A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “This is why you’re still a virgin.”

  “I am not a virgin.”

  “Well, you act like one.”

  “What, because I don’t try to jump every girl I know?” Xavier said.

  “Anyway,” said Dashawn, “I bet her dad—”

  “Stepdad.”

  “Stepdad wouldn’t be good with his pretty virginal white property going off the reservation. You’re black, in case you haven’t noticed. Sure thing he has.”

  “I’m white, too.”

  “You know this isn’t even a debate.”

  “Whatever. It’s the twenty-first century. Even white girls can choose their own boyfriends. I mean, she’s almost eighteen, so—”

  “This white girl? Dream on.”

  “I don’t need to dream. Her stepdad likes me.”

  Dashawn gave him a sideways look. “Yeah? Then it’s only ’cause you’re so white-like. Classical guitar, you know. And let’s see, what else? No grill. Pants up at your waist. Straight-A student—” Dashawn turned to look at him. “Man, you are white.”

  “Oh, so now if I’m not a caricature of a thug, then I’m not black?”

  “Pretty much,” said Dashawn, turning back to his drawing. “I don’t make the rules.”

  Xavier looked over Dashawn’s shoulder at the sketch of a leaping panther. “Pretty good,” he said. He took a snow globe from the desk, shook it, held it up between himself and the window and watched the flakes swirl. “The thing about Juniper … I don’t know. I should back off. I kind of love her name, though. I mean, mine’s not common, but have you ever met anyone else with hers?”

  Dashawn shook his head and started to sketch a bear balancing on a tennis ball. “A juniper is a tree, right?”

  “A genus of trees, actually.” Xavier shook the snow globe again. “Remember how she said she doesn’t know who her dad is?”

  “Yeah—what’s up with that? Does her mom not even know, or is it, like, a secret she’s keeping? Maybe he’s a criminal. Or one of the X-Men.”

  “She told me her name has to do with him, or the lack of him, more like.”

  Xavier and Juniper had been sitting outside in the dark, in a far corner of the yard, leaning against the new fence. His mom was inside with the rest of the party guests. He’d been inside, too, and after having some food and talking with Juniper and the neighbors, he told Valerie he was heading home—which he did, but then he and Juniper met again at the gate.

  He knew he shouldn’t have suggested they meet outside to talk where it was quieter and, yes, private. But they’d hit it off, and he didn’t want to resist how good that felt, how right. She had this captivating quality of being both shy and bold at the same time, and, well, he just wanted … more.

  She was intelligent, that was already obvious to him. And so pretty. High forehead, wide eyes, a nose that had some character to it, lips that were fixed in a slight smile, Mona Lisa–like … He’d studied her while they stood talking in the Whitmans’ insanely perfect kitchen. Her neck was long. Her lime-green dress made her eyes look almost as green.

  Outside, she’d grabbed a couple of cushions and brought them over for them to sit on. In this corner, they could be seen by her next-door neighbors only if those neighbors happened to be outside and the kids caught their attention before settling onto the cushions. Not likely. Rosa and Lyle Morton, whom Xavier had known his whole life, were in their eighties and were sure to be asleep by this time of night, nine-thirty, party notwithstanding. Rosa was an early riser who was up and at the senior center by six o’clock most days. She played mah-jongg and did water aerobics. Lyle was up and out early, too, walking the one-mile loop around this Oak Knoll block before the sun got too high. He’d had a run-in with melanoma a decade earlier and wasn’t taking any more chances.

  The teens each sat down on a cushion, close enough that his left knee and arm nearly touched her right knee and arm. The moon had risen over the house and was casting its reflected light onto Juniper’s face. Xavier liked how Juniper’s eyelashes made shadows on the crests of her cheeks. He liked that she wore her hair in braids. The smell of her—faintly soapy and, underneath that, the musk of perspiration, an earthy, pleasant, sexual scent. He wanted to know everything about her. Was green her favorite color? Did she play any musical instruments? Was she as content with her life as it seemed she ought to be? How long had Brad and Julia been married? Did Brad treat her the same way he treated Lily? What did she like to eat, watch, read, do? Questions about her crowded his brain, leaving no room for him to question himself.

