A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  It was now 7:05 on this, their first Monday morning here, and Julia was still waiting on Juniper. “Come on, we’re late,” she called from the mudroom at the bottom of the back stairway, where Lily was joining her now. The house smelled of wood stain and fresh paint and putty, but she loved it, loved every spotless, solid inch of the place. Reclaimed oak floors. Six-inch baseboards. Marble countertops, marble backsplash tile. A pantry as large as Juniper’s first bedroom had been. Heated bathroom floors. A bathtub in the master so deep you could almost swim in it. Their previous house had been large, and nicer than any place she’d lived before, but in terms of quality and luxury it had nothing on this one. If I’ve dreamed this, no one pinch me, she thought, not for the first time.

  To Lily she said, “What’s taking your sister so long?”

  “Teenagers are slow like old turtles. Except at cross-country. Juniper is fast at that. Maybe that’s why she’s slow now. She used up all her fastness in her races.”

  Julia smiled at Lily, then yelled, “Juniper, come on!”

  “I am,” Juniper called.

  The sound of footsteps assured Julia that her daughter was in fact on her way—and slow. Juniper took her time coming to the stairs and then down the stairs. Julia assessed her: tired for sure, and something else she’d been seeing these past several months. Sadness? Anger? Whatever it was, it pained Julia to see that it still had a hold on her here. Their life was so good!

  Much as she wanted to get some answers from Juniper (who’d been less than forthcoming so far), now was not the time. And maybe she shouldn’t bother her about it more than she already had. Maybe she should just continue to let her have some space and trust that it would sort itself out. Julia remembered being a teenager. She’d hated her mother’s bugging her all the time about every little thing. Her mother still bugged her all the time about every little thing.

  When they were in the car, Julia asked Juniper, “What was the holdup?” She kept her tone deliberately casual.

  Juniper said, “I couldn’t find my shoes.”

  “All your shoes were in the same box.”

  “These weren’t.”

  “I had the movers pack them that way deliberately.”

  “Well, they didn’t,” Juniper said.

  “Where were they, then?”

  “In a different box.”

  Julia tried to recalibrate. She said, “All right. Well. I’ll finish organizing your room today, so we won’t have any more problems finding things.”

  This would be as much for herself as for Juniper. The activity would give a focus to her afternoon, and the sooner the house was fully in order, the better. Disorder bothered Julia a lot more now than it had used to. It felt like backsliding.

  Pre-Brad, disorder had been a fixture of her often-frantic existence, when order, desirable as it might be, was an out-of-reach luxury. And since she couldn’t have it, she didn’t think about it—that was how you managed when you lived paycheck to paycheck, how you survived from one day to the next without making yourself crazy. She might want a spacious, spotless apartment in a well-managed community, a unit where the interior doors latched when you shut them, where you had enough cupboard space, where the toilets flushed correctly and didn’t run all the time, where those enormous ugly camel crickets weren’t lurking in the closets. For that matter, she might want a whole weekend free to wash and put away the laundry and shop for groceries and vacuum and haul out the recycling and take her daughter to the playground or to a movie. She might want a lot of things she couldn’t have because she worked two jobs just to buy food and pay the rent and day care and a babysitter, but what good would longing for all of that have done for her? It would only make her feel more inadequate than she did already, and she’d hated that feeling. Despised it, in fact.

  —We should interject here that once we’d learned about her past, we felt Julia had not been inadequate; she had been unlucky. That was the truth she needed to make herself remember as well. Some people were born into privilege and had everything handed to them; some were born white trash and had to hustle to get even a thousandth of what the privileged had. Some people had sex without protection and never got pregnant; some got knocked up before they knew the guy’s surname. Some pregnant women had abortions to resolve their bad luck, and some decided that a child would be a salve for their painful existence, a person all their own who had to love them no matter what.

