The Good Neighbor: A Novel

by Jay Quinn

  The boys stopped their roughhousing and said in unison, “Sorry, Mom.”

  Meg looked to each of her males blankly. “What are they apologizing for?”

  The boys snickered.

  “Alright, you two.” Austin said. “I think it’s time for you to get out of the pool and go get showered. Bedtime’s coming up.”

  Aw, man,” Noah said and snatched Josh’s bathing suit from where it was floating at hand.

  “Give me that,” Josh said and snatched at his suit.

  Noah responded by flinging his brother’s bathing suit out of the pool, where it sailed just past their mother.

  “Maricon!” Josh screamed.

  Noah laughed and pulled himself out of the pool. “You’re the maricon. With your little pecker hanging out.”

  “Dad!” Josh whined plaintively.

  Austin strode toward Noah and stopped just shy of him but certainly close enough to make him flinch. “Enough!” he said. “You’re not funny anymore. Get upstairs.”

  Josh shot him a dirty look, but did as he said.

  Meg drained her wineglass and watched as Austin picked up a towel and walked to the pool’s steps. “What on earth are they saying?”

  Austin looked at her and shook his head. He opened the towel and said encouragingly to Josh, “Come here, buddy,”

  Josh gratefully slogged through the water to the steps and, giving his mother a bashful glance, turned his back to her as he stepped into the waiting towel his father wrapped around him.

  Austin let him step onto the pool deck, then he knelt on one knee before him and gave him a brisk hug. Then, taking him by the shoulders, he said gently, “I want you to promise me you won’t use that kind of Spanish around Mrs. Guiterrez, okay? You know it’s not nice and it would hurt Mrs. Guiterrez’s feelings.”

  Shivering now, Josh shamefacedly nodded his head.

  “Okay, Joshilito. Go get ready for bed,” Austin said.

  Again, Josh nodded and walked quickly inside.

  Austin watched him go, then turned to Meg with a smile. “Would you like some more wine?”

  “Maybe,” Meg said. “Just tell me what they were saying.

  “You’re going to want some more if I tell you,” Austin warned and grinned.

  Meg wearily held out her glass, “So tell me,” she said.

  “No me jodas roughly means ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ and maricon means ‘faggot,’ ” Austin said and laughed.

  “Why do they only pick up the worst things?” Meg asked wearily. “Why not ‘I love you’ or ‘Dinner was delicious. ’ ”

  “They’re kids, Meg,” Austin replied.

  “That’s no excuse,” Meg countered irritably.

  “I’ll get you that wine now, ma’am,” Austin said and turned.

  “You’re as bad as they are,” Meg called after him. She watched as Austin paused momentarily. He just shook his head and made his way on toward the kitchen. A wave of frustration and resentment threatened to overturn the hard-won relaxation her previous glasses of wine had brought her. Austin was too preoccupied with the boys’ antics to even ask about Mrs. Guiterrez or how much it was going to cost the household budget. The woman wanted four hundred a week. Meg shuddered at the thought. Luckily, she wanted cash. Meg couldn’t even imagine the hassle of the paperwork if she didn’t.

  It was then that she noticed the pot of hibiscus sitting oddly by a chair across the pool deck. It was definitely out of place. Unsteadily, she stood and walked over to move it to its proper place. When she leaned over to grasp its lip to tug it back, she saw two cigarette butts laying crushed out in the soil.

  “What are you doing, Meg?” Austin asked from behind her.

  Meg picked the cigarette butts out of the pot and stood holding them out in her palm. “Who’s been smoking here?” She demanded.

  “Oh,” Austin said evenly. “Rory was over. He wanted to smoke so we came out here.”

  Meg dropped the cigarette butts back into the pot and brushed her hands together with distaste. “Well, at least you didn’t let him smoke in the house.” She walked over and took her glass of wine from Austin. “Exactly how much time does he spend over here anyway?”

  Austin walked past her and said, “I don’t know. He drops by sometimes. Why?”

  Meg stood looking at his back. “If you’re spending your days hanging out with him, I’m glad you’re going back to work.”

