A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

  And if it was? He was not her father. They had no blood relation. She’d known him for only a few years. It would not technically be wrong.

  Suppose she’d invited it—though not deliberately—in the way she’d been crushing on him all along? What to her had been hero worship might have come to seem like something else to him, something laced with desire and intent.

  Did he desire her?

  What if he did?

  Juniper said nothing to her mother or anyone about it. Maybe she’d been mistaken. What did she know about men and … whatever it was she thought she was seeing in his eyes? It could’ve been nothing more than some mixture of pride and happiness and anticipation, right?

  So Juniper studied him at the ball the next night: the way he smiled at her as she made her vows and he made his; the pride in his expression as they held hands and walked to the dance floor; the admiration in his eyes as he gazed down at her during the waltz. Totally paternal. Nothing inappropriate at all, she was sure. She relaxed, then, and let herself be fully in the moment as it was intended—which is to say, filled with certainty that the Lord had brought them together for only this kind of pairing, protector and protected, no different than the other men and daughters here. He was impressed by her commitment and devotion. He loved her like a daughter, and she loved him like a father. He would help her become the best young woman she could be.

  * * *

  This explains the look of bliss on Juniper’s face in that portrait from the ball. But what about Brad’s also blissful expression?

  * * *

  The secret, part two:

  January, this year. With Julia and Lily gone to Lottie’s place, Juniper had taken on the role of cook for the evening. When Brad got home from work that day, the house—their previous house, not the one here in Oak Knoll—smelled like onions and garlic and roasting beef. He found Juniper in the kitchen at the stove wearing an apron. Her hair was up in a loose knot. She had her earbuds in and was singing along to a song he didn’t know. She sang in a half-audible way, as if the action was unconscious. As if she was happy and engrossed.

  Something was cooking in a pot, and she was tending it, and the whole scene struck a chord in Brad—or more like a single low, clear tone. It affected him the way a firm strike on a temple gong does when the sound rings out and surrounds and moves straight into the gut of all who hear it.

  Look at her, so thoughtful. She didn’t have to make dinner. They’d talked, the day before, about going out for sushi, which neither Julia nor Lily would eat. Yet here she was, dressed up and playing house on Brad’s behalf, and he was delighted.

  She’d already set the table. Noticing he’d come in, she now took a beer from the refrigerator and poured it into a pilsner glass for him. She asked him how his day had gone. While they ate a surprisingly good beef roast—better than Julia ever managed to make—she talked about the book she was reading. She was upbeat. Funny. Lively. Lovely. There was no question in Brad’s mind: Juniper had made this effort solely to please him.

  He went to his den after dinner, bemused by the demonstration. What, exactly, was she up to? Was she up to anything at all? Did he want her to be?

  He did not.

  No, he did. Sort of.

  Why not admit it? He was attracted to his stepdaughter and had been for a while now, God help him—which was why he’d made an effort to shut that down, keep it out of his head the way he kept a lot of his youth out of his head, no benefit to him or anyone to let that stuff clutter his brain, affect his actions. He’d fronted his feelings with demonstrations of fatherly affection and pride, as in that portrait. He had plenty of other things to think about—a business to run, projects to work on. He had a daughter of his own who was one of the lights of his life. The most he’d allowed himself to do was watch Juniper and appreciate what he saw, not so different from the ways he sometimes watched porn. Consider: a man could admire and lust after a woman without ever even meeting her, let alone knowing her. He could soap himself in the privacy of his shower and close his eyes and think about her while he satisfied some of that lust, and no harm to anyone. If Brad sometimes had Juniper in mind, so what? No one was the wiser, and if no one was the wiser, there was no problem at all.

  But … supposing she wanted him, too?

  No.

  No. For all intents and purposes, she was his daughter, same as Lily, and he would treat her interest 100 percent paternally. He should never have indulged his inappropriate thoughts in the first place.

  Not that there was any harm in that.

  Leave it, Whitman, he thought.

  He stayed in the den, watched a movie.

  He went to the dining room liquor cabinet, poured himself a scotch.

  He read the local news, then the sports news.

  He thought about taking a shower.

  He got another two fingers of scotch.

  Julia called; he told her everything was fine, that Juniper was upstairs reading, that yes, he would enforce a reasonable bedtime. Had he been drinking? A little, sure. Why did she ask? His speech was a little fuzzy? Well, he was tired. Off to bed soon.

  The house was quiet when he went upstairs. Juniper’s bedroom door was open, the light still on. She’d fallen asleep reading. He stood in the hallway remembering how sweet she’d looked in sleep when she was younger, how when they’d traveled she sometimes fell asleep in the car or in the airport or on a beach towel after a full morning of romping in the surf. He hardly ever had a chance to see her asleep nowadays.

  He went into the room to turn the light off. She lay on her back. So pretty in sleep. So pretty all the time. A smart girl. Sweet. She’d been obedient just the way the church taught—a surprise to him and Julia both, given their own capacities for getting into trouble in their youths. But then everything had been different for Juniper, a rescue child who had always wanted to please people, to do right, to be loved.

