The Perfect Neighbors

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “No, but I’m pretty sure Luke Dunhill was thinking about it,” Mia said.

  “Why did she have to leave?” Noah asked. “Did she have diarrhea?”

  Kellie and Jason burst into laughter.

  “That is so gross,” Mia said. “Why are you laughing? You’re encouraging him.”

  “Projectile vomit is worse,” Noah said.

  “Make him stop!” Mia said.

  “Should we watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer tonight?” Kellie asked.

  It was one of their traditions. They taped tons of holiday specials, and watched them together before bedtime, one per night, between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  “Sure,” Jason said. “Sounds great.”

  After the dishes were done and the kids bathed and in pj’s, Kellie put oil in a pot to heat, then she dumped in popcorn kernels and set out the butter to soften before going into the living room.

  “Move over, monkey,” she said to Noah, bumping him with her hip. She plopped onto the couch and put an arm around him. Jason was at the other end, with Mia also in the middle, next to Noah.

  “Finally!” Mia said loudly. “We’ve been waiting forever for you, Mom!”

  Kellie was about to remind Mia to keep her voice down, but Jason spoke up first.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Jason said softly. “She’s here now.”

  Kellie’s eyes drifted to his and he smiled. It took so little to make Jason happy. A piece of steak. A football game. Having his little family all on the same couch.

  “Can we have hot chocolate, too?” Noah asked.

  “Sure,” Jason said. He leaped up. “I’ll get it.”

  Jason never leaped up.

  “Check on the popcorn?” Kellie asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Jason was definitely more energetic lately. More tuned in. Was he trying a new kind of diet? Kellie wondered. He’d brought home a nice sweater in a navy knit yesterday; she’d seen him take it out of a shopping bag. Maybe he’d gone to the mall and had realized he’d inched up a few sizes over the past few years.

  “You didn’t tell us about your day. Was it good?” Kellie asked, kissing the top of Noah’s head. He had the world’s greatest hair—thick and full and sand-colored. Luckily, he was still at an age where he didn’t mind her running her hand through it.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “What was the best part?” she asked.

  “Recess,” he said. “We played Power Rangers.”

  She loved the feeling of his warm body resting against hers. Noah was her puppy child, a floppy, happy-go-lucky bundle of deliciousness. A miniature version of his father, a third-­generation photocopy. She stretched out her arm and grabbed on to Mia, pulling her in closer, too. She loved her children so deeply it felt like an ache sometimes. She could never do anything to cause them pain.

  “Popcorn, madam,” Jason said, handing Kellie the bowl.

  “Yum,” she said, scooping up a handful before passing it to the kids to devour.

  “Four hot chocolates coming up,” he said, disappearing again and returning a moment later with a tray of drinks.

  “Fancy,” she said, taking her cup. “Where’d you find the whipped cream?”

  “In the back of the fridge,” he said. “The expiration date said it expired last week but it still tastes good.”

  Kellie wrinkled her nose and took a sip, but he was right.

  “Did you fart?” Mia asked Noah.

  “Yup,” he said.

  “Eww! Mom!”

  “Noah, I forbid you from ever farting again,” Jason said, mock sternly. “Hold it in, son.”

  He reached for the clicker and started the video.

  This was her real life, Kellie realized. Her messy, imperfect, wonderful life. Her crush on Miller, their mutual flirtation—that was just an illusion. It was like the airbrushed photos of models frolicking on a beach. Miller looked good to her because she didn’t know any of his flaws. But if they ever were together—which was not going to happen—she’d discover all sorts of horrible things about him.

  Maybe he picked his nose, for example.

  No, she couldn’t picture it.

  Miller had worn a new suit to work today. The cut looked vaguely Italian. She’d asked him if he’d gotten it in preparation for his dream trip to the vineyards.

  “You noticed it’s new?” he’d said, grinning.

  Jason was looking at her with an odd expression.

