A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “Anyway,” she said, “I better get back. Lily likes me to read to her at bedtime. It was really nice to talk with you. I’m so glad we’re neighbors.”

  “Will you come to next month’s meeting?” Valerie asked, turning on the light outside the back door.

  “I’d like to.”

  “Good. I’m sure I’ll see you before then—I’ll be out there in the yard a lot, putting in a koi pond. Zay jokes that I’m going to replace him with fish.”

  “Well, the gate’s always open, so to speak,” Julia said. “If you hear splashing, come on over.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Julia said good night and walked through Valerie’s woodsy yard, glancing upward at the big oak’s extensive branches as she went. It was a remarkable tree, and she was glad to have a view of it from her own kitchen windows.

  She arrived home feeling warm and buzzy and pleased with the evening, especially the conversation she’d had with Valerie—but a bit chagrined about the foie gras. It was so hard to navigate the world these days. Ignorance was bliss, particularly when you found yourself amid a group of informed people who were disgusted by what you’d inadvertently done but too polite to call you out for it.

  * * *

  Julia also couldn’t have known how tentative Valerie’s maybe I will was, which was good because she’d have taken it personally when in fact it wasn’t a judgment against her at all. Now that Valerie had gotten to know Julia a little, she liked her just fine. It was Brad who was the problem, Brad who made Valerie prefer to stay on her side of the fence.

  Julia seemed to be merely an unwitting accomplice to (or we might even say a cooperative victim of) her husband’s ambitions and desires.

  8

  Though the time would come when we’d all know why Juniper Whitman sometimes felt such a keen need to be alone, on this night nearly two weeks after her family’s move to Oak Knoll, we knew only what Xavier Alston-Holt knew: She was attractive. She seemed quiet. We might have called her bookish and meant it as a compliment.

  Twilight, the end of May. A time when lots of folks went outside to look for fireflies and enjoy the cacophony of birdsong, finches and cardinals and chickadees and mockingbirds singing the sun down. For Juniper, twilight promised a kind of cover. She could walk along the sidewalks and not feel exposed the way she did in daytime. Junipure, the freak. Though not for the reasons her classmates thought.

  “You’re not going running at this hour,” Brad said, startling her as she sat down on a bench in the foyer to put on her shoes. He was in the front room, or “parlor,” as Julia and the decorator had been referring to it. The room had four big upholstered armchairs and lighted wall art and a faux zebra-skin rug. And Brad, who’d been sitting there alone, possibly watching the sunset. Juniper hadn’t seen him before he spoke.

  She told him, “No, just a walk.”

  Track season was over, so she’d cut back her running schedule from six to four times a week, getting Julia to drop her off at the state park where she could run on the multi-use trails. She enjoyed being out in the forest, where the air was cooler, where she was away from traffic, away from school, from home, from her life. She also liked seeing the birds and deer, liked the way the sunshine made the forest into a lush green wonderland. She liked the tree trunks standing like thousands of sentinels along the trails, upright and protective. She liked the variety of undergrowth—plants whose names she hadn’t learned yet but whose shapes and structures invited her to meander while she cooled down after a run, invited a closer look, a photo—which a normal teen might share on Instagram, say, but Juniper, forbidden to use social media, would save to an album on her phone, then print the images later and tack them up in her room. Julia did phone spot checks to keep her honest.

  Brad said, “I want you back here by nine.”

  “Okay,” said Juniper, standing up. “But you know, I’m going on eighteen. It’s okay for me to be out after dark.”

  “Sorry. What I meant is, this is a good neighborhood, but we don’t know everybody here. I just want you to be safe.”

  He never worried about her running at the park, but he was worried here? She said, “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “You have your phone?”

  “Yes.” She took it from her pocket and showed it to him.

  “Go on, then. Enjoy your walk.”

  Juniper closed the front door behind her and went down their short flagstone path toward the public sidewalk. The warm air was heavy, humid, the sky blood-orange at the horizon, cobalt overhead. A couple of stars were visible.

