Jen didn’t know what exactly had happened to make Harper turn on Abe, but the aftermath had been awful—whispers on line for PE, shoves in the cafeteria, “not it”s during group projects for school, all perfectly timed for when the teachers’ backs were turned.
Find a new friend, Jen had urged, but Abe explained with resignation that everyone had already heard he was a freak. If only he smiled more, Abe had said, but he was always nervous there and could never remember to do so.
Jen had tried to tell the school, but they were over Abe at that point. When Abe found a note in his drawing kit that said “Satan’s Minion,” Jen brought it up to the art teacher. Are you sure he didn’t draw it himself, Mr. Marley had said in his infuriating stoner’s drawl, Abe can get pretty dark.
What her son needed, more than anything else, was protection. Foothills had not provided it.
Jen’s career ambitions were not the cause of Abe’s issues—linking the two was misogynist draconian nonsense—but part of Jen had always wondered deep down, oh so very deep down because she knew it was crazy, plenty of parents worked, but—
If Janine were Abe’s parent, she might brag about him, but she also would have been a solid, irrefutable daily presence, there in his corner from preschool on. Janine would have volunteered to be room parent and signed Abe up for Scouts, organized a troop if there weren’t one in existence. She would have served punch at the class parties and dances (assuming that was an actual job and not just something Jen had seen on TV). She would have thrown him into social situations, and maybe he’d have developed better skills.
Paul said that Jen couldn’t help but compare herself to other parents because she was a fundamentally competitive person. All parents compared themselves to other parents, though. People operated in relation to each other, just like wolves did, or prairie dogs or meerkats.
Or birds.
Lately, Jen’s research had been heavy on the birds—there was a lot of recent work in the avian-navigation field—and reading about a flock’s inexplicable telepathy, how it majestically ascended to the skies in one coordinated rush, Jen could not help but picture her neighbors, similarly in thrall to the mandates of a group soul.
At book club, differences were not celebrated, they were barely acknowledged. Last year, Jen had initially been pleasantly surprised to note that she was not the only book club member with a multicultural background. There was Priya and also Athena, who was half Liberian, half French.
Not that race or heritage was ever truly discussed. Everyone worked to gently herd the conversation toward safe common ground: opinions about the book, families, work stress. Teasing was always delivered with a smile, to emphasize that it was all in harmless fun.
Even amid tonight’s rowdy Lolita debate, you could see the women striving to agree, their nods of reassurance toward whoever was speaking little pigeon neck-bobs of support.
The real currency at the Cottonwood Book Club wasn’t literature, it was sameness. And Jen craved this feeling of belonging even as she hated what it confirmed: there was safety in numbers.
And danger in being an outlier.
The book club was really getting into Lolita. Annie kept clapping her hands together like a teacher trying to get control of a recalcitrant class and inadvertently elbowing Jen in the ribs.
“People,” she shouted. “He’s a pedophile. Sorry, Jen.”
“You don’t have to be friends with the characters, Annie,” Deb said.
“Well, what a relief that is.”
“Lolita is a classic novel,” Harriet Nessel repeated stubbornly.
“Good grief. Who in the heck cares that it’s a classic? Or that he’s funny? We’ve spent hundreds of pages listening to the point of view of a murdering pedophile. Whoops, sorry, bumped you again, Jen, but if you all just think about that girl trying to put back her life together after this monster broke it into pieces, and then tell me: Do we need his perspective on anything?”
After a swell of dissent, the conversation grew even livelier.
Jen sipped her Lolita Lemondrop and rubbed her ribs where Annie kept jabbing her. She let the discussion wash over her until it died down and the women broke into small groups. Next to Jen, Annie Perley heatedly told Janine that if she liked Humbert Humbert so much, why didn’t she hire him as a babysitter.
“Oh honestly,” Janine said. “I’m changing the subject to our savior.”
Religion was usually Jen’s cue to politely excuse herself, but Janine was watching her with an unnerving soupy smile.