  He had to start somewhere, so he said, “I’ve been wondering, do you not know who your real dad is at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “Like, not even a story about him?” His mom had told him all kinds of stories about his dad.

  “Nothing,” she said. “All my mom’s ever told me is that he was just a guy she shouldn’t have bothered with. She says he’s not worth knowing and don’t waste my time even thinking about him.”

  “Do you, though? I mean, how could you not?”

  “I sometimes wonder how much I might be like him, but…” She shrugged.

  Xavier could feel her body’s heat radiating off of her. He supposed she could feel his.

  “So Brad adopted you?”

  Juniper shook her head. “Mom had my name changed, is all, so that everyone’s matched.”

  “You’re cool with that? Not being his legal kid, I mean.”

  “I guess I was just too old when they got married to think of him as my actual dad. I remember Mom asking me about it—did I want to be adopted?—and me saying something like ‘He can’t be my dad because he’s not.’ So they didn’t force it.”

  “That’s decent,” Xavier said. “So, okay, here’s my next question—”

  “Hold on,” Juniper said, laughing. “You have to answer some questions, too.”

  “Way less interesting for me.”

  “Too bad. Here, I’ll start with something easy. I’ve been wondering why your hair’s not black. Or is that a really weird thing to ask?”

  “My dad was white, that’s how. Okay, my turn: Is Juniper a family name, or what?”

  She laughed again. “Hold on. It’s still my turn. Your dad was white? But … President Obama had a white mom and his hair is like regular black guy’s hair.”

  Xavier said, “Just how it goes. We aren’t a predictable blend of our parents’ genes. It’s not like, you know, mixing ingredients for a cake and every time it comes out the same.”

  “I guess not. I like cake, though. And I like your hair.”

  “Some white people are one hundred percent sure it’s dyed. I don’t even argue it anymore. Okay, so, you. Name. Why.”

  “Fine,” she said, “but then I get another turn.”

  He nodded, happy with this game, this moment, the way being close to her made his blood rush, all of it.

  She said, “Junipers are supposedly some of the most resilient plants there are, and Mom says she figured that since she was single and young and not very well off, I’d need a strong name to live up to, or a name that would inspire me, something like that.”

  “I like it.”

  “I like it, too, I guess. Except people mess it up all the time. They hear Jennifer or—how about this: Jupiter.”

  “Out of this world.”

  “That is so incredibly clever.”

  “Right?” He said, “I get Ex-avier a lot. Think I might change my spelling, put a Z on the front, make it easier for everyone.”

  “The X is cool. Unique,” she said. “Now tell me about your dad.”

  “Nah, that’s a depressing story. You don’t want to hear it.” This wasn’t a false demurral intended to get her to encourage him to say more. He really did not like to talk about it.

  “When did he die?”

  “When I was still a baby.”

  She reached for his hand. “That sucks.”

  “Thanks.”

  The whol
e time they’d been sitting there, Xavier had been dying to touch her, and now by some small miracle his hand was in her small, warm, dry one. The sensation of skin to skin sent a thrum of electricity straight to his belly.

  Idiot, he told himself even as he’d leaned over and put his face close to hers, looking for a sign from her that he should stop or not stop. She leaned closer, and then he pressed his mouth to hers. It was a sweet kiss. Might even have been her first, he thought. The idea pleased him—more, probably, than it should have.

  “Kissing her was stupid,” he told Dashawn now. He picked up his old Epiphone—the first of the guitars he’d bought with his own money—and sat down on his bed, started running through some scales. “I’m not getting into a relationship now, when I’m leaving for school in August.”

  “Fine, don’t,” said Dashawn.

  “Should I tell her that? Or just leave it alone?” He ran up and down a D major scale, then an F major. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe we could go out, if she wants to. If her parents won’t freak about her breaking the do-not-date vow or whatever. It’s not like we have to get married.”

  Dashawn turned around to face him. “Are you going to be like this all summer?”