  “What?” she said. She reached up and touched her chin. “Do I have hot chocolate on my face?”

  “No,” he said. “Didn’t you hear me? I was talking to you.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I just spaced out. What’d you say?”

  A look she wasn’t able to identify flitted across his face, and when he spoke again, his tone didn’t match his words.

  “I said, ‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ ” Jason said.

  Kellie nodded quickly. “It is,” she said.

  Jason cleared his throat. “Are you working this weekend?”

  “Just showing around a client for an hour or two on Sunday,” she said.

  “Shhh!” Mia said. “I’m trying to watch.”

  Kellie smiled at Jason and turned toward the screen again, determined to keep her focus on her family. Where it belonged.

  • • •

  Susan picked up the insulated shopping bag and her purse from the passenger’s seat of her Mercedes and headed into Sunrise Community Assisted Living Center. As she walked toward the elevator, she noticed a group of about a dozen schoolchildren clustered in the lobby, singing carols.

  Susan paused, drawn in by the ethereal sound.

  “Silent night,” the boys and girls sang in high, sweet voices. “Holy night. All is calm, all is bright . . .”

  Residents were gathered around the singers, some in wheelchairs and others leaning on walkers. A frail-looking woman with white hair so thin her pink scalp shone through raised a shaky hand toward the children, as if she yearned to touch their faces. Susan saw a man sitting on the couch, an afghan across his knees, discreetly dabbing his eyes with a tissue.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” a familiar voice said beside her.

  Susan turned to see Mr. Brannon in his usual white button-­down shirt and pressed slacks.

  “It is,” she whispered, surprised by the catch in her throat.

  They listened together as the song wound down, then joined in the applause. The children began to move through the audience, distributing little snowflake-shaped gift bags.

  “Would you mind if we departed now?” Mr. Brannon said before the children reached him. “I don’t mean to rush you.”

  “Of course,” Susan said, hoping he wasn’t exhausted from standing for so long. His treats would keep in the insulated bag; she could give them to him later. She went out and brought around the car and opened the passenger’s-side door for him, then closed it when he was safely inside.

  “Thank you,” he said as she climbed in.

  Susan patted his hand, then turned the heat a few notches higher and drove to their usual Starbucks. Once he had his chai tea in hand, she headed to the high school where he’d first asked her to stop.

  “Shall we sit for a while?” he asked when they approached the entrance. He always worded his requests politely, but she knew by now how much these quiet minutes meant to him. Always at the high school, the house, the hospital, the pizza place. Always the vigils.

  “For as long as you like,” she said. She pulled into a visitor’s parking spot and they stared at the large redbrick structure. A big outdoor sign proclaimed, HOME OF THE TIGERS—2015 ROLLINGWOOD COUNTY SOCCER CHAMPIONS!

  They sipped their chai in companionable silence, and after ten minutes or so, Mr. Brannon turned to her.

  “
I’m ready now, my dear,” he said.

  Susan went to put her chai in the cup holder, then she remembered something. The garden stone Tessa had given her weeks earlier was tucked in her purse, wrapped in layers of tissue paper to protect it. She’d forgotten to give it to Mr. Brannon the last time she’d seen him.

  She reached into her purse and pulled it out.

  “The new owners of your house found this,” she said. “They thought you might want it.”

  “Oh, what do we have here?” Mr. Brannon said. He unwrapped it and looked down.

  “It was in the garden,” Susan said. She hadn’t looked at it carefully when Tessa had given it to her, but now she saw that along with the mold of a child’s handprint was the name “Edward.” What she’d thought was a design etched along the border was actually thin, spidery-looking letters.

  “Edward,” she said. “Was he a neighborhood child?”

  Mr. Brannon released a sound from deep in his throat and her head dropped.

  “Oh, no, Mr. Brannon,” she said. She reached out and twisted in her seat so she could put her arms around him. “Please, Mr. Brannon, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  She could feel his thin shoulder blades through the fabric of his coat. His body shook but he didn’t make any more sounds.

