A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  If this golden future came to pass, they’d be so far away from here that they might as well be in a different country. In San Francisco he could kiss her in public, the way he wanted to do right now.

  “I’d be good with that plan,” he said. “If you’re serious.”

  “I am. And, you know, if things didn’t work out for us, we could still be great friends, right?”

  “Sure—but as my mom would say, ‘Expect success.’”

  “It’s good advice.”

  “She can be intense … but I wish I had the kind of conviction she has. My dad had it, too.”

  “You do have it—you’re just directing it toward academics and playing guitar.”

  “I guess. Conflict is not my thing.”

  Juniper said, “Yeah, I want everybody to get along. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  “Lawsuits aren’t exactly loving. Even if they’re right.”

  “Your mom shouldn’t have to be a saint just so she doesn’t offend my parents.”

  “This will sound funny,” Xavier said, “but you’re really nice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are, too,” she said, smiling at him.

  Love thy neighbor.

  30

  Julia observed Brad throughout supper that evening. He’d phoned her in the afternoon, livid about the lawsuit. Now, though, he seemed to be his usual sunny self. No mention of the matter while Lottie and the girls were in earshot. No snide remarks about opportunistic leeches or tree huggers or madwomen. Maybe he’d gotten over his initial surprise and anger and taken a more balanced view. Maybe it was the shock of it that had made him nasty. Had to be, she thought. She’d never heard him act that way before.

  Her own initial response had been less than generous, she had to admit, even if she was the only one who knew it. She felt betrayed by Valerie, who had been so open with her, so apparently genuine. After hanging up the phone with Brad, Julia went to the master bathroom and ran the shower so that Lottie wouldn’t bother her. Then she sat on the floor looking out the window at the dying oak (which to her looked fine) and wondered what Valerie’s game might be.

  When she concluded that there probably was no game—that based on all she’d seen and heard, Valerie was simply the kind of person who’d sue under these circumstances—she reset her expectations to match this altered reality in which she and Valerie Alston-Holt (and likely a lot of other Oak Knoll women) were not going to be friends after all. There was some self-pity in her disappointment; she’d tried so hard to be what she thought she ought to be, and where had it gotten her?

  “Terrific meatballs,” Brad said, taking his napkin from his lap and setting it on the table. “Lily-girl, thanks for helping your mama make supper. You did good.”

  “Grandma said I could get meatballs in a can if you let me. Quicker and cheaper, she says.”

  “Grandma’s right,” Julia said. “But those don’t taste good, so I don’t buy them.”

  Juniper said, “I like them.”

  “How do you know?” Lily said, turning to Juniper in amazement. “Do you eat them at your grocery store work?”

  “Mom used to buy them when I was your age.”

  “Not fair,” Lily said.

  “Sometimes I got Cap’n Crunch, too. The generic kind, but it was still good.”

  Julia said, “Really, Juniper? How is this helpful?”

  “She’s telling the truth,” Lottie said. “A fine trait, truth-telling.”

  “Lying is bad,” said Lily.

  Juniper said, “Can I be excused?”

  “Go,” Julia told her. “But help clear the table first.”

  Brad sat watching the scene but, as far as Julia could tell, not seeing it. His mind was elsewhere, as it often seemed to be lately. Not that she blamed him; with Lottie around, life in their household was an ongoing mild disaster, and if she, Julia, had been able to get away with tuning out a lot of it, she would have as well.

  She told Lily, “You’re right, lying is bad. So here’s the truth about why Juniper got to eat things I don’t buy anymore, things that aren’t good for you: I didn’t know better back then. Sometimes even grown-ups don’t know everything they ought to.”

  “Why didn’t you know? Didn’t Grandma tell you?”

  Lottie said, “Grandma really likes all that stuff.”

  “But it made you not healthy,” Lily replied, nodding her head sagely, as if she’d just gained a great realization. “Also, cigarettes are bad for you.”

  Julia enjoyed watching Lily work things out this way.

  While Lily and Lottie continued to discuss health matters, Brad told Julia, “I’m going to have a swim.”