  What, she wondered, made a neighborhood good? To her parents, good seemed to mean there were mainly other people like themselves. So: white, privileged, very concerned with appearances (her mom) or perceptions (Brad). Though to be fair, this new neighborhood was mixed, and also, both Brad and her mom had worked like dogs to get their privilege. Nothing got handed to them—unless Brad’s marrying her mom was a kind of handout. It was a hand up, that was for sure. And Juniper would be lying if she said she hadn’t been just as happy as Julia at the time, just as relieved to be pulled out of the chaotic morass of those earlier years. Brad was ten-year-old Juniper’s hero, her savior, her most favorite person in the world.

  So much had changed since then, some of it in ways she didn’t like to think about—but how could she control those thoughts? Her brain wouldn’t always cooperate, and now she was stuck here in this neighborhood where the houses were so close together and there were people around all the time and there was Brad, just sitting in the dark—

  Juniper stopped at the sidewalk, drew a heavy breath. Leave it alone, she thought, exhaling, and then she set off on her walk.

  The Whitmans’ house was now completely in order and Julia was turning it into a showplace, using a decorator to help her choose every piece of furniture, every pillow and lamp and rug. Each room in the house was painted according to a “complementary palette” of pale grays and pale blues with “pops” of color, those pops coming from local artists’ wall art and from throw pillows that were absurdly expensive. Juniper had seen the interior designer’s itemized bill: $94 for one pillow. For $94 they could adopt a piece of rain forest, help the Earth keep breathing a while longer.

  Or they could adopt a dog from the local shelter. Lily had been angling for this, for them to get a dog after they moved—“Just a little one, it can sleep with me, I’ll walk it and feed it, I promise,” and Julia had made noises like she might give in. But now that there was a $3,000 rug and pure white furniture in the living room, and 100 percent wool carpet imported from New Zealand in their bedrooms, Juniper knew there would be no dog—or cat or rabbit or hamster even, because they’d done the hamster thing when Juniper was ten, a present to go with Julia’s marriage and their temporary move from the latest crappy apartment to Brad’s “starter house,” he’d called it. And then the animal gave birth to six pups and ate four of them, traumatizing Juniper, who hadn’t known such behavior was possible.

  Now, though, Juniper was seventeen. She understood a lot more about life. That said, she’d been relatively sheltered these past seven years, and so by no means did she understand everything. Maybe not even enough, because if she had understood enough, then after she’d rounded the corner of her street and walked along the connecting street and onto the one where Xavier lived and seen him and two friends sitting on the trunk of a car beneath a streetlight that had just come on, she would not have stopped to talk.

  No, a wiser, more cautious Juniper would have said, “Hey,” and kept going, up the long street and around the next corner and the next, and returned home in more or less the same mood she’d been in when she left the house. Okay, maybe she would have felt a little more upbeat for having been outside and away for a while. That, though, would have been the whole scenario start to finish.

  But rather than blame Juniper for trouble she could not have foreseen, we should credit her for being friendly, for not having that knee-jerk fear of brow
n-skinned males that so many white girls have, in the South especially.

  We, with our collective wisdom but imperfect knowledge, did not foresee the trouble, either.

  * * *

  Xavier waved at her when he saw her approaching. “Juniper, right? How’s it going?”

  “Okay, I guess. How about you?”

  “All good,” he said, and then he gestured toward one of his companions. “This is my friend Joseph.”

  “Hey,” Joseph said. He was Xavier’s opposite in terms of height and coloring: short, pale, towheaded. He wore his hair in dreadlocks. Juniper couldn’t recall ever seeing a white kid with dreads.

  “And this is Dashawn,” Xavier said, pointing to the other boy, who was darker skinned than he. Dashawn’s hair was puffy—an Afro, Juniper thought. She wanted to touch it, press it to see how springy it might be. Probably he wouldn’t like that, though (as if she’d even dare to do it), the same way she didn’t like random people touching the birthmark on her forearm.