  She comforted him like she would Cole. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry you’re hurting.”

  After a moment she drew back and reached for a napkin. He wiped his eyes and stared at the stone.

  “How could I have forgotten this?” he said. He put his own hand up against the print. “Thank you for bringing it to me.”

  Gigi had said the Brannons didn’t have any children. Edward must have died long ago, Susan thought.

  “You must miss him so much,” Susan said.

  “I do,” Mr. Brannon said.

  Edward must have gone to school here, Susan thought as she looked up at the high school. The pizza parlor could have been where they’d celebrated his birthday. The old redbrick house—perhaps the Brannon family had lived there when Edward was a boy.

  “It was my fault he is lost to us,” Mr. Brannon said. Deep grooves of sorrow were etched from the corners of his mouth down to his chin.

  “It wasn’t,” Susan said, because she couldn’t stand to see this kind man blame himself. “It wasn’t your fault he died!”

  Mr. Brannon looked up at her.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Edward is still alive.”

  • • •

  Mr. Brannon looked utterly exhausted, so Susan hadn’t asked a single question. She’d just driven him back home. He’d held on to her arm as they’d walked to the elevator, one of the few signs of physical weakness he’d ever allowed himself to show in her presence.

  It was dinnertime at Sunrise, but he’d said he was too tired to go into the dining room.

  “They can bring me up a meal if I put in a request,” he said once he was seated comfortably in the easy chair in his bedroom, his shoes off.

  “We can do better than that,” Susan said. “Just give me a minute.”

  Mr. Brannon’s suite didn’t contain a full kitchen, but there was a sink, a mini refrigerator, a hot plate, and a microwave in a little nook off the living area. Susan unpacked her grocery bag, stacking individual containers of casseroles and soups in the refrigerator. She put two tins of brownies on the counter, figuring Garth would snatch up the one labeled with his name when he returned from dinner. She prepared tomato soup and a grilled cheddar cheese sandwich for Mr. Brannon, then took one of the bottles of water from the fridge and arranged everything on a tray before bringing it to him.

  “You’re so good to me,” he said as he dipped his spoon into the bowl. His hand was shaking, Susan saw.

  Susan sat down across from him, on the foot of the bed. He’d put the garden stone on the bureau, but Susan wondered if he wanted to look at it every time he came into his room. “Would you like me to put the garden stone away?” she asked. “I can wrap it back up and put it in a drawer.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Brannon said. “But it should stay there.”

  He ate a little more of the soup, then had a few bites of the sandwich and sipped his water.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This was very good . . . I just don’t seem to have much of an appetite.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Susan said. She started to get up to remove the tray, but Mr. Brannon lifted a hand to stop her.

  “I haven’t seen Edward since he was eighteen years old,” Mr. Brannon said.

  Susan sank back down onto the bed.

  “It was my fault,” he repeated. “I . . . didn’t understand things back then. I didn’t understand him. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not sure,” Susan said.

  “Edward was our only child,” Mr. Brannon said. “We wanted more, but it was not to be. It took us quite a while to have Edward. I was thirty-eight when he was born. My wife, she was younger, but still. We’d waited so long.”

  He paused and sipped some water. “Even as a little boy, he was different. I’d dreamed of playing catch with my son. I wanted him to know how to change the oil in his car. To be a gentleman as well as a man’s man.”

  Susan nodded slowly.

  “I was that way, you see,” Mr. Brannon said. “I thought Edward would follow in my footsteps. That he’d be just like me.”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “He didn’t like to get dirty,” Mr. Brannon said. “He was shy. Didn’t have many friends. But he liked to be around girls, more than he liked to be around boys, so I thought everything was okay. I was disappointed in him, but I figured maybe he’d change when he grew up. That he’d toughen up.”