  “Do that,” she said. “Want a beer?”

  He rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Another bourbon and Coke, thanks.”

  “Maybe I’ll join you for a swim.”

  “Sure, sure,” Brad said. He was already on his way out of the dining room.

  The last time Julia had seen him truly anxious was when he was waiting for his lawyer to nail down the sale of his invention. He’d done what he was doing now: worn a cheerful facade to hide how worried he was that the deal would fall apart.

  Julia fixed Brad’s drink and handed it off to him on his way outside. By the time she’d cleaned the kitchen and gotten Lottie settled in front of her TV in the guest suite, then gone upstairs to put on her swimsuit and finally gotten out to the pool, Brad was done with his swim and was sitting on the covered porch draped in a towel, staring—or maybe the better word was glaring—at Valerie’s oak tree.

  “I’m sorry you got caught up in this thing,” Julia said. “It really should be on KDC completely.”

  “Trees die all the time. So what? This is a bullshit lawsuit.” He said this loudly enough that any of the near neighbors, if they had windows open or were outside, could hear him.

  “Honey—”

  “What?”

  “Let’s not bring the whole neighborhood into this. It’ll get resolved.”

  “I know it will: We’re going to find a way to persuade her to drop it.”

  Julia didn’t like the way he emphasized persuade. “How so?” she said as if only mildly curious, while she slipped into the water. What a marvel to have her own in-ground pool. She might never get over the pleasure of it, of having come so far in her life.

  Brad said, “Lawyers have ways of doing these things. I don’t really care how it’s done, so long as it gets done. I’m not handing over a hundred grand to an extortionist who for all I know could have poisoned that tree herself.”

  “You’d get experts to evaluate it before anybody paid anything, though, right? She has to prove her case.”

  “It’s not going to get that far, not if she’s got any sense.”

  Julia boosted herself onto a pool float and lay back, looking out at the tree. “Well, that is an exceptional oak. I can see why she’s upset about losing it.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re taking her side in this.”

  “No, I didn’t say that. I’m just talking about the tree. It’s a great tree, that’s all.”

  “I don’t need my own wife being disloyal.”

  “Brad—”

  “Did you marry me just for my money?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Where is this coming from? You didn’t even have that much money back then.”

  “I damn sure had a lot more than you did, though.”

  Julia paddled to the ladder and got out of the pool. Before she replied, she wrapped herself in a towel and came to sit beside Brad.

  “I married you because I loved you.”

  “The money didn’t hurt, though, did it?”

  Lying is bad.

  Lying can be necessary.

  “I never gave the money a thought,” Julia said. A lie. Of course she’d thought of it—and he’d wanted her to. All those fancy restaurants. Drives in his BMW. Weekend tri
ps to the beach where they stayed in luxury oceanfront condos. The engagement ring! He’d displayed his money like a peacock displays its tail feathers, asking the peahens to be more impressed with his than with the others’.

  Brad said, “Ever notice how all you women are trained to go after whichever man will set you up best? And the men are taught that it’s not just their job but their privilege to work their asses off to support a wife and kids. The whole burden is on the man. And what do we get for it? A world full of women who think they’ve got the right to take a man’s hard-earned money however they can figure to do it. Valerie, there, couldn’t find herself a husband to get her out of that dump, so she’s coming after me.”

  Julia had to think for a moment to decide which part of this to respond to first.

  She began, “You’ve been teaching the girls to aim for a husband to support them—”

  “Well, it was a mistake.”

  “And what you said about Valerie, it’s not true. She loves her house. It’s actually a nice place.”

  Brad said, “Anybody actually see her supposed husband before he supposedly died?”

  “Yes. Why would you even question it? Valerie’s not a bad person. Maybe overzealous, sure. But … I mean, honey, don’t take this the wrong way, I know you’re mad and all, but you’re not being reasonable.”

