The Neighbor's Secret(22)

Which was unfair. Paul’s job was work, and Jen’s was Abe, and this was the way it would be because Jen made approximately ten percent of what Paul did.

Even now, she wouldn’t have wanted to trade. If someone was going to focus on the puzzle that was Abe, it had to be Jen. (She’d feel like a caged tiger, otherwise, probably call home fifty times a day and bark at Paul that he was doing it wrong.)

But it did feel sometimes—and this wasn’t Paul’s fault—imbalanced. They’d started out on such equal footing, after their first date. Both of their careers had been theirs alone to manage.

Paul was very taken with you, Jen’s friend Candace had told her after one of her crowded house parties.

“Me?” Jen said.

To be singled out like this was a new experience for her. There had been partygoers spilling out of Candace’s house to the backyard, and Jen hadn’t been able to remember which one was Paul.

“You know,” Candace answered, bringing her hand to about three feet above the ground, “short, slight, really prominent eyebrows, looks kind of like a Muppet—but in a good way. I’m giving him your number.”

It didn’t sound promising.

When Paul called, he had a nice warm tenor and they made a date to meet at a restaurant in Chinatown. Jen hadn’t expected much, but when she saw him there, in front of the king crab tank, she smiled. (Which was really saying something: those poor crabs, trapped in that murky crowded water, legs pressed helplessly against the glass, always made her temporarily resolve to become a vegetarian.) Paul was short and slight, with the promised eyebrows—two thick caterpillars slanted downward, which gave him a stern, intense air.

Candace hadn’t mentioned Paul Pagano’s neatly bearded, even-featured face. Or those giant hazel eyes underneath the brows: the kindest eyes Jen had ever seen.

It was funny now to think that Candace, who later disavowed the Muppet comment—but come on, how could Jen have made that up?—was a social media friend who seemingly spent twelve hours a day filming and posting videos of her daughter’s dance team, and Paul had become everything that mattered.

Jen often wondered if she was the butt of some higher power’s practical joke. The part of life that she had expected to be difficult—finding a life partner—had landed in her lap, while the part she might have assumed easy—sending your school-aged child off to school—required Herculean effort.

Jen shouldn’t even go there anyway: Paul would never say they weren’t equals, and neither should she. They were a good team who’d made the only logical decision about resource allocation, and were both just doing the best they could.

Paul switched on the ignition. The podcast they’d listened to on the way to Dr. Shapiro’s—about a man who purchased a DNA kit and found out his uncle was his father—blared over the speakers like the world’s biggest non sequitur. Paul switched it off.

“It fits,” Jen said. “I don’t want it to but—”

“What?”

Jen’s phone had started to ring and the Bluetooth announced Mom calling in a soothing voice not dissimilar to Dr. Shapiro’s.

Jen looked at Paul helplessly. “I can’t.”

“Definitely don’t,” Paul said.

Jen hadn’t even told her mother about Abe’s expulsion from Foothills because she’d never felt quite strong enough to talk her down from the hysterics that would result.

Maybe her mother did have an anxiety disorder.

When the phone stopped ringing, Jen picked it up.

“Calling back so soon?”

“Nope, I’m looking up the school Shapiro mentioned.”

Dr. Shapiro had mentioned three alternative programs for Abe. Jen had already visited one of them before the move, and had not been impressed—too big, too impersonal. The second was two hours away, but the third, the Kingdom School, was a small religious school close to their home. It wouldn’t matter, Dr. Shapiro said, that both Jen and Paul were lapsed Catholics. Plus, sometimes the inherent structure and moral code of religion provided a helpful bright line to kids like Abe.

“There’s just a picture of a shack,” Jen reported. “And a paragraph about Jesus written by founder Nan Smalls. How do we know Nan Smalls?” Jen asked, as Paul turned onto to Main Street, which was as messy with traffic as usual.

“We don’t.” Paul stopped short on the brakes as a Mercedes jeep pulled in front of them.

“The name is familiar, though.” Jen paused. “Maybe if we send Abe to the Kingdom School, our prayers will be answered.”

Paul snorted but Jen hadn’t been entirely joking. She hadn’t prayed much before having Abe, not even as a relatively pure-hearted youngster, but at least once a week she would try to quiet her mind and channel a peacefulness and plead—not to God per se, but also not not to God—that Abe would find a sense of belonging outside of their family, that he would be okay in a vague general sense.

Jen was aware that by the dictates of fairy tales she was violating the rules of specificity. What was okay? Meaningful, reciprocal relationships? Or just not stabbing anyone?

The answer was a moving target.

The light changed and they inched forward, their bumper a little too close to the Mercedes’s.

“When we die, he’s going to be all alone,” Jen said.