  “But he didn’t,” Susan said, thinking, He couldn’t.

  “Now that I think about it, now that I’ve had so long to think about it, I know he was scared to tell us,” Mr. Brannon said. “He did this nervous thing when he was a little boy, this twisting of his right leg so that his toe dug into the ground. Whenever he got in trouble, you could see that leg going. He was doing that when he said . . . You see, my boy was . . .”

  “Gay?” Susan finished.

  Susan wasn’t sure if he’d expected her to be shocked, but she just gave him a gentle smile. Her old college roommate, Bobbi, whose mother was Susan’s first unofficial client, was gay. She and Susan had talked about it for hours in their dorm room, both of them sharing the stories of how they’d felt like outsiders in high school.

  “What happened after he told you?” Susan asked.

  Mr. Brannon was in his eighties. If he’d been thirty-eight when he’d had Edward, that would have meant Edward would’ve turned eighteen in the 1980s, at a time when attitudes were beginning to change, prejudices slowly beginning to crumble away. But Mr. Brannon was probably still stuck in the mind-set of an earlier generation.

  Mr. Brannon shut his eyes tightly. “I told him it was unacceptable. I told him he had to change. I told him he”—Mr. Brannon took in a shuddering breath—“that he was an embarrassment, that he didn’t deserve to share my name.”

  “Oh,” Susan breathed. She imagined that sensitive eighteen-year-old boy, twisting his toes against the ground, working up the courage to come out to his parents.

  “You see, in the army, we used to joke about guys like that. We had names for them . . . Well, I shouldn’t say the names,” Mr. Brannon said. “I didn’t want that for him. My wife was upset, too, but not as much as me. She might’ve let him stay, but she still wanted him to change, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said. For all of you, she thought.

  Mr. Brannon shook his head. “I know he talked to my wife some through the years. On Mother’s Day the phone would ring. But I never spoke to him again. He also came to see her at the hospital at the end. One of the nurses mentioned
it to me.”

  “Did you ever try to reach him?” Susan asked. “To tell him you loved him, that you were wrong?”

  Mr. Brannon sighed. “My wife told me I should try to see Edward. But I said not if he was still living that way.”

  Mr. Brannon leaned back against his chair. His face was ashen. This had been too much for him, Susan thought. The singing children, the handprint, these old memories. He looked on the verge of collapse. She didn’t condone what Mr. Brannon had done, but people changed, and she knew he was deeply regretful now.

  “I sent him a letter,” Mr. Brannon said. “When I was moving out of the house. I wanted him to be able to find me, you see. I gave him my new address. I told him he could write back if he wanted to.”

  “But he didn’t?” Susan said.

  Mr. Brannon shook his head once, stiffly, as if the movement pained him.

  “The letter came back,” he said. “Someone had written on it, ‘Return to Sender.’ ”

  “But maybe he moved,” Susan said. “Maybe he never got your note.”

  Her mind was spinning. She could track down Edward, and tell him how sorry his father was, and that Mr. Brannon probably didn’t have much time left—

  Mr. Brannon looked at her with eyes so bleak she instinctively stood up and rushed to his side.

  “Just rest,” she said. She grabbed the blanket off the foot of the bed and tucked it around him. “We can talk more later.”

  “He got the letter,” Mr. Brannon said, his voice barely a whisper. “On the back of the envelope, he wrote, ‘Don’t try to contact me again.’ I still recognize his handwriting.”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  * * *

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Unbelievable! After a few blissful poop-free weeks, I stepped in it again this morning. Something HAS to be done about this! —Joy Reiserman, Daisy Way

  *Re: Dog Poop

  Shouldn’t this fall under the purview of the Newport Cove Manager? Shannon, I’d like a written plan of action from you soonest. We shouldn’t have to scour our surroundings with the vigilance of children conducting an Easter Egg hunt simply to make it to our cars unscathed in the morning. —Bob Welsh, Magnolia Street