Mr. Green chuckled nervously and rubbed his hands together. “Did you bake something?” he asked my mother, his Adam's apple dunking over his collar.
“Well, as a matter of fact.” She pointed to her poppyseed lemon pound cake, which had sagged after two hours in the heat and had acquired a greasy sheen. Luann, who had gone back to humming, fell silent.
“Very nice,” said Mr. Green. He glanced over at Luann and me, then back at the cake. “Looks very nice.”
“It's lemon poppyseed,” said my mother. “More or less.”
“Aha,” said Mr. Green.
Mrs. Lauder, who had been glancing back and forth between my mother and Mr. Green, quickly broke in. “It's fifteen dollars.” When my mother turned to her in astonishment, Mrs. Lauder added, “That's a very special cake.”
Mr. Green coughed, holding his fist to his mouth. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a black leather wallet.
“Here.” He handed Mrs. Lauder a ten and a five, not looking at either her or my mother.
His face had gone from pink to a kind of cardiac maroon.
My mother stared at him, her mouth slightly open; then she looked down at the open cigar box lying on the table and began restacking the one-dollar bills she had just finished stacking.
“Well thank you, Alden. It's Alden, isn't it?” Mrs. Lauder was saying chattily. “Nice to see you outside your yard, by the way. You work so hard on that lawn of yours you hardly have time to get to know anybody. You know, we really should have some kind of block party one of these days. Get all the neighbors together. The Chiltons, the people who used to own your place? They were always having these little get-togethers. Iced tea on Sunday, lemonade for the kids. As I always say, in a neighborhood everybody should know everybody.”
She smiled at Mr. Green from under her straw helmet. “Now don't be a stranger,” she added as she handed him my mother's pound cake.
Mr. Green glanced up, mumbled something, and began backing away toward his car. But before he opened the door, he gave us an uncertain little salute with two fingers grazing his forehead. It reminded me of movies I'd seen when a soldier salutes after he's been given a difficult command. Then he pulled the car door open, climbed inside, and drove off too fast, staring straight ahead.
Mrs. Lauder watched the taillights of Mr. Green's car disappear around the corner of the mall. “I wonder if he's ever been married,” she said.
“I don't think so,” said my mother, still restacking bills in the cigar box.
“Why not, I wonder?” Mrs. Lauder had a speculative look.
“Who knows,” said my mother discouragingly.
“Well, he certainly seemed set on buying your cake. Fifteen dollars.” Mrs. Lauder raised her eyebrows. “I wonder if I could have sold him the rest of these brownies.”
“I have a ant bite,” announced Luann. The wind was picking up. A few raindrops had already started to fall, pattering onto the sidewalk.
Mrs. Lauder gathered up the rest of the plates and shoveled them into a paper bag. “Really, though. You've got to wonder about someone like him.”
My mother said: “What should we do with these plastic forks?”
The dogwood leaves began to shudder, flipping up their pale undersides as a bright streak of lightning lit the sky, followed a moment later by a shock of thunder. It was going to be a proper summer storm. Another jag of lightning cracked across the clouds, then another thud of thunder.
“Well. Thanks for your help,” shouted Mrs. Lauder, grabbing Luann's arm and herding her toward their car.
“Thank
you
,” my mother shouted back, her hair blowing around her ears as the wind tugged at her skirt.
But before we reached our car the rain came down on us, coming all at once, beating so hard against the pavement that
the droplets sprang back upward. In a moment my mother's hair was streaming and her pink blouse was soaked, exposing the lacework on her bra underneath.
“Get in,” she panted, wrenching at the car door, rain running down her face, beading off the end of her nose. “For God's sake, get
in.
” But as she pushed me into the back seat, shoving my crutches in after me, and slammed the door, I saw her smile.
It was either that night or the next that I woke up screaming.