“Me?” Jen said.
“Yes! For volunteering to host November’s meeting in my place.”
Crap. Crap. Crappity Crap.
Jen had volunteered. She recalled the email plea—S.O.S. LADIES! We are DESPERATE for a host—from a million years before in the summer, when Jen had been full of optimism about her research grant and seventh grade.
“Oh, right,” Annie said to Janine. “Your floors.”
“I’m redoing my floors,” Janine explained with a sigh, “so I can’t host, and I know it’s probably stupid, because our dogs are old and we’ll wind up with a new puppy at some point soon and that puppy will of course ruin the floors, but then tell me, Jen, will there ever be a good time? We’re probably perpetually three years away from a new puppy! You get the impossibility, of course you do!”
“It’s amazing you can even function.” Jen’s tone was tart enough that Annie meowed and formed her hand into a claw. Janine’s giggle made clear that she couldn’t be less offended.
“Right?” Janine said with great enthusiasm.
Jen imagined gesturing to a waiter—I’ll have a bucket of whatever she’s having, please.
“The group will be much smaller next month, cross my heart,” Janine said. “All the book club lookie-loos will be gone.”
“Jen lives in the Stollers’ old house, right?” Annie said.
“Which has that amazing great room,” Janine said.
“With the wood beams and vaulted ceilings,” Annie said, with a dreamy look on her face.
“Thank you?” Jen said, although the compliments did not seem directed at her.
“We’ll do everything,” Janine promised. “It will be barely any work.”
“When are we going to talk about the vandal?” Deb Gallegos said. She and Priya Jensen had appeared behind Janine, and everyone shifted to let them into the circle.
Despite tonight’s eighty-degree weather, Deb wore suede boots that came up to almost her waist. She had Disney princess hair, coiled perfectly over her shoulders in glossy waves.
“What vandal?” Jen said.
The women regarded Jen as though she’d announced that books were stupid, especially when you could just see the movie.
After a cycle of how did you miss this, where have you been? Deb explained worriedly that someone had graffitied not only the Cottonwood signs by the entrance but also—she lowered her voice, infused it with pathos—Lena Meeker’s mailbox.
As in Lena Meeker, of all people.
Jen wasn’t entirely fluent in neighborhood lore, but fragments of Lena’s story had come up in some of the meetings—her husband had died in a horrible car crash years before in the neighborhood, and Lena had apparently responded by sealing herself off in that big house on top of the hill.
How would someone like Lena Meeker parent Abe?
At last an answer that Jen liked: Not as healthily as Jen Chun-Pagano, who made it a point to leave the house and go to book club every single month.
“Even if it is just bored kids,” Priya said. “They’re cruel. I’ve been pregnant four times, ladies. When my bladder sees a sign screaming PEE each morning, it thinks ‘great idea!’”
“Hey,” Annie said. “When did you guys get here?”
Annie’s daughter Laurel, who was roughly Abe’s age, had appeared behind Annie. “Five minutes ago,” she said. In a gesture of casual affection, she’d draped her arms around Annie’s middle, pressed her chin into Annie�
��s shoulder. “Dad and Hank are saying hi to Mrs. Nessel.”
Laurel smiled at Jen. She held excellent eye contact with those alert upturned amber eyes. Her mass of long curly hair was captured haphazardly by a scrunchy. Everything about her said middle school is a breeze!
“Mike,” Deb Gallegos cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the room to Annie’s husband. “Come here.”
Jen stifled an eye roll. Whenever Mike Perley stopped by book club, everyone acted like they were on vacation and he was the hot scuba instructor who was making them feel twenty-one again.
He was different from the other husbands—because of his youth and that cheeky grin, because of his shaggy shoulder-length orange hair, occasionally swept up into a man bun, because of his penchant for accessorizing: rope bracelets around his wrists, leather cords with beads around his neck, ornate tattoos, one on each forearm. Because instead of leaving at seven thirty each morning for the office, he owned a struggling restaurant and seemed to be around a lot.
