A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  A person might ask why she hadn’t she ever spoken up—if not to her father, then to her mother or a teacher or a friend? Well, that was complicated, too.

  And long done, she reminded herself while a pair of cardinals flitted up to the gutter above her front door and called out to announce their territory. Down the line from these birds, near the corner of the house, a wren was at work digging through debris piled in the gutter, pitching bits overboard. Now would be a good time to get Xavier out here with a ladder and have him clean the gutters out.

  Brushing the dirt from her hands, she went in through the front door.

  “Zay, you busy?”

  No reply.

  Stepping out of her clogs, she went down the hallway to look for him. Empty bathroom. Empty bedrooms. Up the hallway, through the living room into the kitchen. No Xavier.

  “Where has that boy gotten to?” she said, moving for the back door—and then, glancing out the window, getting her answer: At the rear of the yard, partly hidden between the new fence and an old stand of rhododendron, were two obviously besotted teenagers standing torso to torso with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists.

  “Oh, Zay,” Valerie said. “Really? Now?”

  * * *

  What would you have done if you were Valerie? This is one of the questions we asked ourselves later. Would you have marched outside and separated them? She considered it. Eighteen years old or not, Xavier was still her son, still her responsibility, if only for a little while longer. In her view, there were a lot more reasons why he and Juniper shouldn’t pursue their attraction than reasons why they should. And usually she was a person who, in forming plans for action, studied the data and followed the facts to the best, most reasoned conclusions.

  Love, however, isn’t a hard science. As most parents know, it’s difficult to be tough on a kid when they’ve invested their own hearts in a thing. You don’t take a child to an animal shelter unless you intend—that day—to adopt a pet. You don’t let them overtake the kitchen with an elaborate stained-glass kit and then insist there’s no window in the house where the finished project, ugly as it might be, can be displayed. You don’t observe your factually adult son in an embrace with a young woman who clearly adores him and then charge over and embarrass and shame the two of them—or if you do, you’ve got a much harder heart than Valerie had, particularly where Xavier was involved.

  He had never been an easy child in the ways she’d wished he could be. Oh, sure, he’d slept through the night at four months of age, and he’d been as happy to eat vegetables as she was, and he hadn’t stopped loving books in favor of video games, and he’d earned excellent grades and he’d practiced his music and he’d worked minimum-wage jobs to earn college money without a lot of complaint. But as we’ve learned, he did not have an easy time letting go.

  Valerie watched the kids and thought about how in a few hours Chris would be there. How she and Chris would be telling Xavier about the plan now under way that could lead to her remarriage. How, after having shared that news, sometime later, at the end of the night, she and Chris would go together into her bedroom and shut the door. If she continued her campaign to discourage Xavier from seeing Juniper just because it might (who could say for sure?) cause trouble of varying kinds, she would be telling him that her right to happiness was more legitimate than his, that she didn’t trust him to know what he was doing.

  He was an adult now. Hard as it was for her not to “mom” him at this moment, she needed to let him make his own choices and make mistakes and get messy and get his heart broken and lose money and be hungry and miss a bus and be betrayed by a friend and have whatever else that we all know is simply life come his way.

  Valerie watched the two of them, Juniper’s face tipped up looking into Xavier’s. Valerie wanted a girl (or a guy, if that’s how it had gone) to look at her son that way. Not one of us knows what’s in our future with any certainty. This, with Juniper, might be only a passing thing. Or it might be the event upon which his whole life would turn. Either (and neither) was possible. Who was she to assert that in matters of his heart, she knew best? Valerie understood that while her son did and always would hold her heart in his hands, the fact of being a parent was that her son’s heart was and must be reserved for someone else.

  32

  The new Whitman HVAC commercial was being shot at Brad Whitman’s own home. A lot of us were at work that day, but those who weren’t came out to stand on the sidewalk in front of the house so we could watch the film crew set up what seemed to be a lot of equipment for what we’d been led by ads to believe could just as easily be done with a smartphone. Evidently there was a little more to it.

  Right at the curb in the Whitmans’ front yard, taking over much of the sidewalk, a square portable canopy was erected so that the crew could gather to keep out of the sun in between takes. The day was clear and hot, the sky that saturated blue we North Carolinians try to claim is “Carolina blue” but is in fact the very same blue you see in every clear sky everywhere. Besides that, the original association of “Carolina” and “blue” has nothing at all to do with the sky.

  Brad Whitman’s video crew included a cameraman, an equipment technician, a director/producer, a makeup and hair artist, and three other people whose purpose was not apparent. There were microphones and lights and shades and cables and various odd boxes for who knew what.

  We couldn’t tell yet what the Brad Whitman–endorsed product for this ad was going to be; no product was in sight, and neither was Brad. For fun, we’d started a betting pool: Odds were good for its being a trendy-ingredient-infused water or maybe iced tea. Also popular and seemingly probable was a plug for Asa’s B-B-Q, the new “food stand” that had opened not three blocks away on a corner where Oak Knoll abutted Hillside; we’d seen Asa himself making deliveries here to the Whitmans’ house twice in the past week. Maybe it was Lottie who’d been ordering it, maybe not.