  “Here’s reason for you,” Brad said. “That woman wants to take a hundred thousand dollars that I earned right out of my pocket. She wants four hundred thousand from Kevin—who also works his ass off and has for years to get to where he is. There’s no tree in history worth five hundred thousand dollars. I’m telling you: She wants to take that money and get herself some upgrades. Shiny Cadillac. Big TV. Diamond earrings. Go on a cruise … She wants what all you ladies wish you could get without working for it yourselves.”

  “Now you’re being obnoxious,” Julia said. “I don’t appreciate this at all. I took any job somebody would hire me to do so that I could stand on my own two feet—”

  “Right up until the second you could get it from lying on your back. Maybe look at your daughter’s example if you want to see some integrity: Juniper doesn’t have to work at all, but she’s got two jobs by choice.”

  Julia got up, fuming. “Are you drunk? Take that back. It was your idea for me to quit.”

  “I said you could if you wanted to.”

  “And then I had Lily—”

  “Who’s in school now.”

  “I’d be glad to work again!” Another lie. She wouldn’t be glad. But she’d do it if she had to.

  Brad said, “Then what’s stopping you?”

  “You didn’t want me to work! I don’t understand where all of this is coming from, Brad. Really I don’t.”

  Brad pointed at Valerie’s house. “Your new friend, over there.”

  “I’m starting to wish we’d never bought this house,” Julia muttered.

  “We can sell it. Just say the word.”

  She squatted down in front of Brad’s knees and looked up at him. “You don’t mean that. Can we stop sniping at each other? This isn’t doing anybody any good. Be straight with me: Are you so mad because you think she has a real chance with this?”

  Brad glanced at her and shrugged. “Some rules got bent, and the trail’s not hard to see for anyone who goes looking real close.”

  “So then why not offer to settle? Pay—I don’t know—half and be done with it.”

  “Shell out fifty grand without a fight? You kidding me? I’ve never backed down if I had any kind of choice—you ought to know that about me by now. We’ll give her a chance to drop it, and if she won’t, we’re going to the mat. It’s a good bet we’d get a sympathetic jury that also doesn’t give a shit about some black woman’s tree.”

  31

  This Sunday morning found Valerie in her front yard dividing irises before sunrise. She was a little premature with the effort; irises preferred the drier heat of late summer. So be it. She’d already done her lilies, and the sedge and muscari. The beds were weeded. The roses were fed. She couldn’t just sit inside on a morning like this, a day of rare low humidity and cool breeze, so the irises were it.

  Much of the neighborhood was still asleep, or still inside at any rate. No cars driving past. No joggers. A few minutes earlier Ellen had come by walking Pritzy, her Labradoodle, but she hadn’t stopped to talk for long; she already knew Valerie’s happy news. Two cocktails and a coin toss (yes, they really did decide it that way) and now Valerie was looking at her future in an entirely new light.

  Even as she’d gotten more steadily involved with Chris, she’d seen herself as single. And she would still technically be single once Chris was living here—here meaning in this city, not in this house. Not yet, if ever. If their agreed-upon six months of close habitation went according to what they intended and hoped, however, her marital status—and his—would change.

  Possibly her address would change, too.

  Dividing a rhizome with gloved hands and a spade, Valerie tried to push her imagination in the direction of that change. Leave this house and Oak Knoll, after more than eighteen years. Find a new home with a new man. Two middle-class black people whose combined salaries would be decent: Where in this city might they go that would feel as right as Oak Knoll had felt that day she’d brought Tom to look around?

  She didn’t want to move, but how could she put Chris in Tom’s house, Tom’s bed, on a permanent basis?

  Now, to be sure, all of that was a long time ago, and she wasn’t going around mooning over her dead husband. Tom was (she hated to admit) more a memory than a man. Which was natural. She didn’t “see” him here anymore, not the way she’d done for the first few years after his death. She didn’t think of him daily. All physical evidence of him was gone except for the few things in Xavier’s room, which she’d left alone, allowing him to keep or not keep what was there as he liked. Really, Tom wasn’t here at all.