  Austin took the seat he’d been sitting in earlier and turned it back toward the canal. “I don’t see what the problem is,” he replied.

  Meg sighed. “He’s the problem. I have no idea when he actually works, and it seems like he’s getting you into some bad habits.”

  “Exactly what is that suppose to mean?” Austin said defensively.

  “Running off in the middle of the week to go to the beach, for one,” Meg stated baldly. “What was that about? It’s not as if you don’t have a semblance of a job right now, for all you’re leaving it soon. I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

  Austin looked at her and started to say something, but thinking better of it, he simply sat in his chair with his back to her.

  “Well. I can tell this conversation is finished,” Meg said. “I get the hint.”

  “Good night, Meg,” Austin said.

  “Don’t you even want to discuss Mrs. Guiterrez’s wages? It’s got to come from the house account. We need to discuss it,” Meg said petulantly.

  “It’s a cost of doing business, my dear. You don’t want to cut back on your hours,” Austin said and turned to look at her. “And I’m sick of being a stay-at-home dad. It is what it is. Two tears in a bucket, mother fuck it.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Meg said angrily.

  “Good night,” Austin said evenly. Across the lawns, Rory came out on his pool deck following a trotting Bridget. He opened the screen door and let his dog out into the backyard. Austin watched as Rory, hugging his bare chest against the night’s chill, stood in the dull moonlight while Bridget snuffled around in the grass.

  Meg turned and went inside, her resentment once more articulated by the brusque sound of the sliding glass door traveling along its track to the door jamb.

  Rory whistled once, then twice again in short succession. Bridget squatted tiredly and then trotted happily back to the door where Rory waited. As she stepped back into the screen enclosure, she caught either the scent or sight of Austin sitting across the way. The dog bayed deeply and Rory looked across the yards. When he saw Austin, he paused and stared at him intently through the darkness.

  Austin stood and stared back, hoping their exchanged dark gaze communicated something, some part of the connection they’d shared. Finally, Austin lifted his chin in greeting. Rory nodded and then turned and went back into his house with his dog.

  Austin sat back down in the dark and wondered for a long while how he’d gotten to this uncharted place.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A cheap hotel

  AS IT HAPPENED, Austin made the only big score of his sales career a week before he was to quit the job and return to work in Boca. It all came together so suddenly, he was amazed and thrilled. The commission would be enough to pay off the furniture he’d impulsively ordered and still leave plenty left to salt away. When the time came to drive across Alligator Alley to Fort Myers to finalize the paperwork, he asked Rory to come along. They were on the road by eight fifteen, and he had all the signatures and a purchase order from the hospital in hand by ten thirty. When he returned to the car where Rory had waited patiently in a shady spot, he tossed his briefcase inside and gave Rory a frankly sexual leer.

  “Would you consider celebrating with me?” Austin said mischievously.

  “Not right here in the parking lot, I hope,” Rory said and laughed.

  “Oh no,” Austin said as he climbed in to the driver’s seat of the minivan. “I’ve been thinking about this for days,” Austin said. “I’m ready for you now.”

  “Oh boy,” Rory laughed
. “One time didn’t cut it for you?”

  “Hell no,” Austin said as he cranked the engine and carefully looked behind him before backing out of the parking space. “That wouldn’t really be fair to you, would it?”

  Rory smiled and shook his head.

  The place Austin chose for the event announced its single and double room rates on a pole eighty feet high. It loomed like a beckoning promise of inexpensive haven above the exit where I-75 west merged with I-75 north. Rory wondered, as Austin paid for the room, how he could let himself be had so cheaply. It was almost laughable. But, he told himself, sometimes cheap and dirty felt good. He was enjoying the adolescent excitement and very adult tackiness of it all. When Austin returned to the car and drove around to the back of the motel, he sang a few quick lines from a song that had been popular when they were children, “Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous…”

  “Stop it,” Austin said seriously as he parked the car and turned off the engine. “It’s not like that.”

  “Isn’t it?” Rory asked.