  “Hey, Juniper,” Dashawn said.

  “Hey. Nice to meet you.”

  “Juniper lives behind me.” Xavier pointed in that direction.

  Joseph gave a low whistle. “I’ve seen that house. Nice digs you all have.”

  “She goes to Blakely,” Xavier added. “Junior, right?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  He said, “Next year will go a lot faster than you think. So, we were about to go inside and play some music. Me on guitar, no surprise. Joseph here plays sax—alto and tenor.”

  “And baritone.”

  “And baritone,” Xavier echoed. The two boys tapped knuckles. “Dashawn is an awesome drummer. I’ve been messing around with jazz just for fun, and they’re putting up with my mediocrity. Want to hang out?”

  When in Juniper’s life had any boy come across so cool? Never, that’s when. Xavier Alston-Holt didn’t just look good (and to Juniper, he looked pretty close to perfect), he had talent and an outgoing personality she admired. At her house that first day, when he and his mother had come over to meet her parents, he’d sat there as if he was one of the adults, comfortable, tuned in, polite in a way that didn’t seem at all put on. Most of the boys she went to school with acted fake and smarmy around the adults, as if they thought themselves superior but knew they had to pretend it was the other way around. Xavier had … well, she would have to say he had a presence. And she was responding to it. It wasn’t that she wanted to, but how could it be helped? It couldn’t be. She didn’t really want to help it, either, and that surprised her.

  Juniper told him, “Thanks, but I have to get back. Brad thinks I might be attacked by vampires or something if I’m out past nine.”

  “That your brother?” said Dashawn.

  “Stepdad.”

  Xavier said, “He’s the Whitman HVAC guy.”

  “I know him,” Joseph said. “Not, you know, know him—”

  “The ads,” said Juniper, and Joseph nodded.

  “He get along with your real dad?” said Joseph. “My two act like they’re ready to throw down over stupid shit all the time.”

  “I don’t know my real dad. He’s not … I mean, he’s never been part of my life. I…” She paused. “I don’t even know who he is.”

  “It happens,” said Joseph, and the other two nodded, and Juniper felt proud of herself for telling them something she didn’t usually volunteer.

  “But that shit ain’t happenin’ to me,” Dashawn said. “I keep it covered.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” Xavier said. He told Juniper, “Maybe call and see if Brad’ll let you come inside, away from the vampires. Well, except this one,” he joked, nudging Joseph. “My mom’s home, if that makes a difference.”

  Juniper thought of it: calling Brad, telling him that Xavier had invited her in.

  “Okay, I’ll check.” She took her phone from her pocket and called her mom’s cell instead.

  “Hey, it’s me. I’m around the block and Xavier—the boy behind us?—is here with a couple of friends and they want to know if I can hang out with them for a while. Ms. Alston-Holt is home.”

  “Friends meaning boys, or girls, or what?”

  “Boys.”

  “Not a good idea,” said Julia. “You know that. Time to come on home. It’s almost nine anyway.”

  “Seriously? It’s Friday.”

  “You know the rules. You should’ve made plans with your girlfriends. Come home. Lily and I are watching Frozen, if you want to join us.”

  “Fine.”

  Juniper hung up, then told the boys, “Can’t, sorry.”

  “Next time,” Xavier said, and Juniper felt herself flush with pleasure.

  Joseph said, “Are they always strict like that?”

  She shrugged. “They’re pretty protective—”

  “Brad seems nice on TV,” Dashawn said.

  “No, right, he is. It’s just … they’re old-fashioned about stuff like this. I didn’t think I’d get a yes, but I wanted to try.”

  This last part Juniper directed at Xavier. She was rewarded with the crooked smile all the Oak Knoll ladies adored. She began to think she might adore him if she got the chance. Or took it.