As he approached their group, the women’s faces turned toward him like sunflowers.
“Mike Perley.” Janine beamed. “Be still my beating heart. How was the blood drive?”
“Excellent!” Mike said.
The women swooned and tittered as he and Laurel jointly narrated the highs and lows of the school blood drive they’d just attended, after which Laurel was dispatched to protect the food table from Hank. Before she left, though, she referred to Hank by an affectionate nickname—Jen didn’t catch it—that made Annie and Mike dissolve in laughter.
Tonight, proximity to the Perleys was a little too much for Jen to take. She suddenly felt a burning need to find cracks in their family dynamic. There had to be cracks. Didn’t every family have cracks?
She had become a total jerk.
“Did you donate blood?” Janine asked Mike in a teasing lilt.
Mike gestured to the Band-Aid in the crook of his elbow, shrugged with false pride.
“I won the blood drive, actually,” he joked. “Great veins, universal donor. They actually invited me back for next year and”—Mike raised his eyebrows and—“I don’t think they do that with everyone.”
Janine threw back her head in laughter. Her hand, Jen noted, lingered on Mike’s arm, patted that defined bicep.
How would the Perleys have parented Abe?
They’d be unruffled, Jen guessed, which would probably be excellent for Abe. She and Paul both could get uptight and they tended to care too much about even the unimportant things.
At the food table, Laurel handed cheese cubes to her brother, who had the same bright orange hair as his dad and was hamming it up, overstuffing his mouth with the cheese.
Jen still occasionally questioned whether she and Paul should have tried for a second child. Abe had always seemed too fragile, and they’d been exhausted and worried it might disrupt his ecosystem. But maybe it would have been exactly what he needed.
Would Abe be more adaptable if he’d had a sibling looking after him, feeding him cheese?
Probably. And he’d have strong bones, too. All that calcium!
“Your son’s not at Sandstone, right?” Deb asked Jen.
“Abe goes to Foothills,” Priya said before Jen could respond.
“Great school,” Janine said. “People love Foothills. That principal, people rave about him. What’s his name, Denton? Talk about cult of personality—”
Because Jen was working so hard to keep her expression measured, it took a moment for her to recognize that the ringing phone was hers. Saved by the bell!
When the ID flashed her former area code she realized she hadn’t been saved at all.
She managed a scrambled “excuse me,” and pressed the phone to her ear as she rushed out the front door to Harriet’s front steps.
“Hello?”
“Scofield here.”
“That’s some prompt service.” Jen paused for Scofield to laugh, which he didn’t. “I’m sure you don’t remember us, it’s been years since you saw our son, seven if I’m counting right, he was in kindergarten—”
Jen lowered her voice as the Perleys walked past her and Laurel paused on Harriet’s porch for Hank to hop on her back. Annie and Mike linked arms and Hank chanted a pop song and they all joined in as they strolled across the street to their house, not even bothering to check for cars.
“Eight years,” Scofield corrected. “He’s just turned thirteen, right?”
“Right, I don’t know if you keep notes or not, but his name is—”
“Abe. The guinea pig killer.”
“It was a hamster,” Jen said, already annoyed, “and no one died.”
“Riiight,” Scofield said in an indulgent ooze that made clear that the rodent’s well-being wasn’t the point.
“But I’m wondering,” Jen said, “if you might have been right about him.”
“Which part?”
There was a long, empty pause.
He was a horrible man, sadistic. He was going to make her say the word aloud. There was a difference between thinking it and tasting it on her tongue, slithery and rotten.
“The part—” Jen held her chin high just on principle, and realized in a flash that Dr. Scofield was inconsequential. The man was not some oracle. He was an asshole, and always would be. The important struggle had always been the one between Jen and herself. Could she even consider this about own son, let alone say it?
It turned out that she could.
“The part,” she said, “about Abe’s being a sociopath.”