  Did Juniper still love her? Julia glanced at her daughter in the seat beside hers. Maybe this was a stupid thing to wonder. Some days, though, it was hard for her to tell. She was so thankful to also have Lily, “silly Lily,” who was not just a ray of sunshine in their lives but a whole entire sun. The child had practically been born giggling.

  Julia felt guilty about the stark differences in her daughters’ early lives. But as Reverend Matthews at New Hope had reminded her when, freshly married and pregnant with Lily, she’d shared her anxieties with him: she’d done the best she could with Juniper. Emphasis on best and could.

  “Knock knock,” Lily said now, from the backseat.

  “Who’s there?” said Julia.

  “No—Juniper. Knock knock, Juniper.”

  “Who’s there?” Juniper said, lowering the math book she was studying.

  “Hatch.”

  “Hatch who?”

  “Bless you!” Lily said. “Get it?”

  Julia smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “A sneeze.”

  “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?” said Julia.

  “No, Juniper.”

  “Who’s there?” said Juniper. “I’m trying to study. I have a test in second period.”

  “You didn’t study last night?” Julia said.

  “Hey, Mommy,” Lily cried. “You interrupted. Start over. Knock knock, Juniper.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Avenue.”

  “Avenue who?”

  “Avenue answered this door before? Ha!”

  “You’re a riot,” Juniper said, smiling.

  “You tell one.”

  “I can’t think of any.”

  Lily said, “I can think of a hundred.”

  “Yeah, but can you do trigonometry?”

  “I might be able to if you teach me.”

  Juniper said, “Ask me to in ten years, when you’re a junior.”

  “You’ll be way far away in a rain forest or something.”

  “I might. I’ll teach you by FaceTime.”

  “Deal!” said Lily. “Pinkie-swear it.”

  Juniper reached back and the girls linked their pinkies. “I swear,” said Juniper.

  Seeing the girls being playful this way heartened Julia. Juniper had become moody and at times withdrawn, even from Lily. She had not wanted to move, didn’t care in the least that they’d have a gorgeous house in an increasingly prestigious area closer to the center of town, making the commute to many of her and Lily’s extracurriculars more convenient for Julia, who felt she spent most of her waking hours behind the wheel.

  “She’s so temperamental,” Julia had said to Brad one night a while back, after they’d taken the girls to see the house, still a shell but far enough along to picture what it would become. Juniper had walked around inside with them but hadn’t said a word.

  “Don’t be too tough on her,” Brad said. “She’s a teenage girl. They’re hormonal.”

  “I just don’t want her to be ungrateful for everything you’ve done for us—are doing for us, for her. She needs to remember how things used to be, before.”

  * * *

  We’ll just say it: Julia’s history was nothing like we’d imagined—which goes to show that even experienced, well-meaning people can get things wrong. In her before, she had just been fired from the job that was supposed to make everything easier, an administrative position with a national mattress store chain, after she’d refused—four times—to sleep with her supervisor, a short, wiry, splotchy man who kept his fingernails almost as lo
ng as hers—which was not very long, but still, something about this trait put Julia off. Well, she was put off anyway. Plus, she was not in the practice of mixing her personal and work lives, having already learned that doing so could make things awkward and messy. She didn’t tell the supervisor any of this. When he came on to her, she said simply, “I really think I’d better not,” and “I’m flattered, but it’s not a good idea,” and two other answers along those lines. Then she’d arrived late to work one especially difficult morning when nine-year-old Juniper had been up sick all night with what looked like strep throat and the babysitter agreed to take her but charged double and Julia was exhausted and frazzled from rushing around making rearrangements—and now here was an envelope in her time card slot announcing, in generic corporate language, her dismissal.

  After sitting in her car crying for maybe ten minutes, Julia blew her nose, freshened her makeup in the mirror, and drove to the county employment office that had helped her find the job. Her intention was to file a complaint. By the time she arrived, though, and took a number, and waited, waited, waited, she thought what she’d better do was let it go and use this session to find other work. She didn’t have the time or the energy to fight some asshole mattress store manager just to, what, get the same job back? Probably.

