The Neighbor's Secret(12)

Despite tonight’s eighty-degree weather, Deb wore suede boots that came up to almost her waist. She had Disney princess hair, coiled perfectly over her shoulders in glossy waves.

“What vandal?” Jen said.

The women regarded Jen as though she’d announced that books were stupid, especially when you could just see the movie.

After a cycle of how did you miss this, where have you been? Deb explained worriedly that someone had graffitied not only the Cottonwood signs by the entrance but also—she lowered her voice, infused it with pathos—Lena Meeker’s mailbox.

As in Lena Meeker, of all people.

Jen wasn’t entirely fluent in neighborhood lore, but fragments of Lena’s story had come up in some of the meetings—her husband had died in a horrible car crash years before in the neighborhood, and Lena had apparently responded by sealing herself off in that big house on top of the hill.

How would someone like Lena Meeker parent Abe?

At last an answer that Jen liked: Not as healthily as Jen Chun-Pagano, who made it a point to leave the house and go to book club every single month.

“Even if it is just bored kids,” Priya said. “They’re cruel. I’ve been pregnant four times, ladies. When my bladder sees a sign screaming PEE each morning, it thinks ‘great idea!’”

“Hey,” Annie said. “When did you guys get here?”

Annie’s daughter Laurel, who was roughly Abe’s age, had appeared behind Annie. “Five minutes ago,” she said. In a gesture of casual affection, she’d draped her arms around Annie’s middle, pressed her chin into Annie’s shoulder. “Dad and Hank are saying hi to Mrs. Nessel.”

Laurel smiled at Jen. She held excellent eye contact with those alert upturned amber eyes. Her mass of long curly hair was captured haphazardly by a scrunchy. Everything about her said middle school is a breeze!

“Mike,” Deb Gallegos cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted across the room to Annie’s husband. “Come here.”

Jen stifled an eye roll. Whenever Mike Perley stopped by book club, everyone acted like they were on vacation and he was the hot scuba instructor who was making them feel twenty-one again.

He was different from the other husbands—because of his youth and that cheeky grin, because of his shaggy shoulder-length orange hair, occasionally swept up into a man bun, because of his penchant for accessorizing: rope bracelets around his wrists, leather cords with beads around his neck, ornate tattoos, one on each forearm. Because instead of leaving at seven thirty each morning for the office, he owned a struggling restaurant and seemed to be around a lot.

As he approached their group, the women’s faces turned toward him like sunflowers.

“Mike Perley.” Janine beamed. “Be still my beating heart. How was the blood drive?”

“Excellent!” Mike said.

The women swooned and tittered as he and Laurel jointly narrated the highs and lows of the school blood drive they’d just attended, after which Laurel was dispatched to protect the food table from Hank. Before she left, though, she referred to Hank by an affectionate nickname—Jen didn’t catch it—that made Annie and Mike dissolve in laughter.

Tonight, proximity to the Perleys was a little too much for Jen to take. She suddenly felt a burning need to find cracks in their family dynamic. There had to be cracks. Didn’t every family have cracks?

She had become a total jerk.

“Did you donate blood?” Janine asked Mike in a teasing lilt.

Mike gestured to the Band-Aid in the crook of his elbow, shrugged with false pride.

“I won the blood drive, actually,” he joked. “Great veins, universal donor. They actually invited me back for next year and”—Mike raised his eyebrows and—“I don’t think they do that with everyone.”

Janine threw back her head in laughter. Her hand, Jen noted, lingered on Mike’s arm, patted that defined bicep.

How would the Perleys have parented Abe?

They’d be unruffled, Jen guessed, which would probably be excellent for Abe. She and Paul both could get uptight and they tended to care too much about even the unimportant things.

At the food table, Laurel handed cheese cubes to her brother, who had the same bright orange hair as his dad and was hamming it up, overstuffing his mouth with the cheese.

Jen still occasionally questioned whether she and Paul should have tried for a second child. Abe had always seemed too fragile, and they’d been exhausted and worried it might disrupt his ecosystem. But maybe it would have been exactly what he needed.

Would Abe be more adaptable if he’d had a sibling looking after him, feeding him cheese?

Probably. And he’d have strong bones, too. All that calcium!

“Your son’s not at Sandstone, right?” Deb asked Jen.

“Abe goes to Foothills,” Priya said before Jen could respond.

“Great school,” Janine said. “People love Foothills. That principal, people rave about him. What’s his name, Denton? Talk about cult of personality—”

Because Jen was working so hard to keep her expression measured, it took a moment for her to recognize that the ringing phone was hers. Saved by the bell!

When the ID flashed her former area code she realized she hadn’t been saved at all.

She managed a scrambled “excuse me,” and pressed the phone to her ear as she rushed out the front door to Harriet’s front steps.