OCTOBER
To: “The Best Book Club in the World”
From: [email protected]
It’s that time again, Ladies!!! Put down that pumpkin carving knife and open this month’s read …
The book: IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH. Paige Smithson is a pediatrician, married to the love of her life, with the career of her dreams, two beautiful young children, and a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
The story of a woman, mortality and how to say goodbye, written by the husband who loved her, has been called “as heartbreaking as it is life-affirming.” “A treatise on what it means to be human.”
I’ve read this twice now—am-A-zing!—and will warn you: bring tissues!!!
The place: Deb Gallegos’s house, 5552 Frontview Way. Deb would like me to warn you about the hole in the front yard due to an issue with the pipes, so please watch your step, especially in the dark! And also, please leave your shoes in the front hallway when you come in.
I am just realizing, Deb, that all of your instructions are feet-related! Fetish anyone?;););)
The time: 7:30*
To bring: Tissues, drinks and snacks (so many great offerings last time, let’s keep those themed masterpieces going!)
Until then, readers!!!!! (Who’s with me in not believing it’s October?? Where is the year going???)
*Is anyone else open to pushing the start back to a little later in the evening? (Just maybe like eight? Soccer mamas, are you with me? Katie’s sport schedule is killing us this year!! #Goaliemom)
CHAPTER SIX
Annie’s first appointment on Tuesday morning was with Deb Gallegos’s daughter Sierra, whose science teacher had written her up for yet another dress code violation. Annie would have told Deb regardless—Cottonwood parents kept each other informed—but this offense, Sierra’s third, triggered a mandatory call home.
Phone to her ear, Annie tapped her pencil’s eraser against the yellow legal pad on her small desk. Most of the time, Annie wasn’t bothered by how much younger she was than her neighborhood friends, but occasionally, from Deb, Annie felt an undercurrent of amused condescension that rankled.
Anticipating this, when Deb picked up, Annie blurted out the news abruptly and officiously.
“Sierra cannot wear denim underwear to school.”
Deb snorted. “Oh my god, Annie. Your tone.”
Annie felt herself blush. She had sounded rather harsh. “They’ve got t
o be at least mid-thigh. And no rips.”
“Who makes this stupid rule?”
“The—”
“Middle-aged sexist pigs. And where is the rule about what a boy can wear?”
“I know,” Annie said. “But kids label each other, Deb. I care about Sierra and her reputation—”
“Your innocence is adorable, Annie, if you haven’t figured out that everyone wears short shorts. Stores don’t carry anything else. Boys get those knee-length parachutes and girls get hot pants.” Deb sighed. “What on earth is she supposed to wear when it’s hot out?”
“It’s not me,” Annie objected, feeling like a nerdy hall monitor. “It’s the school’s dress code.”
“Which is entirely sexist.”
Yes, but so was life.
Annie wanted Sierra—all of the students—to be treated like whole human beings, not objects. If that meant adhering to an occasional double standard and buttoning an extra button, wasn’t it worth it?
Before she’d sent Sierra back to class, Annie had tried to explain to her that the rules of fashion were not written to benefit teenaged girls, but rather to objectify them. I remember that feeling of power, Sierra, and it’s a ruse.
Sierra had nodded gently and unconvincingly, as though Annie was the lonely local curmudgeon known to yammer on about how great life had been before that dang rock ’n’ roll music ruined everything.
Only once did Sierra’s eyes, heavily lined in turquoise pencil (when had that come back into style?), flick desperately to the door.
Annie had been tempted to grab her by the shoulders and bark that sex was evil.
Wasn’t life just hilariously ironic, because teen Annie would have rolled her eyes so hard at such out-of-touch advice from a grown-up.
(Nor did Annie truly believe that sex was evil. It was fantastic, at least until you were a grown-up and really thought about how young pubescent kids were, how underdeveloped emotionally. She would never understand why biology handed out hormones to the young. Might as well send paper dolls to fight wildfires.)
“So,” Deb said. “Do I need to pick up my little fashion victim?”
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