  “Look, I’ve dreamed of doing this for days,” Austin said with genuine hurt. “I want to be with you. I really want to do this,” he added emphatically.

  Rory wiped the smile off his face and said, “I didn’t realize how important this was for you.”

  Austin reached past him and picked his briefcase off the floor in the backseat. He opened his car door and said, “It is. Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m sorry Austin,” Rory said, chastened.

  “I don’t think you know how much I…” Austin began.

  Rory answered by opening his car door and stepping out into the parking lot. The walls of concrete and glass were unremarkable and forbidding. It was a barren, lonely place. There was not another car parked along the side of the building. “What room are we in?” he asked soberly.

  Austin got out and gave him a hungry look over the blunt hood of the car. He gestured with his chin toward the door waiting little more than three feet from the front bumper. “We don’t have to do this,” he said impatiently.

  Rory closed his car door, stepped the few feet to the door, and waited.

  Austin looked at him searchingly, then smiled. He closed his door and pressed the button on the key to automatically lock the car against every intruder, including both their consciences. Then he put the car keys in his pocket and drew the room key from the pocket of his suit coat. Resolutely, he stepped to the steel door, with its rust patches blooming from under the red paint, and let them in.

  Rory stepped inside with Austin on his heels. He walked into the room and breathed in the scent of cheap hotel deeply. It was a combination of commercial soap, spray air freshener, and stale smoke lying like fog over commercially washed linens. Under the low hum of the air-conditioner, silence waited interestedly for the sounds of their occupation. It seemed to anticipate with jaded curiosity the echoes they would certainly leave with the other aural ghosts of the room. Rory shivered in the drawn-curtain darkness.

  Austin placed a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the bed closest to the chipped Formica vanity in the dressing area off the bathroom. Once their journey of steps had arrived at Austin’s intended destination, he moved past Rory and sat his briefcase on the bed next to the one he intended for them to share. Rory watched as he opened the briefcase and fished in the pocket of its lid. He took something in his grasp and lifted it out, proudly extending his hand for Rory’s inspection. On his palm lay two condoms and two small pillow-shaped plastic containers of personal lubricant.

  Rory looked up and met Austin’s grin. He swallowed hard and, avoiding Austin’s eyes, pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it across the room. When he looked back, Austin had his fingers knotted in his tie. Gently he pushed Austin’s fingers aside, looked him in the eye, and said quietly, “Let me do it.”

  WAKE MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

  AFTER BRUNO PAID the check, he stood and waited for his mother to pick as cheerful a spot as could be had in the sprawling hospital’s cafeteria. When she finally found a place that suited her, she turned back to find him and smiled. He returned her smile brightly, but inside he felt his heart tear a little at the familiar sight of his mama. Tall and zaftig, always impeccably dressed, she nonetheless had always been a woman for sons. She had heard every story her boys could come up with, and could either bawdily share their laughter or handily call them on their bravado. For the first time he could remember, Bruno found himself wanting to hug and comfort her, rather than turn to her for the same. Standing by the cafeteria table, she had somehow aged, shrunk in on herself.

  The last few days had not been kind to his mother. It seemed as if the many years’ cares of rearing boys to men had depleted her swagger and stature. She was no stranger to Wake Memorial’s cardiac care unit; she was there first with her husband, now with her eldest son. For all her bluff self-assurance, the hospital and its routine had obviously diminished her. The gentle smile she returned to Bruno with a questioning nod toward the table was only a shadow, not the comforting bright beam that had guided her sons home over a lifetime.

  Bruno nodded in answer to her unspoken question and negotiated the few late-morning staff and visitors who populated the cafeteria. It was too late to be having breakfast, but the hospital’s cafeteria was more than a place to eat, it was a haven from the horrors and tedium attendant on patients and loved ones warehoused in the warrens and halls above. By the time he reached her, she’d already sat down and relieved her tray of its few items of food and drink. Bruno emptied his tray as well, picked up his mother’s, and strode away in search of a place to put them down.

