We were quiet for a while, listening to the sounds of Phil getting ready for bed—his feet plodding on the stairs, the water running in the bathroom.
“What about the boys?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? No way am I inviting the boys.”
I laughed. “No, I meant—what are they like?”
“Oh, um—besides their video game skills? Alex and Eric are really smart and kind of quiet. Kelsey told me they’re both going to be doctors, like their parents. They go to the school she used to go to, Ass Bury.”
“Ashbury.”
“And then Mac...he’s kind of an idiot. But he’s funny, I guess.”
“Thank goodness for that,” I said, smiling. Maybe this would be the beginning of something—of friends in and out of our house, breathing life into our empty spaces. “So it was fun overall?”
But Danielle had closed her eyes and was already drifting off to sleep.
* * *
In the morning, I made a trip into Livermore for groceries, lingering for a long time in front of the aisle of chips. What did teenage girls eat? Flavored chips, diet soda? Was it possible to make a wrong choice and completely blow my daughter’s chance at a social life?
I put Danielle to work straightening the house, which mostly consisted of hauling unpacked boxes from the living room to the garage. It was junk, all of it, but junk I couldn’t bear to throw away—an old spaghetti pot with the enamel worn thin, binders and outdated college textbooks.
Hannah arrived twenty minutes early—shy, answering my questions with polite monosyllables. Unlike her mother, she was plump, fat puddling at her armpits. She was awkward in her racerback tank suit, and I decided I liked her.
Kelsey was twenty minutes late, her face dwarfed by an oversize pair of sunglasses. Danielle was right. In her black bikini, with a sarong tied casually across her hips, Kelsey might have been a model for an advertisement in a men’s magazine. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, holding out a confident hand, as if she were the adult, welcoming me to her home. “I hear that you work at Miles Landers.”
“Right, I’ve been there for seven years now. I think you’ll like it.”
She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head, revealing eyes that were the same pale blue as her mother’s, but somehow colder and flatter. “Anything would be better than Ass Bury.”
All together, they were an odd trio, thrown together by circumstance rather than similarity. Throughout the afternoon I caught odd snatches of their conversation and glimpses of them from various windows of the house. Danielle blew up the beach ball I’d bought at the Dollar Store and the three of them smacked it back and forth across the surface of the water, sometimes viciously, sometimes idly, until it popped.
At one point Danielle came inside to use the bathroom and I intercepted her with a kiss on the forehead. At my insistence, she’d slathered herself with sunscreen, and her skin gleamed pink and raw from the previous week’s burn. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”
“Well, we haven’t taken a blood oath or anything yet, so don’t get too excited,” she said, hurrying past.
When Phil came home, he found me browning beef for enchiladas and wrapped his arms around my waist, swaying gently with me cheek to cheek.
“You’re in a good mood,” he observed.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“So how did it go? The great swim party of 2014?”
“Still going.” I jerked my head in the direction of the backyard, where the girls had been taking turns on the diving board. Hannah was there now, pumping her legs, her large breasts jiggling with the vertical motion. She took a clumsy leap and hit the water with a splash. I saw Kelsey and Danielle exchange smirks and felt suddenly, inexpressively sad. “I invited the girls to stay for dinner.”
Phil straightened, releasing me. We stood next to each other, watching out the window as the three of them bobbed in the pool.
“It seems to be working out,” I said. “And here Danielle didn’t think she had anything in common with them.”
And then Kelsey emerged from the water, one long leg following the other. Oh, to be so young, I thought. To be so lovely. She made her way to the diving board, water droplets glistening on her body, blond hair slicked back.
We watched transfixed as she hooked her thumbs into her bikini top, carefully adjusting her breasts within the two black triangles. She called something that sounded like “Geronimo!” and did a perfect swan dive into the water below. When she surfaced, her bikini top was twisted, revealing a perfectly round nipple.
“I bet the Jorgensens could afford a little more fabric,” I commented lightly.
Phil only said, “Shit,” and turned away.
A question: What’s the difference between a pedophile and an innocent person accused of pedophilia? What about a rapist and a person accused of rape? Practically speaking—nothing. They’re the same. One might as well be the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, because the accusation plants the suggestion, and from there the guilt grows. The innocent are the most vulnerable, really. They’ve got the most to lose—those with wives and kids who aren’t looking for something on the side.
On my first official day of work at The Palms, she was there. The office had been repainted for me, and plastic sheeting still covered my desk when I’d arrived. I’d been sorting through files in the cabinet when I heard the door close. By the time I looked up, she was sitting in one of the club chairs. Her skirt was so short that it nearly disappeared when she crossed her legs.
I smiled. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I have a complaint.”
I’d spent the previous week getting to know the residents, schmoozing with the men and flattering the ladies, fielding complaints about the wattage of lightbulbs and the leaky faucet in the women’s locker room and a slight hump near the service line on one of the tennis courts. I’d written it all down, made the appropriate phone calls. There had been other complaints, too—private ones—made by residents who stopped me on the sidewalk, always prefacing their thoughts with You didn’t hear it from me, but... and ending them with some variation of the same theme. Of course, I wouldn’t complain just for myself, but I’m thinking about the good of the community. Myriam Mesbah hated Helen Zhang’s dog, which barked constantly. Rich Sievert’s view was spoiled by the excavator that was digging out a pool in one of the backyards in Phase 3. The trees on the edge of the Asbills’ property dropped leaves into Janet Neimeyer’s backyard, and her gardener was forever having to blow the debris, which in turn disturbed the Asbills’ twins, who needed a midmorning nap.
But I’d smiled through it all, because this wasn’t real hustling, like selling had been—courting buyers and talking clients down from unrealistic asking prices, running from open house to open house on weeknights and weekends, waiting for above-asking-price offers that might never come. This job meant regular hours and a steady paycheck, not to mention a house Liz and I would never have been able to afford on our own.
“Buyers in these communities tend to be high-maintenance,” Jeff Parker had told me, after we’d shaken hands a second time, and the job was officially mine. He was a vice president at Parker-Lane, and eventually he would inherit his dad’s job. “The thing is to soothe them, to kiss a few asses here and there, to deal with what you can immediately and pass the buck upward for the rest. Above all—they like the quiet, the security, the exclusivity. They like to feel like they’re the most important people in the world