  Brad’s decision to shoot the commercial here was surely a practical one: He didn’t have to pay anyone for use of the location. Also, where would he find a more appealing example of the kinds of homes Whitman HVAC was eager and ready to service? In this commercial he intended to highlight the company’s great relationships with the area’s top new-home builders, in an effort to expand that segment of his business (there was a lot more upfront profit in new installations than in service and repairs) and, yes, a way to put his thumb in Valerie Alston-Holt’s eye.

  Inside the efficiently cooled house, the parlor had been temporarily remade into a dressing room. Brad and Juniper sat back to back on tall stools while the makeup artist and her assistant put the finishing touches on their subjects’ faces and hair. As we’d learn later, this commercial would have no featured product. This commercial would have a featured person: Juniper, Whitman HVAC’s newest addition and future owner, that’s what Brad was going to say. Time to introduce her to the public, make her face familiar, give her a taste of the celebrity experience he was convinced all young women desired.

  “Ready to become a star?” Brad said to Juniper while Julia, Lily, and Lottie looked on.

  “I want to be a star,” said Lily.

  “Sugar bear, you’re already a star.”

  “Then so’s Juniper. When can I be on TV?”

  “Maybe next time,” said Julia.

  “Sure,” Brad said; there was an angle in letting the public see his adorable little girl—a different angle than what he was up to here, but an angle nonetheless.

  Marina, the makeup artist he’d used for every commercial he’d made, gave his face a once-over with powder and a brush, then removed the cape she’d put over him to protect his clothes. “You’re all set,” she said.

  He stood and moved so that he could see Juniper. She wore a royal blue golf shirt with the Whitman HVAC logo, same as he did. The color was flattering on her even if the style was nothing special. They both wore white linen-blend pants—though hers were a slim cut that showed off her figure in a
way every man who saw the ad would respond to, while also looking sufficiently modest to all women viewers. A fine start, Brad thought. What made her outstanding, though, was what the gals had done with her makeup and hair.

  Again, the goal had been to balance sex appeal with modesty, so the makeup was subtle in its tones yet made every fine feature stand out. Her eyes looked large and intelligent. Her lips full but not slutty. She looked not so much older as better defined.

  Her hair was long and full and wavy—a blowout, Marina called what they’d done to it. Julia told him there were shops now where that was the only service offered. Women’s services were a mysterious thing to him, but this was one he liked a lot. The effect on Juniper, in Brad’s view at least, was that she appeared ready.

  “Ready?” he said, reaching for her hand to help her off the stool.

  She took it and stood up. “It feels weird to have all this makeup on. Can I see myself?”

  From her ringside chair, Lottie said, “Better you don’t.”

  Juniper looked alarmed. “Why?”

  “You are beautiful,” Marina told her.

  Julia said, “You are. But … I think your grandma’s right about this. You don’t want to get all self-conscious about it. Just be yourself.”

  Juniper looked at Lily, who was staring openly. “What? Say it.”

  “Do you want to borrow my tiara?”

  Juniper smiled. “Maybe later on, when this is done. We can play princess; do you want to?”

  Lily nodded. “You be the princess and I’ll be the star.”

  “Okay. Start picking out your wardrobe and I’ll meet you upstairs in a little while.”

  The commercial’s director/producer, Evan, came in the front door. “We’re ready for you on the front porch.”

  There would be three brief scenes edited into a single sixty-second spot. One scene out front, with both Brad and Juniper; one on the side of the house that would be just Brad and the compressors (temporarily turned off); and one out back beside the pool, where the plan was for Juniper to be solo in the shot, seated at the pool’s edge with her pant legs turned up, feet in the pool, while Brad, in a voice-over, would affirm to the viewing audience what a good life awaited them when they didn’t need to give their newly installed or freshly serviced HVAC systems a single thought.

  Brad answered Evan, “All right, then, let’s get to work.”

  —If you’re wondering, as we later would, whether Juniper resisted any of this—the plan to put her in the commercial, the public positioning of her as a future co-owner, the “star turn” there beside the pool—the answer is no. She had an agenda of her own.

  * * *

  When the shoot concluded, Julia treated the crew and any neighbors who’d stuck around for the whole three hours in the heat to a delicious spread in her kitchen, all the food arrayed atop that gorgeous Carrara marble island: shrimp salad; gourmet cold cuts and cheeses; sliced mangoes, pineapple, and kiwi; artisan breads; a watermelon-feta-mint salad with balsamic vinegar; bottles of fizzy waters in fruit flavors and plain. Lottie (predictably) had suggested there also be bowls of potato chips and Doritos, getting an also-predictable enthusiastic second from Lily.

  Brad cared not in the least about any of that. He wasn’t hungry just now (though he did hold a plate of food in his hand). He was standing at the door to the back porch watching Juniper record a video of a dressed-up Lily marching around in a pair of Julia’s high heels. He was thinking about what his next steps toward scratching his itch might be. There had to be a way for them to take care of it with no one else the wiser. It would be like any other once-in-a-lifetime experience: something to remember and savor—if only secretly, just between them. He loved the idea of being her first, of being the center of the special story she would treasure just for herself.

