storage room that Joe had suggested turning into a bedroom for his campaign manager. Surprisingly, Melanie hadn’t complained when Joe had discussed it with the kids—which fueled Gigi’s suspicion that Melanie had a crush on Zach.

  There were a few boxes of books in one corner, a dusty StairMaster that Gigi had bought in a surge of misguided optimism, and a rolled-up rug they hadn’t gotten rid of even though it was the wrong size for the living room, because they’d paid full price for it.

  But once everything was cleared away, the room would be sufficient for Zach. It lacked a closet, but there was a small attached bathroom with a shower, which was a more important feature, in Gigi’s estimation.

  She started to climb the stairs, thinking of the address labels she still had to print. They were hand-distributing five hundred copies tomorrow, in the hopes that the information would be fresh in voters’ minds for the primary.

  Gigi’s foot paused on the first step, then she swiveled and walked back into the storage room. Joe would never ask her to clear out the basement. He’d come home tonight after a long day at the office with his insufferable boss and a night of campaigning in his suit. Some people would shut doors in his face and others would lecture him about the flaws in his beliefs and others would make jokes about foot fetishes. Joe would stagger home and he’d change and go into the basement and begin to fix up the room for his campaign manager.

  Because Joe wanted to make the country better.

  She b
ent down and began to pick up one of the heavy boxes.

  Lift with your knees, not your back! She remembered the rule a split second after she felt the agonizing spasm in her spine, right at the spot of her decades-old horseback riding injury. She dropped the box and collapsed to the floor.

  • • •

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Wreath Sale!

  Newport Cove High School is having its annual wreath sale next week to raise funds for the basketball team. If you’d like to order a decorated wreath ($20) or undecorated wreath ($15), please contact me. I’ll be taking orders through Nov. 15. —Connie Moran, Iris Lane

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Isn’t this discussion a “waste” of time by now? —Frank Fitzgibbons, Forsythia Lane

  *Re: Dog Poop

  I’m glad you find this so amusing, Mr. Fitzgibbons. Perhaps you’ll volunteer to canvass the neighborhood and clean up dog leavings in your spare time, since you seem to have so much of it? —Joy Reiserman, Daisy Way

  *Re: Dog Poop

  My deepest apologies, Mrs. Reiserman. —Frank Fitzgibbons, Forsythia Lane

  *Re: Dog Poop

  IT’S “MS.” REISERMAN! —Joy Reiserman, Daisy Way

  • • •

  Maybe Harry was a veteran. Kellie didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t know much about the Campbell family at all.

  She and Tessa always chatted at the bus stop, commenting on the weather and the Liam Hemsworth–ish soccer coach (Addison had joined the team after all) and their weekend plans, but those brief conversations barely skimmed the surface of their lives. That night at Wine and Whine had been one of the few times she’d felt as if she’d connected with Tessa. Afterward, Tessa had reverted to being polite and remote.