  Task accomplished, he reached in his jacket pocket and retrieved his cell phone. The slit of its window showed no light alerting him to missed calls. He’d left Rory several messages over the past couple of days, the most recent one at eight thirty that morning, only to be faced with a chilling silence from Venetian Vistas that spoke louder than any cold conversation. Swallowing his increasing disappointment and fear, he slipped his cell phone back into his jacket pocket and took the seat opposite his mother.

  “You’re not eating much,” his mother commented. “Dry wheat toast, a banana, and a glass of skim milk? What the hell happened to your appetite? You were my best eater.”

  Bruno picked up a slice of toast and regarded it skeptically. “Rory’s got me on a diet. He’s trying to keep me from ending up upstairs with Brian.”

  Bruno’s mother nodded, looked at her plate of bacon and eggs, and slid it away from her. “Good for Rory, even though he just killed my appetite as well.” She watched as Bruno took a generous bite of his toast and then began to peel his banana. “Why the diet? You look healthy as a horse.”

  “I am healthy, Mama. I just have to think about things I didn’t used to,” Bruno replied easily.

  “For god’s sake, don’t tell me you’ve got your father’s cholesterol as well. I don’t know how many more times I can go through this cardiac routine.”

  Bruno swallowed his toast and laughed. “Sorry, Mama, I’m a daddy’s boy. Mine got up to over 300, but it’s coming down, I promise.”

  She snorted and asked, “How much of that is thanks to you and how much is Rory’s pushing you to do it? He’s a tough little knot.”

  “Hey, no fair, Vivian,” Bruno said, calling his mother by name. “I’m running five miles a day, and my doctor’s got me on Vytorin. Rory’s just making sure I eat halfway decent.”

  Vivian sighed. “Brian’s on Vytorin and Plavix, and look where he is. Of course, he’d have been better off with someone like Rory than with that crazy heifer he’s supposedly still married to.”

  Bruno took a bite of his banana and tried not to laugh imagining his bellicose and very outspokenly macho oldest brother being married to another guy.

  “You laugh,” his mother said. “But it amazes me that out of four boys I managed to raise, my gay kid has the best marriage. Timmy’s on his third wife, Jamie
and Janine had to find Jesus right on the doorstep of their lawyer’s offices to get it together, and Brian… well, enough said.”

  Bruno nodded, swallowed, and reached for his milk. “I’m a lucky guy,” he admitted with an inward pang.

  His mother rubbed her eyes tiredly, then generously creamed her coffee. “Have you talked to Rory since you’ve been up here?” she demanded.

  Bruno put down his milk and picked up his piece of toast, avoiding his mother’s eyes. “He’s busy. I think he was doing some studio work for this new group. He’s fine.”

  His mother waited, studying him over the rim of her coffee mug. She expertly paused until he had a mouthful of toast before she asked, “So you haven’t actually spoken with him, is what you’re saying.”

  Bruno looked up at her slowly, but with still not enough time to mask his eyes.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said smugly. “There haven’t been any messages from him on my phones either. And,” she added, “I noticed it took you a right long time to get back to me when I called him to tell you about Brian’s heart attack. Rory didn’t have a clue where you were or what you were doing.”

  “I was in New York, remember?” Bruno said calmly as he put down his toast and picked up his banana. “Look Mama, it’s not anything you should be worried about, okay?”

  Vivian took a sip from her mug and leveled her eyes once more on another of her predictably loutish sons. “You can’t bullshit me, Will. I’ve wiped your ass. What happened, you couldn’t keep your pecker in your pants?”

  “I hate you sometimes, you know that Vivian?” Bruno, defeated by her predictably knowing checkmate, responded without any real heat.

  “You are a daddy’s boy, aren’t you?” his mother said tiredly.

  Bruno put his banana back down on his plate and pushed it away angrily.

  Calmly, Vivian drank the rest of her coffee and sat the mug back on the table between them. “Go home, Will,” she said evenly. “There’s nothing more you can do here. Brian’s going to pull through and I can take care of myself. Your daddy taught me that. If that’s what you’re teaching Rory, take it from me, you need to get your big ass home and make it right.” With that she stood and glared at her son.