A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  She sought counsel from a white lawyer named Wilson Everly. Though she would have preferred to hire a person of color, this choice was strategic. Not only was Everly white, he was Southern-born, with a family that had been rooted in this state since before the Civil War. A family with numerous members who’d become ardent environmentalists. Everly was a Southern white card-carrying member of numerous conservation agencies and a prominent attorney in a respected firm. Valerie could not have a better combination for her purposes.

  Wilson Everly, who we’d have to describe as upright in appearance as well as in reputation, met her in the law firm’s austere lobby and ushered her into his office. The month being May, he wore a pearl-gray suit. His shirt was crisp and white, with collar stays, not buttons; no preppy oxfords for this gentleman. His narrow tie, apple green with thin violet stripes, was the only visible clue that he was something other than a traditional Southern gentleman. We hide in plain sight, Tom (a Southerner) used to say about men like himself and Everly, men who when taken out of their usual context were assumed to be the stereotypical conservative Christians of Southern tradition and power. And in reply, Ellen would say how nice it must be to pass in a way that conferred an advantage—because for her, a Haitian émigré, being presumed African American (as happened often) was of no benefit at all.

  Everly said, “Please, have a seat. May I offer you something? Iced tea? Water?”

  With that Old South accent, his was the voice of innumerable plantation owners long past, the voice many blacks associate with oppression and cruelty, even if only on a subconscious level.

  Valerie remembered how she’d fretted about moving from Michigan to the South, though she’d been excited about taking the teaching position and eager to live in a place where snow was considered a rare treat. Her rational brain told her that there were many, many white folks in the South who did not wave the Confederate flag, who in fact were ashamed of that heritage. Irrationally she expected every white person here to try to diminish her whenever the opportunity might arise. She’d said this to Tom the first time they met, at a university mixer for incoming faculty, then waited for him to defend himself and the state and the South the way other white people had done. Waited for him to say she was overly sensitive. To insist that racism was a thing of the past. But he’d said with full sincerity, “I’m sorry. That can’t feel good. I admire you for coming here anyway.” When he’d gone on to tell her he was a W. E. B. Du Bois acolyte, well, they were off to the races.

  Now Everly said, “I want to know all about what’s going on with you and that wonderful tree.”

  “Formerly wonderful. But thank you. So, as I told you when we spoke on the phone, its root system has been fatally disrupted. The tree is dying.”

  “This, because of the construction in the lot that adjoins yours”—he checked his notes—“at the back.”

  “Yes—but more specifically, because the house and pool and patio cover too much of that lot. I looked up the permits: KDC Homes got a variance without revealing that there was a tree of this size within seventy-five feet of the proposed structure. And I have to guess that either the inspector who granted the permit never visited the lot to see for himself, or signed off on it anyway.”

  Everly nodded. “Either of those could be true. I’ve seen both.”

  “KDC knew what the effect was going to be—that’s why they took every tree off of that lot before they built. Every single tree. That way there’s none left to die later, and therefore no homeowner complaint and request for the builder to pay for removal,” Valerie said. “It’s all about money. Laverne Michaels, the woman who’d lived there since 1961, had a pair of ancient dogwoods in the front yard that some folks made a special point to come see each spring. Do you know what’s there now? Boxwoods. Boxwoods! They’re … they’re Disney World shrubs. They aren’t going to shade a thing.”

  “No,” said Everly, nodding in that patient manner some older gentlemen have. “That they are not. Now, you said you think the homeowner, too, was aware that what he wanted to build was not to code. What makes you think so?”

  “He basically said it.” She recounted the conversation she and Brad Whitman had on his patio that first day, when the fence crew arrived. “He said he had a friend on the inside and then he winked,” she said. “None of them believe in regulations. They don’t care what the effects of breaking them might be. Rules are for losers and cowards and poor people!”

  “I understand your frustration, Ms. Alston-Holt. But I believe you’ll feel better if we keep our focus on action rather than emotion. I do share your view—please don’t mistake me. But I have found that not only am I more effective when I set aside the emotional aspects of a situation, I sleep better, too.”

  “I can’t sleep well knowing that sooner or later I’m going to have a tree service in my yard using chainsaws to…” Her voice thickened and she paused for a moment to collect herself, remind herself to stay focused on the goal, to pursue not retribution but justice. Justice was a force she believed in. Justice would be enough.

  She said, “Taking down that tree will cost me several thousand dollars that I don’t have to spare. My son’s going to a private college this fall, and though he did win a substantial scholarship, it’s not even close to covering the full expense. I’ve saved some,” she said, wishing for the thousandth time that Tom had taken out a life insurance policy (something they’d both intended to do but hadn’t gotten around to). “But I’m borrowing a lot more. How am I going to come up with the money for tree removal? That’s partly why I’m here. That expense shouldn’t be on me.”

  Everly said, “Indeed—I’ve seen this kind of thing run into five, seven thousand, depending on whether they’ve got to bring in a crane and so forth. And beyond that is the alteration to your property that will result once the stump and roots are out.”

  Valerie winced. “God, I hate even hearing this.”