  Xavier set his guitar in its stand and flopped backward onto the bed. “Just shoot me now,” he said.

  12

  “I do not like what I’m seeing,” Valerie Alston-Holt said to Ellen Davies, president of the Oak Knoll HOA and Valerie’s good friend and neighbor of nearly twenty years. They stood outside in Valerie’s backyard looking up at her beloved oak tree.

  It was an otherwise perfect day. Not too hot. Not too humid. Valerie and Xavier had been out early that morning with string and stakes to delineate where the koi pond would go. Then, as had become her habit, at midmorning Valerie got her binoculars and made a close study of the tree’s branches. What she saw made her feel the way you might upon hearing of a dear friend’s cancer diagnosis: weak and sad and angry and helpless. She’d called Ellen for a sympathetic ear.

  While Valerie’s attachment to the tree had everything to do with Xavier, that tree was beloved by most of us. Its diameter had to be nearly six feet. It had seen scores of ice storms and hurricanes and droughts, and had witnessed more than just Valerie’s grief during its long life. Almost a century before there’d been a proper neighborhood, a small band of former slaves squatted here on land that officially belonged to some white man who evidently had no use for it. The newly freed Negroes, as they were called back then, built two-room planed-log cabins on the kind of stone foundations you can still find in the state’s parks and along the greenways. Those folks certainly knew grief, and surely told their tales within earshot of this oak when it was little more than an acorn’s upshoot straining toward the sky.

  One such tale was that of a young woman—almost a girl, really—whose owner had reluctantly complied with the Thirteenth Amendment by hiring (for a pittance) slaves who would stay on to keep his house and work his land. He was an old man for his time, close to sixty, and had managed to keep the Yankees out of his cotton and his home. War be damned, he’d been determined to carry on independently—that carrying on not limited to farming: he’d gotten his mind fixed on this girl, a laundress, and in time coerced her such that she was pregnant with his child. Her daddy, unhappy with his daughter being ill used by a man who no longer possessed that “right,” persuaded most of the other slaves who’d stayed on that it was time they take their chances elsewhere.

  This band of “goddamned ungrateful defectors” went by foot across the wide state, aiming for Kentucky, where one of the women believed she had kin. The travel wasn’t such a hardship for people who were used to being on their feet all day. The pregnant young woman, though, came into her eighth month during this time and began to have difficulty keeping up. She’d always been scrawny; that was why she’d been made a laundress and not a field slave. Now it seemed that the baby inside her was drawing her down further as it grew. No way she was going to make it to Kentucky.

  As the story goes, that pregnant young woman collapsed in a small clearing near the young tree that became Valerie’s great oak. For three days it was touch and go for both her and the baby inside her. On the fourth day, the baby (a boy) emerged hearty and loud, taking all of its mother’s life with it. He lived only a few weeks before he, too, was called home. They buried him just a few paces from the tree where he had been birthed, next to the woman who bore him.

  The tale, while sad at this juncture, takes a somewhat heartwarming turn—or it did for a time. The keeper of stories tends to be the oldest among us (Esther, in our case), and in her telling, mother and child became benevolent haints, protecting the tree and the land around it. We have no explanation for why that protection didn’t last.

  Valerie’s voice wavered as she looked at the tree and fought back tears. “This is so bad. It’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

  The tree stood about thirty feet away from the back of her house and shaded both the yard and the structure. Other, younger trees grew in its proximity, mostly on the fringes of the canopy perimeter, where there was more available sunlight. This tree was the reason Valerie and Tom had chosen this house, which was smaller and had been more expensive than the other one for sale in Oak Knoll at the time.

  “See there?” Valerie pointed. “Those limbs are in distress. They’ve been dropping leaves all day and are at maybe thirty percent of the leaf density they had last summer. Thirty percent. You can see the damage there, too.” She pointed again. “That’s seventy percent or so.”

