A Good Neighborhood Read online

  Xavier liked to hang out with them, not to gossip (their business was their business) but to avail himself of the appetizers and salads they brought. They brought wine, too. Plenty of wine. He was eighteen now, old enough to die for his country and therefore old enough to have a glass of wine with his hummus and olives, his chèvre-stuffed figs, his lentil-arugula salad, et cetera, that’s what they all liked to say. Xavier wasn’t much for wine, but he would never say no to the so-called crack dip, a hot cream cheese, Ro-Tel, spicy crumbled sausage extravaganza, as far as he was concerned. He planned to buy a Crock-Pot for his dorm room so that he could make the dip himself and basically live on the stuff.

  “Juniper,” the well-kept woman said again, this time with annoyance.

  “Juniper,” Xavier said to himself softly, trying it out. Then he thought, Idiot. You got no time for this.

  “Seriously, Mom?” said Juniper.

  “On your face? Absolutely. Arms and legs, too. You have to take care of your skin now, or you’ll end up spending way too much money treating sun damage later. Do you want to end up looking like Grandma Lottie? I wish I’d had a mom as smart as I am.”

  “If you do say so yourself,” said Juniper, taking the sunscreen.

  “By the way, do not tell Grandma I said that.”

  Next came a shirtless man with a golf tan, wearing coral-colored flowered shorts below the protruding belly common to so many middle-aged men. He left the tall door open behind him. “Is this the life or what?” he said. He carried a bottle of beer in one hand and a pitcher of something pink in the other. Setting the pitcher on a teak dining table, he added, “Who’s ready for a swim?”

  “I am!” said a little girl, skipping outside behind him.

  The woman said, “Are you sure the water’s warm enough? They just filled it yesterday.”

  The little girl, maybe seven years old, fuchsia bikini, big yellow sunglasses, put her hands on her hips and answered, “Mommy, are you a man or a mouse?”

  Xavier, realizing that he was staring, finished stuffing a bag and then put down his rake and turned to go find his mother. Might as well get the introductions over with. Before he got more than a few steps, though, the man called to him.

  “Hey there, son.”

  Xavier turned around. The man was waving and walking toward him.

  “Listen,” he said, coming into the yard, “I’m wondering if I might hire you to do some work for me when you’re done here. We just moved in and I’ve got boxes to haul out and break down, some furniture to move around—my wife, she couldn’t make up her mind with the movers, so…” He chuckled. “Fifty bucks sound fair? I don’t need you for but an hour or so—pretty good pay, right?”

  “Oh, I … That is, I’m just helping out my mom.” Xavier pointed toward the house. “I’m Xavier Alston-Holt. Most people call me Zay,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Ah,” the man said, and shook Xavier’s hand. “Brad Whitman, Whitman HVAC. You’ve probably seen my commercials, right?”

  “Maybe?” Xavier said. “We don’t have TV.”

  “I’m on the internet, and radio, too.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  Brad Whitman leaned in and tapped Xavier’s shoulder with his fist, saying, “Heh, I thought you were hired by the old lady who lives here.”

  Xavier smiled politely. “I don’t think my mom would appreciate being called ‘the old lady.’”

  “No, right? What woman would?”

  “She’s only forty-eight.”

  “That so? Guess my Realtor got it wrong,” Brad Whitman said. “But there are lots of old ladies in the neighborhood, isn’t that a fact?”

  Xavier nodded. “And some old men. Everything, really.”

  “Sure,” Brad said. “That’s what we want, right?”

  Xavier nodded. “So, I was just about to get my mom. She wants to say hello.”

  “Sure, good. Bring her over.” Brad pointed toward his house. “Julia just made some pink lemonade. The girls love it. I’ll offer you a beer if you’ve got ID saying you’re twenty-one.”

  “Not yet, but thanks. Be right back.”

  Xavier was almost to the house when Brad Whitman called, “Bring your dad, too, if he’s home. I’ve got a cold one for him, at least.”