  The job counselor made a note that Julia had been let go for tardiness, then suggested she apply for a similar position that had opened the day before with Whitman HVAC. Julia dutifully drove across town to the company’s location, a low, square building in a remote industrial park. She saw a pair of brightly painted service vans with the not-yet-familiar blue-and-yellow logo, parked alongside a glossy red BMW sedan. If this was the boss’s car, she thought, she might as well turn around and go pick up Juniper. The last thing she needed was another thinks-he’s-a-hotshot man in authority trying to put the moves on her.

  No way to know, though, without going in.

  The car did belong to the boss. The boss, though, was nothing like she feared. He was, in fact, possibly the loveliest man she’d ever met.

  Brad Whitman took the time to meet her personally and thank her for her interest in the job. At her callback for an interview, he accepted without further questioning her explanation of why she’d been tardy and fired. After she got the job, he took time to say hello each morning and to ask how her day was going. He praised her work ethic. He hung out with her during slow times and talked about his upbringing, asked her about hers. Sometimes he ordered in lunch for her and the other employees. He often inquired about Juniper. When Julia brought Juniper to the company picnic a few months later, he played tag with her and the other kids, he brought both Juniper and Julia ice cream sandwiches, he carried Juniper on his back for a relay race, and he asked—respectfully—if he might take Julia out for dinner the next weekend. Charmed by this and all that had preceded it, she decided to put aside her rule and say yes.

  At dinner that next weekend, in a trendy downtown restaurant, he said, “I don’t really want to be your boss. I want to be your husband,” and presented her with a princess-cut solitaire diamond ring that must have set him back six or eight thousand dollars. It was crazily romantic. Julia’s mother, on the phone later that night, cautioned her to slow down, make him wait for her answer, see if he really was as good as he seemed. Julia was already wearing the ring.

  * * *

  At the curb now, in the Blakely Academy drop-off lane, Julia said, “Have a great day, girls. Juniper, good luck on the trig test. After school maybe we’ll squeeze in time for frozen yogurt before running and dance, okay?”

  Lily, having unbuckled herself, reached her arms around Julia’s seat and hugged her from behind. “Great plan, Mommy!” she said. “I want sprinkles and a cherry, please.”

  “Naturally.” Julia looked over at Juniper. “Sound good?”

  “You know I don’t like to eat right before I run,” Juniper said, and got out of the car.

  Julia told Lily, “Your sister is a grump.”

  “That’s what Daddy said after he tried to cheer her up, too. I don’t want to be a teenager,” Lily said, slipping into her backpack’s straps. “Way too much drama. I’m going to skip it.”

  “Good plan.”

  Julia waited for Lily to climb out and then pulled away from the curb, thinking of Juniper—the tension in Juniper’s tone when speaking to her compared with the warmth she’d shown Lily. Something was just not right. Never mind giving her boundless time and space; this needed to be dealt with. She’d wait another week or two, see if things improved, and if they didn’t, it might be time to suggest that, although their church attendance had fallen off, they might see Reverend Matthews for counseling as a family, so that Juniper wouldn’t feel singled out.

  As quickly as Julia decided this, though, she vacillated: Brad wouldn’t like her taking their business “outside.” He believed in self-discipline, in solving one’s own problems, so there was that. He also believed in keeping personal matters quiet. It was a privacy thing. He was a public figure of a kind, and while she trusted Reverend Matthews absolutely, Brad regarded him as being “a little too in love with his own opinions and with sharing them widely. Perfect for a preacher, sure,” he’d once said, “but don’t go telling the man every little thing about yourself or the girls or me.”

  Maybe Juniper would come around on her own and Julia would be able to avoid a difficult conversation with Brad. He was so good to her, but he was also set in his thinking. He’d be reluctant to admit that Juniper could possibly have an actual problem, that everything wasn’t in perfect order, that he wasn’t in complete control of his domain.

