Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online Page B

alternative energy company and sometimes groups of people came to his house for meetings, most of them well dressed and driving tiny cars that looked as if they’d been tooled by hand from thin sheets of steel. Through Roland, we learned that green energy development wasn’t just for hippies and counterculture aesthetes. There was money in those minicars lined up along the street, money in the layers of peasant clothes they wore. Once I saw a man in cowboy boots and a bolo tie clasped with a fist-sized disk of turquoise step out of a limousine and walk around the house to Roland’s basement door. We assumed they would explain it sooner or later— he’s from Texas, an investor, a crazy old coot —but Marianne never mentioned it and neither did Roland.
    It’s been a year since the last time Marianne mentioned Roland’s name, and I haven’t got the heart to ask where he lives now. For all her buoyant enthusiasm over my release—the balloons, the cake, the WELCOME HOME banner hand-painted and strung on one wall of the living room—there is a sadness about Marianne that isn’t hard to see.
    “What’s happened to the old neighbors?” I ask, trying to make the question sound casual. I need to find these people and talk to them, the sooner the better.
    “Well, the Baker-Harrisons moved to New Jersey. But a nice part. Montclair, I think. I don’t know if Helen still has that faux-finishing business. And Wendy Stubbins died from something. Brain cancer, I think.”
    Wendy Stubbins was one of the young mothers on the block. Once I saw her walk up the street carrying a trike in one hand and her toddler by his overall straps in the other. “You’re not listening,” she hissed as she walked past, her child’s limbs pinwheeling through the air. I remember so many snapshots like that, so many times I wondered: Would I do that? It was easy to believe I would have made a firm but fair mother, one who could discipline with one throat-clearing sound and a narrowing of the eyes. “Wendy’s dead ?” I say in disbelief. Her son couldn’t be more than fourteen now. I always feel a pang when I hear about motherless children. As if there should be a way to match us up, a dating service of some kind.
    “I don’t know if Jim ever remarried. He was a little bit of an alcoholic even before she died. I don’t know what happened with that.”
    He was? For the umpteenth time I wonder how much I witnessed and failed to see in those days of watching so much on our street.
    After we’ve cleaned up, Marianne leads me to Trish’s old bedroom, apologizing along the way for the state it’s in. “I haven’t done much with it,” she says, which might be an understatement. Apparently, in twelve years she’s done nothing at all because it still looks like a little girl’s room. In one corner there’s an empty hamster cage, in another a dollhouse with one door hanging loose. The twin beds are covered with throw pillows and stuffed animals.
    Trish’s brother, John, was the one most people noticed first. The smartest boy at the middle school and probably the oddest. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute but couldn’t, when pressed, clip his own fingernails. He had a nervous personality and a habit of licking his lips and then spitting when he spoke. I know Marianne worried about John for most of his childhood. She got him out of PE classes, and had the mandatory swim test required for graduation waived so that the valedictorian of the class could get a diploma. He never learned to drive a car or ride a bike. Once I saw him struggle for ten minutes to open a bag of potato chips.
    Marianne tells me that these days he works as a software designer and lives in Alabama. She sees him twice a year and says he’s become a churchgoer. “Apparently he’s always wanted some type of community. I never realized that. I’ve asked him does it really have to be a church and he says, ‘Yes, Mother, it does.’”
    Trish, though, I