  Xavier raised his hand to acknowledge he’d heard.

  Bring his father? He wished he could. He had always wished he could.

  3

  Before we depict the first encounter between our story’s other central players, we need to show the wider setting in which this slow tragedy unfolded. As our resident English professor would remind us, place, especially in stories of the South, is as much a character as any human, and inseparable from—in this case even necessary to—the plot.

  * * *

  Valerie Alston-Holt had fallen in love with our neighborhood, Oak Knoll, the first time she stood on one of its sidewalks. She was a Michigan native two years out of her Ph.D. program, twenty months into her new job at the university, one year married, and seven months pregnant. She and her husband, Tom Holt-Alston, who was a young sociology professor, had been renting a cozy apartment near campus. Now, though, it was time to buy a house—and this was the neighborhood their colleagues loved most. Tom and Val couldn’t go wrong here, everyone said so.

  As with a lot of American suburban neighborhoods of a certain character, Oak Knoll had been conceived in the boom years after the Second World War. Wide streets, sidewalks, and—because this is North Carolina, which is rich in both trees and clay—brick-clad ranch homes, the basic three-bedroom, one-bath design, small but functional, set on spacious tree-filled lots.

  Spring was Oak Knoll’s showy season: white and pink dogwoods in bloom along with chestnuts and pears and viburnums and camellias, cherry trees, persimmon trees, hawthorn shrubs, hollies. Also tulip magnolias, those heralds who now and then made their eager pink appearance only to be punished by a late frost. The neighborhood was known particularly for the dogwoods, delicate, slow-growing trees that need two decades to achieve the size of a six-year maple. Valerie brought Tom to walk around and see for himself how lovely it was here, how perfect for them and their child-to-be. Some of us still remember seeing the two of them that day, Valerie so pregnant, so dark-skinned, such a contrast to her tall, blond husband. We won’t pretend that no one paid attention to this contrast. Of course we did. Mostly we felt it gave them an exotic appeal, a kind of celebrity status in a neighborhood that had come to think of itself as progressive yet was not doing much to demonstrate that character. The most that could be said was that some residents were white and some were nonwhite, some were on fixed incomes and some were young professionals in low-paying fields, and we treated one another with kindness and respect. To be fair, what more was there to do?

  Oak Knoll was never, at least until recently, thought to be a prestigious part of town. People with serious money lived in nearby Hillside. Hillside had the blue bloods, the politicians, the surgeons, the founders of industry and big retail chains, many of them living in enormous homes made of stone and brick, fairy-tale homes with gates and ivy and long driveways and porticoes and sculpted shrubbery and, of course, towering oaks. Valerie admired these mansions and also the slightly lesser versions of them tucked into the smaller lots there—also beautiful, the yards also verdant. Who wouldn’t? But there was no way, not in any life that might be available to her (short of winning a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot), that she could ever call Hillside home. And even if she did have millions, many of the Hillside residents would say a black woman with a white husband had less legitimacy there than the black hired help, because she obviously didn’t know her place.

  As time passed and the city grew, the type of people who were then known as yuppies bought big graceless houses in new outlying subdivisions on acre-plus lots, where the properties were dubbed “estates” and many families kept a golf cart in their three- or four-car garage. The Whitmans had lived in one of those neighborhoods because, let�
�s face it, you get a lot more house for your money out there and your neighbors aren’t close enough to know your business. Also, Whitman HVAC was a growing company, not a mature one, and to get the kind of house he wanted for a mortgage he could afford while still driving his BMW and giving Julia a new Lexus SUV and paying for the girls’ private schooling, Brad Whitman, who secretly yearned for the prestige of Hillside, had to settle.

  Then he invented some gadget or part of an HVAC system (we’re not clear on what exactly it was), patented it, and sold it to a big manufacturer, netting something like two million dollars. This meant he could afford to move Julia and the girls to a house in Hillside. To one of the lesser houses, true; four thousand square feet instead of six or eight. But Brad was fine with that plan; his property taxes would be lower than with the true mansions and he’d still have that enviable Hillside address.