  Here’s what we wonder: How does a man like Brad become a man like Brad—that is, so assured of his authority and viewpoint that he never bothers to interrogate himself? Maybe it’s a question for the ages. We do what we can to find answers, though, which in this case means looking into how he spent his early years. Here’s what we know:

  Brad and his younger brother, Jeff, lived hand-to-mouth with their parents in an Appalachian town none of us had heard of, a tiny place on the Tennessee side of the North Carolina/Tennessee border some miles from Pigeon Forge. A lot has been made in recent times about the plight of the Appalachian “hillbilly,” but as with so many things that rise to the level of hype, you shouldn’t believe everything you read. The Whitman family was poor, yes. They were not, however, toothless or uneducated. None of them played a banjo—or any stringed instrument, or, for that matter, any instrument at all. They weren’t Bible-thumping patriots. None of them were addicted to drugs.

  Brad’s father was and is a mechanic. When Brad was a boy, Rick Whitman was employed at what was then called Goldrush Junction, a puny theme park that became Silver Dollar City that became Dollywood right about the time Brad was in high school. People in those parts think highly of Dolly Parton for taking the park up several notches and improving lots of other things in the process.

  When the water park portion of Dollywood opened, Rick Whitman found himself assigned to work exclusively on the flume rides. Water parks in that part of the country are seasonal attractions. So, come fall and winter, Rick Whitman had a lot of time on his hands. Mechanics with a lot of time on their hands often take things apart, fix things, and build things. Rick Whitman most liked to build. He had two boys who needed to be kept out of trouble over those months when money was tight and their mother, Katie, was at work all day selling tires. So what he built were big, complicated, multipart projects that required the boys’ help: a wind-powered grain mill that also produced electrical power; portable networked solar collectors he could take with him when the family moved (which was too often, as they were ever at the whim of one landlord or other); a 1942 Chevrolet G506 truck from parts he and the boys collected over a year’s time.

  Thus Brad learned planning. A person got an idea in his head—didn’t matter what kind—and then set about making a plan. What’s the first step? What has to happen next? And then what? For Brad, this idea-to-goal flowchart first manifested as grades good enough for admission to a college electrical engineering program. Then, early in his first semester, he got the idea that bored though he was, he could tough it out, get the degree, and go back home to start a company with his dad. They’d do custom design-build work in every electrical-mechanical area they could dream up: corporate and home audio and video systems and security; specialty machines like the mill his dad had built; conveyor systems, storage systems … There were more than plenty of opportunities for hardworking, resourceful men. If his brother preferred a life of drinking and chasing girls and making milk shakes at Dollywood, as it appeared he did, well, that was his prerogative.

  We admire hard workers. We admire the determination it takes to start from nowhere and go far. Brad’s father had some of that, but he wasn’t as ambitious as his older son. When Brad came home from college that first (and only) year he was enrolled, he was full of plans for this company they’d start—only to have his dad tell him, “You know, if I was thirty years younger and wanted to hustle as much as I’d have to for what you’re thinking, I’d sure want to get on board. Thanks, son. But that’s not my speed. I like what I got and what I do already.”

  Brad was disappointed. He was angry. He’d put a lot of store in that plan. He went back to school after the break, and the fact was, his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He could not make himself suffer through that stupid composition class. So be it. Moving on. New plan.

  We didn’t know, couldn’t know, what all Brad was capable of. We have to say unreservedly and in unison that regardless of whose side we found ourselves on when the unraveling started, if even one of us had been privy to how Brad’s mind worked, we would have stepped in and at least given Julia a heads-up. We would have seen the situation so differently.

  Here we
have no choice but to be trite and say, “Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” and “What’s done is done,” and continue with our story because it’s in the telling of a tragedy that we sow the seeds—we hope—of prevention of future sorrows.

  33

  “I’m off to the park to run,” Juniper called to her mom up the back stairway. She was dressed for the activity and for the heat: sports bra, high-tech moisture-wicking tank top and shorts, her trail-running shoes. This was not the look she would have chosen for what was her true intention today. Funny how you could form something up in your imagination and then have the real thing, when it happened, turn out so differently.

  But she was missing her other usual must-have for running: her phone. She said, “I think maybe I left my phone at work this morning, so will you check with Brad to see if it’s there? I bet it fell out of my bag, under the desk.”

  “I don’t like you going out there without your phone,” Julia replied from the laundry room, it sounded like, or maybe Lily’s room. “Take Grandma’s.”

  “I’ll be fine. There are always people around.” This wasn’t true. Today there would be, though. One particular person, and she needn’t worry about him.

  “Take it, I don’t mind,” said Lottie from the guest suite, down a short hallway from where Juniper was standing.

  “Okay, thanks,” she said, then called to Julia, “I’m taking Grandma’s.”