  “I guess I don’t have to tell you that when you take out a tree of that size, you alter the ecosystem in its proximity. Which means incurring additional expense to restore the landscape.”

  “It does,” Valerie said. “My backyard will have to be reforested. It’s … I…” She cleared her throat and wiped her eyes. “Sorry. I can’t seem to help myself.”

  “We should talk about this,” Everly said, gesturing toward her. “The emotional damage this situation has caused and will cause.”

  “You just said I should leave emotion out of it.”

  “Yes, I did. And you should when we’re making decisions and pursuing a course of action. There is no denying, however, the distress you’re suffering. For that, we’ll want to include a request for those damages. It’s important to make folks like this feel the consequences of their actions materially. It’s a matter of justice and also, one hopes, a deterrent against future such acts. I want to start a damages claim at five hundred thousand and see where we get.”

  Valerie blinked twice and leaned forward. “I’m sorry, did I hear you right? Five hundred thousand dollars?” Had she been asked to put a figure on it, she’d have said ten thousand. Fifteen, tops.

  Everly said, “It’s a large sum, yes. It needs to be large to be effective. I think the apportionment would be fairly put at four hundred from KDC and one hundred from Mr. Whitman. Plus, of course, a reimbursement of your total expenses including my fees. If I start digging—forgive the pun—and discover evidence that the city was willfully involved, we may want to include them in the suit as well.”

  “I…” Valerie began. Her first impulse was to protest the amount, to say that while she was absolutely wrecked by the impending loss of that tree, a half-million dollars in compensation was absurd.

  Then she thought of how, if they prevailed, she’d be able to pay all Xavier’s college expenses not covered by his scholarship. Neither she nor Xavier would have to borrow a penny. She could pay off the balance of her mortgage. She could make donations to the NAACP and the ACLU and the Southern Pover
ty Law Center along with a whole list of organizations that made environmental protection their mainstay.

  She said, “Wow. If you really can do that, a lot of people will benefit.”

  “Doing is not as easy as saying. But we’ll set our course and get under way, and I have no doubt that you’ll come out of it better than how you’re going in.”

  “Really, that’s all I want. If we can stop these soulless bastards—Sorry, I’m supposed to put aside my anger, I know. Let me try that again: If in the end we can encourage—no, require—better future behavior, everyone wins.”

  “There you go,” Everly said.

  * * *

  We’ve said this before: no one who’d known Valerie before Oak Knoll’s gentrification began had ever thought of her as any kind of troublemaker. No one saw her as a difficult person. Just the opposite, in fact. She sought consensus, was respectful of diverse points of view. She volunteered her time and expertise. She wasn’t much of a cook, but you could count on her to organize a bereavement committee or retirement party or birthday celebration and have it go off beautifully.

  We did know her as a tree hugger, as a guardian of what made Oak Knoll such a lovely place to live. The HOA had adopted her suggestions to require application and approval any time a resident wanted to remove a tree with a diameter greater than four inches—which was as much as we could regulate; the city had its own codes that superseded ours. Some trees did need to go—Valerie was expert on this. Selective culling and intelligent habitat management benefited not only the trees but the human residents and the animals, too. Possums, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, deer, chipmunks, lizards, hawks, every kind of songbird, five varieties of woodpecker, including the yellow-bellied sapsucker and the pileated … all these creatures coexisted here with us—or had, before the infill began; by now no one had seen a pileated woodpecker in better than a year. And we won’t even get into the detrimental effects that might occur on the less obvious categories of insect life and soil health and the complicated equations of carbon dioxide and oxygenation, which we can’t speak to except in the most general terms.

  Maintaining the visual character of Oak Knoll and keeping an ecosystem in balance was, we all felt, a worthy endeavor. We liked having a local authority who was motivated to serve the community in ways it hadn’t known it needed serving. Hardly a day went by between February and November when one or another of us didn’t stop by or call to ask Valerie a question about planting or pruning, fertilizing our grass or killing our weeds in bug-, bird-, and pet-friendly ways. And in truth, we were sometimes also checking in on her, especially in the first year or so after Tom was gone. In sum, Valerie was like a turtle: tough shell, tender underside, easy to have around.

  We had reservations, though, about including the Whitmans in this lawsuit-to-be. Equal to ecological harmony, we valued social harmony. Valerie did, too—we all knew that. So then, what about the effect this suit was certain to have on her developing friendship with Julia Whitman? What about our friendships with both the Whitmans and Valerie? What about the kids’ friendship—friendship being all we thought (if we thought of it at all) was going on at the time? Might a less visible, less contentious, less financially injurious process be a better way to go, even if, as some of us would remark, it wasn’t like Brad Whitman was going to be bankrupted if he was made to pay?

  We wondered, had Tom lived to see what was going on now, would he have cautioned Valerie against filing a lawsuit? Or at least cautioned her against naming Brad Whitman in the suit?

  Those of us who’d known Tom best said nope, absolutely not. He’d loved her because she was both tender and fierce.