  And, well, Juniper was resilient, thought Julia, pulling into the tennis center’s parking lot. Probably she, Julia, was worrying too much. They’d been through a lot worse than this. Worse? For heaven’s sake, what was she thinking? This, their move, was a marvelous gift, not a problem! She needed to relax. Juniper was just being a normal teenager, and Julia was just being a normal overprotective mom. Everything was going to be fine.

  6

  Juniper waited near the Blakely Academy entrance doors for Lily to catch up, then walked with her inside.

  “Knock knock,” Juniper said as they went toward the Lower School corridor.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Spell.”

  “Spell who?”

  “Easy: W-H-O,” Juniper said, and Lily burst out laughing in that whole-body, unabashed way she had. Juniper envied her. Everything was so straightforward for Lily, so clean and easy.

  “You got me,” Lily said, grinning at Juniper. “I can hardly believe it.”

  “I’ve been saving that one up. See you later, flower girl,” said Juniper, and watched while Lily continued on toward her classroom.

  Back in the main corridor, a pair of teenaged girls, seniors, saw Juniper coming and stepped into her way.

  “Well, if it isn’t Junipure Whitman,” said the first, a girl named Meghan who’d been deviling Juniper more or less the whole time she’d been a student at Blakely, and had ramped it up three years ago when word got around that Juniper had made a purity vow at church. “How’s your day so far, Princess Junipure?”

  “Look at her expression,” said the other girl, Kathi, Meghan’s usual sidekick. “She’s totally like, Go fuck yourself.”

  “But she’ll never actually say it because she’s so pure.”

  “I wish I could be so pure,” said Kathi. “Wait, no, I don’t.”

  “So dull,” said Meghan. “You should be at the Christian Academy with the other Jesus freaks.”

  Kathi said, “Seriously, why aren’t you there?”

  “Balance” was why she wasn’t there. When Julia married Brad and turned her life around, she wanted Juniper in private school away from the kinds of bad influences that had led to so much of her own trouble. New Hope had a small K–12 program, but Julia felt that secular education on weekdays and religious education on Sundays was the best formula for making sure Juniper’s in
fluences were as well balanced as the meals she could now afford to feed her.

  Blakely was supposed to be the best possible school environment your money could get you—in this part of North Carolina, at least. The best kids from the best families. The best teachers and best technology. The best hot lunch menu, curated by culinary goddesses—that’s basically how the school sold it to the parents, anyway, and the parents loved it. Boutique education, like boutique hotels. There was talk of raising funds for an on-site spa.

  As far as Juniper could see, Julia was all in for all of it. Between Blakely and New Hope, she was making certain her daughters were groomed into angels on earth. She made sure they did the “right” extracurricular activities, too, and she encouraged them to have the “right” kinds of kids as friends. Julia wasn’t a helicopter parent; no, she was worse. She was an entire atmosphere surrounding her daughters’ bodies, controlling their lives.

  Juniper hadn’t always seen Julia in such a negative light. In the first years after they joined up with Brad, Juniper was relieved to have so much order imposed on her life. Overjoyed, in fact. Lately, though, she’d begun to feel smothered and critical—of Julia, mainly; Brad was another story altogether. Appearances were all that mattered to her mom: more than ever they had to have the perfect house, and Juniper had to be the perfect model child, visible proof that all the misfortunes and mistakes of their earlier lives had been remedied, with no lingering effects. Juniper resented that, and she resented this, these girls with their actually ideal lives and superior attitudes. She couldn’t wait to be done with all of it, to be in charge of her own fate.

  Juniper gave the girls no reply.

  Meghan said, “She might be too big a freak even for the Christian Academy.”

  “That is possible,” said Kathi. “You could be right.”

  “I am right. She doesn’t even want to be normal, even Christian normal.”

  “Are you done?” Juniper said.

  “Are we?” said Kathi.

  Meghan cocked her head. “I suppose so. I need to go practice up on how to be so holy.”