  She’d offered to let Xavier “update” his room—that lamp, for example: Did thirteen-year-old Xavier really still want a lamb on his bedside table? Yes, he did. He wanted the mobile. He wanted the rug. He thought the wall color was just fine, why bother to change it? He’d stuck posters and programs up all over his walls, and consented to letting her replace sheet sets and comforters a few times. Otherwise, the room was as it had been the day she, Xavier, and Tom arrived home from that Thanksgiving trip, Tom leaving in an ambulance that night and not coming back.

  Valerie laughed ruefully, chiding herself. Tom wasn’t here? Tom was here; all she had to do was open that bittersweet door in her brain and there he stood, looking apologetic and a little bit scared just before he let the paramedics lead him out to the ambulance.

  How unfair that the past was irretrievable and yet impossible to leave behind. “Forward,” she said, and made herself conjure Chris’s face.

  The subdivided group of irises had been intended for transplant in a sunny spot alongside the pond-to-be. The pond project, though, was on hold until the situation with the oak got resolved and she had a better sense of what she was doing with the yard and with her life. Next spring, maybe; nothing was happening anytime soon, that was already apparent.

  Her phone rang: Chris. She tucked her earbuds into her ears and answered, “Hey, you’re up early.”

  “Trying to recalibrate my sleep schedule so that we’re matched.”

  “Isn’t that just a bit precipitate? You don’t even have a position here yet.”

  “My mother says I’ve always been overeager. Never slept through a Christmas Eve in my life.”

  “Duly noted.”

  They talked for a minute or two about the lawsuit’s status. She said, “Both the builder and Brad Whitman were served this past week, and we got the initial response we expected: calls from both men’s attorneys to mine insisting that the suit is specious and that I would do well to think again and drop it, if I’m a sensible woman. Thugs. Now we wait for their official response. They’ve got thirty days
.”

  Chris said, “Anything directly?”

  “You mean did Brad come charging over here with his hair on fire? No. I haven’t seen or heard a thing from him or his wife. But never mind all of that,” she said. “Let’s talk more about us. I’m glad to see you really aren’t a sore loser.”

  “Loser? What are you talking about? I won.”

  “Flatterer.”

  “What are you wearing right now?”

  Valerie laughed. “I’m in my yard, digging irises.”

  “I dig irises, too, baby,” Chris said, his voice low and sultry.

  “Why don’t you drive down here and see for yourself what I have on.”

  “Is this a real invitation?”

  Valerie hesitated. Was it? She hadn’t yet given Xavier the news of Chris’s impending move and their plans for what would follow. “Yes,” she said decisively. No time like the present.

  “Let me just brush my teeth and I’m on the road.”

  “I’ll try to have showered by the time you arrive. You don’t want some sweaty—”

  “Val,” Chris said, interrupting her.

  “What?”

  “I want you in whatever way you are. All the time. Every day. That’s what this is now. Get used to it.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice thick. “You drive carefully. I’ll have lunch waiting.”

  They hung up and she took the earbuds from her ears, tucked them back into her T-shirt’s collar. The sun had broken the horizon and pierced through the heavy foliage, working with the breeze to make a kaleidoscope of light and shade on the ground.

  From here she could see the upper half of her old oak, its entire thinning crown. The untrained eye wouldn’t yet be able to tell it was starving to death. The tree might live another summer, even two, its leaf density diminishing each season, its limbs and trunk increasingly vulnerable to parasitic invasion by mistletoe (already in evidence), by oak gall and scales and worms. She wasn’t sure she could stand to watch it fail, much the way it was torturous to witness, during her infrequent visits home to Michigan, her father’s terrible slow decline.

  Which is not to say she loved this tree more than she loved her father, necessarily—they were different kinds of love, and where her father was concerned, her feelings were complicated, compromised by what sometimes was anger, other times pain. Why hadn’t he seen “Uncle” Ray for the creep he was? Ray’s attitudes weren’t hidden. Ray, sitting with her father at the kitchen table, the two men swapping stories and drinking Schlitz from the can: Hey, Val, come here, sweet thing, sit on old Uncle Ray’s lap, the two men laughing, Ray reaching out when Valerie passed, trying—and sometimes succeeding—to give whatever part of her body he could reach a quick feel.