I had dreamed that Mr. Green had been transformed into a naked blue monkey. He squatted by the bureau in my bedroom pulling at his penis. “Just like a thumb,” he cackled. “Nothing to be afraid of.” He grinned and waved, gesturing with a little wrinkled hand for me to come closer. When I drew near, his penis bobbled and grew suddenly enormous, the size of a watermelon. Then it burst and Mr. Green flew squealing around the room, a pale balloon losing its air, while grass seed dribbled out of him. “Come back here, you little shit,” he cried.
“Are you all right?” called my mother from the hall. A moment later she appeared in the doorway tying the sash on her flowered bathrobe. When I didn't answer, she came in and sat on the end of my bed and held my good foot. “Was it a bad dream?
“Can you tell me what it was about?” she said after a little while, laying a hand on my neck.
Eventually, as she stroked my hair and tucked the sheet around my shoulders, I told her that I had been dreaming about Mr. Green.
“He's disgusting,” I said, trying to muffle myself in my pillow.
“What?” She leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“He's weird,” I whispered, more desperately than I'd intended. But I was remembering Mr. Green, tattooed and bare-chested, squatting in his backyard laying bricks for his barbecue pit. Then I remembered how he'd glanced at me that day through the porch screen. Some sort of a claim had been implicit in that glance, some sort of recognition.
“He
looks
at me,” I shrieked into my pillow, then burst into tears.
My mother's hand withdrew. With my face in the pillow, I couldn't see her expression, but I could feel the temperature of the room change.
When she spoke again, her voice was chill. “Tell me exactly what you mean, Marsha, when you say that Mr. Green looks at you.”
I have never been one of those people who can retract a lie, who can explain that I spoke carelessly, that I hadn't meant what I said. Once I have lied, I've propelled myself into a story that has its own momentum. It's not that I convince myself that I'm telling the truth, it's that the truth becomes flexible.
Or rather, the truth appears to me as utterly relative, which is a frightening thought but also inevitable if you examine any truth long enough, even reassuring in a cold way.
So I babbled about Mr. Green staring at me when he got out of his car, staring at me from behind the lilac bush, staring at me when he came out to mow his lawn, becoming more hotly committed to my story when I rolled over and saw the tilt of my mother's eyebrows. I said he stared at Cameron Sperling's bottom when Mrs. Sperling once carried him naked into the front yard. I said he'd stared at Luann's underpants once when she was doing handstands in her yard and her dress kept flying over her head. I said he hung around the playground and stared at kids going down the slide. Nothing very serious, of course, but serious enough when a child has been raped and murdered a few blocks away and the man who did it still hasn't been caught.
“Has he ever touched you?” my mother said, in that same chilly voice.
I thought of Mr. Green's blunt fingers patting his bald spot, his other hand trembling as he reached for the glass of lavender lemonade my mother offered him.
“No,” I said. “But he's weird.”
“Listen to me.” She grabbed my shoulder, her fingernails digging through my nightgown. “Listen to me. If Mr. Green scares you, then stay away from him. But I don't want you talking about this to anyone else. Is that clear? You tell me if he does anything to make you nervous, but otherwise you don't
talk about this. Is that clear?” Her voice held a high, uncertain note. I stared back at her. A moment later she let go of my shoulder.
“What you've told me could make a lot of people around here very upset,” she continued more quietly. She picked up my right hand and held it between both of hers, squeezing each of my fingers, one at a time. “Everyone is frightened right now, and when people are frightened they can do things they feel sorry for later.”
She looked out my window at the telephone wires strung across the street. From my window it was possible to see the lights from the Defense facility near the mall; perhaps she was looking at those lights, wondering who could be working there so late. I pulled my hand away and lifted my glasses from the night table, holding one lens up to one eye as though I were peering through a telescope. I studied her face, examining the small V of her chin, the calm planes of her cheekbones, the soft flaw of her broad upper lip. Her hair hung lank and dry around her ears; the top of her head looked flat.
I said: “I don't care. He makes me sick.”
My mother gazed down at me. “Do you want me to go talk to Mr. Green? Do you want me to tell him what you've told me?”
“No,” I shouted.
“Does this have anything to do with your father?”