  Moving there would have been the Whitmans’ plan, except that their best friends, the Jamisons (Jimmy was in pharmaceuticals and doing well these days), had discovered Oak Knoll, with its aging houses and, in many cases, aging residents. Aging residents who were one by one selling off and moving into assisted living. Or they were dying off and their kids had no interest in returning to live in the cramped one-bathroom houses they’d grown up in, houses that now smelled of mothballs and Preparation H and had nicotine stains on the ceilings and walls. And so the kids were clearing out the tchotchkes and selling the places as is.

  Unlike in Hillside, where the houses were at least as old or older (if better smelling—sometimes—and better kept), in Oak Knoll you didn’t have to pay through the nose to get the house and then pay again to modernize everything. Oak Knoll homes were cheap enough that you could raze them and build a brand-new showplace, put in the best materials, best technology, great insulation and low-e glass, have lower utilities and maintenance and tax bills and a larger return on investment if you sold—Oak Knoll was where it was happening, Jimmy Jamison told Brad. He’d already picked his builder, and Brad was not going to believe the media system he’d designed. Jimmy took Brad to see one of the builder’s just-done houses (Mark and Lisa Wertheimer’s, now). The men stood in the kitchen with its ten-foot ceilings, its marble countertops, its Sub-Zero refrigerator and Wolf range, and Brad said, “Damn. I reckon I ought to build one of these for Julia and me.”

  * * *

  From the far more basic Alston-Holt kitchen, where Valerie was arranging her peonies in vases, she watched Xavier speak with the new neighbor. Visually, the man fulfilled every expectation she’d had for who was going to live in that house: white, late forties, trendy on-brand swim trunks to go with the swimming pool and the enormous stainless-steel gas grill on the flagstone patio nearby. He wore flip-flops and a backward-facing ball cap. A man-child with money.

  There were a lot of them around these days. She’d had dates with a couple such men, fix-ups by a friend in the engineering college who had regular dealings with men in local industry. More like pre-dates: meet someplace during happy hour, see if there’s any chemistry, try to gauge whether or not the guy’s interest in dating a black woman arose from an honorable place in his soul. Valerie Alston-Holt was not some exotic oversexed chick waiting to satisfy some white man’s slave-sex fantasy—and yes, there really were men who entertained themselves with that idea and thought she’d be entertained by it, too.

  Valerie didn’t mention any of that to Xavier. Even when she dated a man for real, she kept it very low-key. To wit: her current gentleman, a man she’d connected with at a conference in Virginia almost three years ago but whom Xavier had met only twice. His name was Chris Johnson—the most nondescript of names, we thought. He had great credentials, though, being tenured faculty at the University of Virginia in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Also, he sang baritone in a prizewinning quartet. Their “dating” so far amounted to regular FaceTime conversations and the occasional weekend getaway, now that Xavier could stay home on his own.

  Valerie didn’t invite Chris down here, save for the two times we mentioned, and didn’t talk about him much. As all single parents know, dating while raising a child or children is no simple endeavor. Valerie didn’t want to make Xavier anxious about a thing that might happen, might not. Once that boy got fixed on something, he had a hard time letting go. She’d seen that about him early: a favorite blankie, a favorite food, a toy, a book, an author—one summer he’d read nothing but the Brian Jacques Redwall novels, all twenty-two of them. He had two close friends, who’d been his friends since preschool. And of course there was his music and his guitars.

  Here’s another example of the boy’s intensity: The possibility that Xavier’s first-choice college might not take him had kept him awake nights, though he was as skilled and talented as anyone he’d competed with over the years. To the delight of those of us who lived nearest and could hear him play when the weather was mild and the windows open, Xavier increased his practice schedule to an hour before school every day and two hours at night after he got home from his job stocking groceries. Then he did his homework. For two days before and a day after his SFCM audition in January, he could barely eat, which is saying something. And although he did get himself back into a more normal routine after they returned from San Francisco, he stayed keyed up until his acceptance letter came in mid-March. This was just the sort of young man he was. Valerie had done her best to teach him to make that intensity work for him. Good grades, good work ethic, good recommendations from his teachers and his boss—and it had paid off.