  At her bedside, Brad leaned over, intending to kiss her on the forehead. The kiss, though, almost of its own accord, landed on her mouth.

  Juniper stirred and Brad pulled back half in a panic, but she didn’t wake.

  For a long moment he watched her and warred with himself over what to do next.

  Her lips … So soft, so virginal. That young, firm body … God, the temptation! He hated and loved it both.

  She’d be scared, but eager, too, definitely eager. He sensed it. He knew it.

  But.

  No, damn it, he thought, and he turned and left the room.

  It would be wrong, was wrong, was not even something he ought to be considering.

  But.

  He wanted to have her, could have her, he believed. Under the right circumstances.

  Which would never come to pass. He wouldn’t allow it, even if she threw herself at him. That’s not the kind of man he was. He had a wife and a daughter to consider.

  But, Jesus, it was painful to know she was absolutely in reach if he wanted to pursue her, if he was willing to accept what she was offering.

  And it galled him to know that something he wanted was not in fact gettable. There had been very little in his life so far that wasn’t.

  21

  The secret, part three:

  Juniper had not actually been asleep.

  22

  Chris Johnson, Valerie’s beau, frowned at her from across the table at the restaurant where they were having dinner. She didn’t like his severe expression. This expression was not what she’d driven three hours to see.

  She said, “I take it you disapprove.”

  “You don’t need my approval—but no, I don’t disapprove of your taking action against the builder. The homeowner part of this worries me, is all. You’ve dramatically increased your burden of proof in requiring a jury to hold him jointly accountable.”

  Valerie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’ve got plenty on him to prove his complicity. If it even goes to trial, which my attorney thinks isn’t likely. The negative press would be b
ad for all of them.”

  Chris said, “I wish you had talked to me about it before you—”

  “Please don’t try to pull some kind of mansplaining thing on me,” Valerie said, not letting him finish. “I hired an eminently qualified attorney to advise and represent me in a jurisdiction he knows all about.”

  “My, you’re prickly. I wasn’t going to mansplain anything. I was going to say, I wish you had talked to me at the time so that I could’ve lent my support from the start.”

  “Oh,” Valerie said. “Okay, I’m sorry. This has been really stressful, and I’m…” She swallowed hard. “Let’s start over, okay?” She picked up the cocktail menu.

  “You don’t have to go through all of these things alone, Val. I know you’re tough and capable, but, you know, sharing a burden can be a good thing—for a relationship but, more importantly, for a stressed-out individual who’s already dealing with an impending major event.”

  “You mean Zay leaving.”

  “Yes. I’ve been there; who can relate better?”

  He meant he’d seen a fledgling of his own leave the nest: his daughter Talia, who was now twenty-six and was getting married at the end of June. One of the reasons Chris was so appealing to Valerie was that he’d raised a child to adulthood largely on his own, as she had. “And he’s black,” her mother had said when Valerie told her about him. “I guess now you’ve learned your lesson.” “That’s incidental,” Valerie had replied, and her mother had said, “Humph.”

  To Chris, Valerie said, “Sure, you launched Talia. I don’t know that you can relate to the tree situation, though.”

  “Not directly, but so what?” He reached across the table for her hand and said, enunciating each word slowly, “I am on your side.”

  Valerie drew and expelled a heavy breath. Her shoulders were practically up around her ears; she relaxed them, took another cleansing breath, and then said, “I am going to order a cocktail.”

  Chris squeezed her hand and let it go. “I want to be … It’s hard to do this long distance.”

  “We’ve talked about that.”

  The waiter arrived at their table. Chris and Valerie each ordered a drink, and then Chris said, “Let’s talk about it again.”

  “And draw the same conclusions. So maybe we should just flip a coin to see which of us gives up two decades of connections to their school and colleagues.”

  “That might be the only way to resolve it.”

  “What we’re already doing works fine.”

  “It does not work fine,” Chris said. “It works barely.”

  He wasn’t wrong. What kept it functional was that they had excellent chemistry, had felt it the minute they met, continued to feel it whenever they were together, and felt it sustaining them when they were apart. Further, they had a strong intellectual connection, both of them idealists, activists, committed and experienced educators. Everything about the relationship worked gorgeously, except the geography.

  They’d talked about it a lot, and the issue Valerie had so far managed to avoid addressing (because she knew her answer was in some ways lame) was why she was so reluctant to consider relocating. UVA was a good school—she’d be pleased to teach there. And central Virginia was beautiful. The summers were cooler than here.

  The answer to why was this: her house and her friends and her outdoor plants. She was entrenched. To say so, though, would make it sound like she valued those things over Chris. Which she didn’t. But still.

  Xavier was going to college. Their oak tree was going to die. Maybe she should be going to some kind of new situation, too.

  She said, “Here’s something else I haven’t told you yet: Xavier likes the girl whose father I’m suing.”

  “Well, that’s … untidy. Did you know? Before you filed suit?”

  “He never breathed a word of it—and probably never would have except that he got pissy with me about the lawsuit and it came out that that was why.”

  “So it’s going to mess things up for him.”

  “It would, except that she’s forbidden to date.”

  “Date him?” Chris said.