For a moment I pictured the two of them standing side by side, Mr. Green and my father. Mr. Green in his fussy shoes
and madras shorts and khaki shirt and my fatherâso relaxed and normal in his aviator glasses, suit, and tieâstanding together in the front yard. Anyone could see that my father had nothing in common with Mr. Green. Even my mother should be able to see it.
For another moment I pictured my father's slightly triangular blue eyes and his slender, gingery eyebrows, which he could raise one at a time. His teeth were small and white and square, except for one gold crown that glittered far back in his mouth. “My secret treasure,” he once called it, smiling like a pirate.
“Marsha,” murmured my mother. She put her hand on my back, rubbing up and down my spine. “Watch yourself.” Which is the same thing that detective had told me weeks before, advice that, to my great regret, I was soon to ignore.
By then I had curled myself into a corner of the bed, my face shoved into a space where the bed met the corner of two walls. While my mother sat beside me breathing in the dark, I kept my back rigid and counted my breaths. Until at last my mother got up and left the room.
The plaster walls felt cool against my cheeks. I pushed harder into the corner, glad when my head began to ache from the pressure. When I woke up the next morning, I was still in the same position, pressed against the wall.
It was on Wednesday, a little less than two weeks after Boyd's murder, that we received our invitation to Mr. Green's cookout.
Sometime very early that morning, he left a small white envelope propped on the front steps, much like the morning when he left my mother a box of baking soda. From our porch, I spied white envelopes resting on the Morrises' and the Sperlings' doorsteps, too, like small flat doves.
My mother got to the envelope before I did. She picked it up and tore the back flap open, letting the screen door bang shut behind her. Inside was a card, which she read standing on the front steps in the morning sunlight, pale wisteria leaves drifting around her head. Then she came back inside and handed the card to me. She sat down and drank her orange juice and after a moment buttered her toast, scanning the front page of the paper.
The card was cut in the shape of a teddy bear holding a balloon. Printed in red block letters were the words
A PARTY
! followed by
AT THE HOME OF
, then a blank line, then the word
WHEN
, and another blank line. On the first blank line, in blue ink, was the same painstaking, looping script that had been on the file card accompanying the baking soda: “Mr. Alden Green Jr., 23 Prospect Terrace.” After
WHEN
he had answered: “Sunday. 5:00
P.M.
Children Welcome!”
If Julie and Steven had been home, they would have had something appropriately cutting to say about this invitation. “Oh Christ,” Julie would groan. “He can't be serious. I mean, who's he having a party for, the Bobbsey twins?” But I couldn't summon up more than a bleak grimace at the teddy bear and his jolly little balloon.
I propped Mr. Green's card against the napkin holder and watched my mother eat her toast. She finished reading the front page, turned it, and kept reading, neatly wiping her buttery fingertips on her napkin. She stirred cream into her coffee, still reading, and lifted the cup to take a sip. She turned another page. Finally she looked up at me.
“Yes?” she said. “You rang?”
“I'm not going.”
She took another sip of coffee, setting the cup back into its saucer with a hard little chink.
“Are you going?”
“Maybe.”
“Why do you like him?” I said.
“I like a lot of people.” She gave me a narrow look.
“Well, I don't have to go.”
“No,” she agreed, displaying the half-smile she reserved for neighbors and grocery-store cashiers. “No, you certainly do not.”
That evening I watched Mr. Green investigate his barbecue pit. He had been making a tour of his backyard, pacing back and forth between the house and the copper beech tree, circling the picnic table and his two folding aluminum patio chairs placed at conversational angles, when he found himself in front of the barbecue pit. For a few moments he stood there, admiring his tidy chimney and two built-in shelves. He
even squatted down to lift the new grate, and peered into the pit itself.
I couldn't look at him without remembering the blue monkey in my nightmare. Neither could I look at him and find anything wrong with him. He was so careful. Never in the months that we lived next to Mr. Green had he made a loud noise, not even when he was laying bricks or hammering a loose shutter back into place. No potato chip bags blew across his lawn; no weeds sprang from the sidewalk cracks in front of his house. He was the perfect neighbor.