  9

  We can’t say that even after a few weeks of casual acquaintance we knew Brad Whitman all that well, despite his gregarious behavior with the neighbors and the information about him available on the internet. His style was to ask people about themselves, to draw them out, make them feel important, seen. He didn’t offer them much about himself beyond the surface-level facts. He was, however, every bit as charming as he seemed on TV, that much we knew.

  Local and regional newspapers and business journals liked to write about him, this North Carolina–born boy who’d come from nothing and pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps, building a company that had become familiar to most of us, those blue-and-gold service trucks and vans seeming to be everywhere you looked. Hot weather meant trouble with air conditioners. Cold weather meant trouble with furnaces and heat pumps. For Brad (in this), trouble was money in the bank.

  The Whitman HVAC technicians were all clean-cut, polite, honest men, every one of them white because, we surmised, Brad understood a truth about his fellow Southern citizens: a great many of them would not open their door to a man of color—especially a black man, no matter how clean-cut or polite. And Brad couldn’t afford to have customers refuse to do business with him owing to their unreasonable fears. He was, we agreed, practical—possibly to a fault, though we couldn’t know yet one way or the other.

  That said, we were making what we thought were pretty fair guesses about who he was and what motivated him each day when he set his feet on the hand-loomed Himalayan Snowmass Alpaca rug the interior decorator had selected to go underneath his and Julia’s bed. Real understanding (though perhaps understanding is an overstatement) is something we arrived at later; we hardly saw him in the neighborhood as summer got under way, given that he had a thriving business to run.

  * * *

  “Whitman HVAC is solid,” said Mark Lewis, Brad’s accountant and friend since way back. Mark had just presented his biannual assessment, and “solid” was the bottom line. He said, “You’ve never been in better shape.”

  They were in Brad’s office at what they called the Hub, the company’s headquarters, the center now of a wheel that had seven satellites in four cities. The office, small and tidy, was painted gray and had little character. A utilitarian desk. A single tall file cabinet. An old couch—Brad’s first, from back when he’d had a studio apartment and survived on microwaved lasagna and burritos, living off his credit cards while he got the business (such as it was at the time) up and running. Mark sat in a plastic IKEA chair, while Brad sat behind the desk in the room’s single indulgence: a leather Eames Executive Chair, possibly the most comfortable piece of furniture ever made and no question the best Brad had ever owned.

  Brad patted his belly. “Good shape? Eh, I might do with a few more hours at t
he gym.”

  “Maybe now’s the time for that,” Mark said. Like Brad, he wore a designer-brand golf shirt. Unlike Brad’s, his didn’t strain in the front. “Scale back a little here, spend more time in the gym, more time in the great outdoors. You keep saying you’re going to buy a boat.”

  “I do keep saying that.”

  “Usually when you say a thing, you do a thing.”

  Brad said, “That’s a fact.”

  “Well, I mean it. You’re in great shape, Bud. You’ve already got the beach house; now you should buy that fishing boat and get to work angling for swordfish.”

  “I might could,” Brad said. “Though a sailboat appeals to me, too.”

  Mark closed the files on his tablet and tucked it into his briefcase. “Any boat’ll get you on the water. You just need to pick one and buy it. Boat ownership is the natural progression of things. Oh, and of course you’ll need a first mate.”

  Brad laughed. “Well, I guess I know who to call. Meantime, you and Carrie are coming to our little soiree, right?”

  “The housewarming? Definitely. And let me know if you want me to connect you with Ed Levinson—he’s the boat broker some of my other clients use.”

  “The way you’re pushing this boat thing, I suspect you get a commission.”

  Mark shook his head. “Nah, I just like having friends with boats. That way I’ll never have to bother with owning one myself.”

  “I’m not sure if that makes you lazy or smart.”

  “Proudly both where boats are concerned.” Mark stood and Brad walked him out. “You think on it—and the rest of it, too, all right?”

  “I’m not getting any younger, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “None of us is. Carpe fucking diem while you can.”

  “You are a fine poet, my friend. But don’t give up accounting.”