  “Date anyone. That is, she made a purity pledge when she was fourteen, which we can only call blatant coercion. Though even if she could date, I’m sure Brad wouldn’t be wild about her seeing a black boy. Julia, the mother, is genuinely friendly toward us—or she has been; I think that’ll change once the suit’s served. I know I should give Brad the benefit of the doubt, but—”

  “Except where your tree is concerned.”

  “Except there,” she said.

  “Would you be okay with them dating—tree notwithstanding?”

  “Truth? I did not react to the idea favorably. I like the girl. I’m absolutely in favor of people getting together in whatever combinations work for them, color or gender or class or whatever. But I don’t have to tell you, racism is getting uglier and more overt all the time.” She took a roll to butter and went on, “I told Xavier she’s too white.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know—Tom was white, I’m a hypocrite. But here’s the thing. Her parents are willfully cultivating that young lady’s ignorance. Education and access to birth control are what works. It’s proven.”

  Chris said, “Yes, well, if safe sex was the goal, that’d be a whole different story. The goal is ‘purity,’ remember.”

  “Yes, exactly. Purity, which might as well be a synonym for whiteness, in this case. Not to mention female disempowerment, a ‘marry them off and keep them barefoot and pregnant’ effort. Let’s just all go back to the Dark Ages together,” Valerie said, her voice rising. “Those good old days, when life expectancy was thirty and lynching Negroes was all the rage. Why wouldn’t I want Xavier to get himself mixed up with folks like that? I’m getting all wound up, sorry.”

  Chris smiled. “You’re trying to protect Zay, that’s all.”

  “That’s my job. Or it was my job.”

  “And you’ve done it well.”

  “Have I? After our little chat, he left for a party and I haven’t seen him for more than maybe three minutes since. It’s like he’s punishing me.”

  “Probably is.”

  “He said he’d decided not to pursue her, but he still got mad when I agreed he shouldn’t.”

  “Sure, he said it.”

  “You think he didn’t mean it.”

  “What do you think? I don’t know him well enough to say.”

  “I think … he wanted to mean it. But I have a feeling he’s caught.” She sighed. “Damn. I do like her, though. Just yesterday she came over while I was working in the yard. We had a nice little visit.”

  Valerie had been turning the compost when she heard Juniper and a friend come outdoors, the other girl doing most of the talking. It seemed a mutual friend of theirs was maybe bulimic, maybe anorexic, how to be sure without asking? Also: how to ask? One thing was clear: Hailey was getting way, way too skinny, absolutely skin and bones, don’t you think? and Juniper’s friend wondered if they should make plans for an intervention.

  While the girls discussed it, they batted a beach ball from one side of the pool to the other. Valerie heard the soft bumps of hand against plastic (those things would last centuries in a landfill), saw the ball at the top of each arc. She listened keenly, as she often did to the students milling in the hallways on campus. These girls were, what, seventeen? And no mention by either of them of involving adults in this possible intervention or of getting adults involved at all. Not surprising, really—Valerie remembered being that age, her total lack of confidence in adults at the time. Adults caused the problems, they didn’t solve them. And wasn’t that still generally true? Yes, it was.

  The ball came sailing over the fence and bounced into Valerie’s yard, followed moments later by Juniper coming through the gate, her friend following. Both of the girls were in bikinis that made middle-aged Valerie almost blush for them but in which seventeen-year-old Valerie would have strutted proudly.

&n
bsp; Youth. Would she go back to her own if she could? She’d be tempted, sure. Imagine getting to regain the excitement of her first serious romance—with ecology, not with any boy from that time; ecology was the love that had lasted.

  She could recall the day it happened. She was ten years old, sitting with her family in church and waiting for her grandmother’s funeral to begin. While the adults murmured to one another, Valerie observed the display in front of them. There was a coffin, its top half open to reveal Gram from the waist up, its lower lid closed and covered with a casket spray of peach and lavender and cream-colored roses—Gram’s favorite colors, the lavender especially, which she had often remarked matched her hair. An overstatement, but then Gram had been prone to hyperbole. To hear her tell it, her whole life before moving to Michigan from Beaufort, North Carolina, at age twenty was a series of Depression-era trials and tribulations that rivaled Job’s tests.

  So: casket flowers, and two urns of similar floral bouquets set on pedestals, and three more big arrangements on easels. Valerie turned to look around her. The first four rows of pews had smaller floral sprays at their ends. Flowers and funerals: Why did they go together? Not until she researched it later would she know that the original purpose was to mask the smell of death—that is, decomposition. No matter; the connection she was making as she sat there that morning was that flowers and plants made folks feel better. That’s why people also sent them to hospital patients. Flowers and plants made folks feel good, happy—why?

  That was the question that got her going. What was behind the interrelationship between humans and flora? Between one plant and another? Plants and animals, plants and insects, plants and the atmosphere? Why did one seed turn into a flower and another into a shrub and another into a tree?

  That feeling: curiosity, excitement, love. Love was the root of all of it, no pun intended. Love came so easily in youth.

  Now Juniper saw Valerie and said, “Oh—hi, Ms. Alston-Holt. Sorry, the ball got away from us.”