  But it might have as easily worked against him, and still might; how many nights in the past few years had Valerie waited up for her son, praying that he and his friends not be stopped by the police? Praying that he never got put in a position where he felt wronged and defensive and turned that intensity of his on the cops? He was tall. He was black. Valerie had told him so many times, “If they get scared of you, they’ll shoot,” hating that she needed to say it at all, hating that the progress toward that post-racial future she and her husband and others like them had fervently fostered was now being reversed. Why couldn’t we see one another as simply human and pull together, for goodness’ sake? The planet was dying while people fought over things like who was most American—or who was American at all.

  Now she watched Xavier leave the man-child-with-money and come inside the house. “They’re all out there,” he said, joining her in the kitchen.

  “I saw. Let me just finish this and wash up.”

  Xavier leaned against the counter, took an apple from a bowl and polished it against his T-shirt. Then he put it back and did the same with another, saying, “He thought I was your hired help.”

  “Are we surprised?”

  “He also thought you were an old lady. Well, not you specifically. He thought an old lady lived here. Said his Realtor told him that.”

  “Well, that is a fair mistake.” She dried her hands on a dish towel. “Did you get his name?”

  “Brad something. HVAC. That’s his line of work. He said he has TV commercials, like I should know him.”

  “Oh, right, right. I remember Ellen said a local celebrity was buying here. She just couldn’t remember which one or which house. Clearly there’s a good buck in HVAC.”

  Valerie considered and then rejected changing out of her sweaty T-shirt and fraying cargo shorts. Let them take her—or not—as she was. She put on sunglasses and a hat, and then she and Xavier walked over to the Whitmans’ together, moving from their wooded paradise to the Whitmans’ sculpted strips of mulch and sod that surrounded the patio and pool.

  “Greetings,” she called as she stepped onto the flagstone. At least the Whitmans had chosen natural stone and not poured concrete. The stone wasn’t a great choice in terms of the environmental effects of excessive hardscape coverage, and Valerie suspected the builder had gotten a variance for the pool and patio and possibly the house, too, or how could he get away with covering so much of the land? But flagstone did have slightly bett
er permeability than concrete and looked much more natural.

  The real problem was the risk to the nearby trees. Large ones, like the old oak in Valerie’s backyard, had shallow root structures that spread laterally and might extend hundreds of feet from the trunk. Valerie, who taught classes on recreational forest management (among other subjects), knew this better than any of us. She’d been watching that oak for signs of stress since the day the Whitmans’ lot was cleared.

  That tree meant a great deal to her. She couldn’t look at it without seeing baby Xavier in the bright red canvas swing they’d hung from one of the lower branches; little Xavier, age four, on the wooden “big boy” swing that came next, moving his legs back and forth in his first attempts to pump; ten-year-old Zay and his uncle Kyle building a tree house, in which Zay and his best friends, Dashawn and Joseph, would spend untold hours in the years ahead with their comic books and video games and great quantities of snacks. Both the tree house and swing were still there. Xavier and his friends still sometimes used them, as if they were as reluctant to break these tethers to childhood as Valerie was to see them broken.

  Julia Whitman was the first to return Valerie’s greeting. She stood up from where she’d been sitting in a cushioned teak chair on the covered porch. “Hi, join us. I’m Julia. Let me pour you both some lemonade.”

  “Hi. Valerie Alston-Holt.” She directed her words at Julia but went straight for Brad Whitman, her hand extended. She knew from experience that it was necessary to set the tone right away. “You must be Brad.”

  “Brad Whitman, Whitman HVAC. Good to meet you. Thanks for coming by.”

  Then Valerie shook Julia’s hand and accepted a filled glass before taking the seat nearest Brad’s. She said, “We’ve been waiting forever for this house to be finished.”