  “Maybe it will recover,” Ellen said. She was an optimist—which was part of the reason we liked having her head the HOA. We appreciated her positive approach to problem-solving, her preference for inclusiveness. We liked having a black woman in a leadership position. It seemed like proof that even as the character of the neighborhood at large was changing, our ideals for what Oak Knoll should and could be (inclusive, color-blind, progressive) were holding fast.

  “Recover?” Valerie shook her head. “I want to hope for that, but … I think this is a death knell. Not only for those limbs—for the entire tree.” Tears welled again. “Goddamn that builder. I knew when I saw the foundation go in—and then when they were digging that pool … It’s too much damage to the root system.”

  Ellen said, “How can you know that’s the reason and not, I don’t know, disease?”

  Valerie turned toward her. “Seven years of college is how. A Ph.D. is how. Experience is how! I can’t believe you would even ask me that question.”

  “Okay,” said Ellen. “Sorry. I’m just—”

  “The city never should have given them a permit. And the builder—he knows what he’s doing to the trees, that’s why none of them even try to leave the big ones in place. They’d have to build smaller and therefore less profitable houses to accommodate the trees. They’d have to avoid severing or covering or compacting roots—they’d have to be careful. Careful costs money. Profit is everything.”

  “Okay, yes, but—”

  “I’m going to sue those heartless bastards,” Valerie said. “The builder, the pool company, the—”

  “Hold on,” said Ellen. “What if you get those limbs pruned first and see if that does the trick? You don’t want to go stirring up trouble if you don’t have to.”

  Valerie sat down at the base of the tree and leaned back against it. She tilted her head and looked upward. Two blue jays were hopping from branch to branch to branch and making their screechy dinosaur calls. A mating ritual? A territorial debate? Chickadees squeaked and chattered as they flew from the tree to the feeder and back.

  Valerie said, “I wish you could be right, about pruning.” Her voice was thick. “God knows I do. But you’re not.”

  Ellen was quiet for a minute. Then she said, in as kind a voice as anyone could muster, “Valerie, hon, it’s just a tree. No one is dying.”

  “You think I’m overreacting,” Valerie said. “Y
ou think I sound like some crazy woman.”

  “Not crazy … just, well, we all need to keep our sense of proportion. It’s a great tree, maybe even an historic tree, but like I said, it’s just a tree.”

  “It’s … it’s a part of my life here, and Zay’s. It’s a friend, El. And all right, not everyone has plants as friends. Some of you have cats or dogs that you tend like children—and, I remind you, you mourn their loss the same as if they’re members of the family. For me it’s plants, but this tree especially.” Valerie pressed her palms against the thick roots. “Look, a lawsuit would be me standing up for a principle. I’m an ecologist. If I don’t take a stand for environmental protection this way, who will? You have got to stand with me on this, Ellen, or before you know it, there won’t be one tree left in Oak Knoll.”

  “Okay, sure. But … maybe you want to talk to the Whitmans first. Try to work it out that way.”

  “Work what out? How would a conversation help this situation? The damage is done and can’t be repaired. They might say they’re sorry, but I’m not looking for an apology from them or their builder. I want to force a change to policy and practice.”

  “We used to have harmony here,” said Ellen.

  “You are not blaming me for this.”

  “There’s already so much conflict in the world. I’m tired, Val.”

  Valerie stood up. “Who isn’t? Come on inside and I’ll revive you with some pimiento cheese so good that it will change your life. Cold beer, too, if you want it.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Ellen said.

  “And I won’t stop—you know that, and you love me, right?”

  * * *

  Just the same, before Valerie took action toward bringing a lawsuit, she waited and watched a while longer, observing the tree closely, checking again for signs of disease or infestation. She very much wanted her initial assessment to be wrong. Or even just less dire. Anything to prevent her from antagonizing the Whitmans. She wanted to keep the peace and continue to be everyone’s favorite neighbor (our words, not hers). She wanted to see whether Julia Whitman might become a friend. The tree, however, insisted on its own agenda, dropping leaves ever more rapidly as if to challenge Valerie’s integrity and test her commitment. Don’t ignore the bigger picture, Val, it seemed to say. Do right by me, or what is all your work for?