  13

  The scene at the Whitmans’ dining table on the evening Juniper asked for a car was one we would have liked to witness. Because as much as any of us could stand on the sidewalk and gaze at their picture-perfect house, seeing the warm glow of costly light fixtures inside, noting the way the copper gutters caught the dying western sun as the crickets began their night song among the boxwood shrubs … as much as we envied the ability to live as well as the Whitmans did even while disapproving of the size of the house and the process by which it had come to stand here towering over its near neighbors, we wondered how they treated one another when no one was watching. We were curious to know whether their family life was as enviable as their home.

  For example, Juniper might be a fuel source for drama just by being seventeen and impatient for adulthood, as most of us are at that age. Then there was the impending visit of Julia’s mother, which Julia had mentioned to Kelli Hanes as the two women chatted by their mailboxes on a recent afternoon when Kelli was about to leave for second shift in the OR. Apparently the mother, Lottie Corbett, was having financial and health troubles and would be bunking with her daughter’s family for a while. Capping all of that: Brad Whitman didn’t know yet that he was about to be sued—an event that was certain to cause Sturm und Drang between the Whitmans and Alston-Holts.

  For the moment, however, the issue was a car and, even more to the point, a job.

  * * *

  Supper had concluded, and while the girls cleared the plates, Julia brought a strawberry-rhubarb pie to the table. “Who wants a scoop of ice cream, too?” she asked.

  “Me!” said Lily, raising her arm and waving it.

  “Clean plate club members welcome,” Julia said.

  Juniper said, “I’ll have some.”

  “How about half a scoop?” Julia said, recalling how she had gotten plump at Juniper’s age. A diet of nothing but sugary garbage would do that to you: Twinkies and soda and candy bars and Pop-Tarts … she’d eaten whatever she could persuade a boy to buy for her at the convenience store up the road from the high school, or whatever she could slip into her waistband or pocket when the clerk’s attention was elsewhere. Both habits had led to trouble of similar kinds: boys expected certain favors in return; clerks who caught her blackmailed her for those same kinds of favors. It had been a terrible time, but Julia didn’t shy away from the memories. They gave her the power to hold the line when the girls protested rules stricter than what their friends’ parents set.

  Juniper said about the ice cream, “I’m still running thirty miles a week; can’t I have a whole scoop?”

  “Sure,” Brad said. “That’s reasonable.” He gave Julia a look that seemed to say, Lay off. Julia bristled for a moment, then gave a nod. He was right. She was over-parenting again.

  As Juniper took the plate Julia held out to her, she said, “Also … I was wondering if you guys could help me buy a car. I’ll pay you back.”

  “A car? For what?” asked Julia.

  Most teens these days—or at least the ones at Blakely—were in no rush to drive. They were so accustomed to using their mothers or a service to get around that the idea of having a car seemed not to occur to them. Julia and Brad had made Juniper take a driver’s training course so that she could, if need be, safely and legally get behind the wheel. They made sure she took her test and got her license. They did not, however, intend to let her go off driving on her own for no good reason—which was fine, since Juniper had not been inclined to ask.

  She answered Julia, “For work. Fresh Market offered me a job stocking shelves and I don’t want you to have to always drive me back and forth.”

  “You got a job?” said Julia.

  Brad said, “Now, why’d you go and do that?”

  “I told you I was applying,” Juniper said to Brad. “Remember?”

  Julia said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Brad replied to Juniper, “I remember we said you’d come to work for me.”

  “No,” she said, frowning. “I said maybe I would—”

  “When was this?” said Julia. It was all news to her.

  “Like, two weeks ago? I told him I wanted to get a job so I won’t be bored all summer.”

  “And I said I had a position opening up in dispatch—which I would’ve advertised,” Brad said, directing his gaze at Ju
niper, “if I’d known you weren’t serious about my offer.”

  Juniper looked miserable. “I only said maybe. I’m still thinking about what I want to do.”

  “I want to have some pie and ice cream, please,” Lily said, looking up at Julia, who, so prompted, went back to her task of slicing and serving.

  “Do?” Brad said to Juniper. “With what? Your summer or your life or what?”

  Lily said, “Juniper’s going to college, she told me so.”

  “She might,” said Julia. “She should, if she’s going to have a career, but we know there are other equally good choices for women, right?”

  Lily said, “Right! I’m going to marry Daddy and make him build me a house just like this one, except orange.”

  “You can’t marry your own dad,” said Juniper, not unkindly.

  Even so, Lily’s face threatened to crumple. “Why not?”

  “Honey, Daddy’s married to Mommy,” Julia told her. “You’ll marry someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone you’ll meet later, when you’re grown up.”

  “But … but I already know Daddy and he loves me and I love him.”

  “I do, sugar pie,” Brad said. “But Juniper and Mommy are right. When you’re older you’ll meet somebody who knocks your socks off and he’ll build you your own big, pretty house and I’ll come and visit you there. How’s that sound?”

  “Terrible. I don’t even know him. This is dumb,” Lily said, digging into her pie. “There’s too many rules.”

  Brad said to Juniper, “So you didn’t already accept the job?”

  “No, I did—but … I could do both. How about that?”

  Julia said, “I don’t know. You’ve got a lot of reading to do this summer, plus piano—”