Nico has a playdate today with Spencer, the boy who lives at 13 Locust.
This playdate was nearly impossible to arrange. We’ve been living here for two weeks, and this was the first opening. I had to provide Janice a copy of Nico’s vaccination record—no joke. I’m surprised she didn’t require blood and urine samples.
But it’s worth it, because Nico is always bouncing off the walls on the weekends, and he doesn’t have a bunch of friends nearby like he did at our old apartment. The playdate is at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon at Spencer’s house, but starting at one, Nico asks me roughly every fifteen minutes if it’s time for the playdate yet. It gets to the point where every time he says the word “Mom,” I want to scream.
“Mom,” he says at a quarter to three. “Can I bring Little Kiwi to Spencer’s house?”
Enzo and Nico decided they didn’t want to wait for a praying mantis egg to hatch and all the mantises to eat each other, so instead they purchased a baby praying mantis that arrived last Monday. Nico named the praying mantis Little Kiwi in a weird homage to one of his favorite fruits.
“Not if you ever want to be invited back,” I reply.
Nico thinks about this. “Can I bring my baseball and bat?”
Tryouts for Little League were a week ago on Friday, and Nico made the team, which is great because it’ll be another way for him to make friends and burn off some of that pent-up energy. But as a result, he’s been even more obsessed with baseball than he was before. Enzo has
been tossing the ball around with him every night. It’s very cute to watch, because Enzo narrates every move like an actual baseball game. He comes up to the plate, he swings at the pitch He gets a hit! He runs to first base, second base
“Okay,” I agree, although I’m slightly worried that Nico is going to let the ball get out of control and break a window, at which point Janice will have a stroke. He has a good swing, but he is not quite as good at control.
Finally—finally!—it’s three o’clock, so we can head over for the playdate. Ada is sprawled out on the sofa, reading a book, her glossy black hair splayed out behind her. Once again, I am struck by how beautiful my daughter is. I don’t even think she realizes it. God help us all when she does.
“Ada,” I say, “do you want to come with us?”
Ada looks at me like I’ve lost my ever-loving mind. “No, thank you.” “Do you have any friends that you want to have playdates with?” I
ask her. “I’m happy to drive you.”
She shakes her head. I hope she’s making friends at school. She is not nearly as outgoing as Nico, but she has always had her little tight group of friends at school. It must be hard to start over in fifth grade, and Ada is not the type to complain. Maybe I’ll suggest a girls’ night out for the two of us, and I can probe a bit to see how things are going.
I consider inviting Enzo along, but then I realize I haven’t seen him all afternoon. He must be working. He had a lot of clients back in the city, but he’s trying to relocate all his business to the island, so he’s been hustling a lot. He’s incredibly concerned with our ability to make our mortgage payments. I appreciate what he’s doing, but at the same time, I wish he were around more.
Anyway, it looks like it’s just going to be me and Nico heading over there. So I grab my purse and we walk across the cul-de-sac to 13 Locust
—the house that supposedly used to be for servants. As we pass Suzette’s house on the way over, I can’t help but notice a lot of noise coming from the backyard. What are they doing back there?
When Janice opens the door for us, her face falls, like in spite of the invitation, she had been hoping we might not show.
“Oh,” she says. “Come in, I guess.”
“Thanks,” I say.
As we step onto the welcome mat inside her house, she points down at our feet. “Shoes off.”
I slip out of my closed-toe sandals, and Nico kicks off his sneakers, which, to my horror, go flying down the hallway. I race over to retrieve them and place them gingerly in the shoe rack. We have barely left the house today, so I have no idea why his sneakers are caked in dirt. And when I look at his socks, they are equally dirty. How did that happen?
“Why are your socks so dirty?” I ask him. “I was playing in the backyard, Mom.” “In your socks?”
Nico shrugs.
He ends up peeling off his socks, and underneath the socks, his feet are also dirty, but I guess less dirty than the shoes or the socks. I need to dip this kid in bleach tonight.
Spencer and Nico seem overjoyed to see each other, like long-lost friends, even though they were in school together literally two days ago. They race off to the backyard, as Janice shouts after Spencer, “Be careful!”
Janice is wringing her hands together, looking in the direction of the backyard. I don’t know if I should offer to stay or if she even wants me here. What she really looks like she needs is a stiff drink. She finally turns to me, and I’m certain she’s going to offer me some lemonade or cheese and crackers, but instead she says, “How often do you check Nico for lice?”
My mouth drops open. I want to be offended, but Nico has actually had lice three times. So has Ada, and that was much harder to deal with, because you can’t exactly shave the head of an eight-year-old girl. That’s the sort of thing she would have been describing in therapy years later.
But I definitely took a razor to my son’s head. He wasn’t thrilled about it at first, but when Enzo offered to shave his own head too, then it became fun.
“He doesn’t have lice,” I say.
She narrows her eyes at me. “But how do you know?”
I don’t know what to say to that. “He’s not scratching so ”
“Do you have a good lice comb?” “Um, yes ”
“What brand?”
I don’t know if I can take much more of this. I mean, I dislike lice as much as the next person, which is a lot. But it’s not a favorite topic of conversation.
“Listen,” I say, “I should get going ”
“Oh.” Janice’s face falls. “I thought maybe you could stay for a bit. I squeezed some fresh juice.”
Her face fills with genuine disappointment. Even though she was so rude about my choice to be a working mother, if she does stay home all day, she might be very lonely. And I’ve never been great at making friends either. Maybe Janice and I got off on the wrong foot, and she’ll be my first friend in Long Island. I mean, on Long Island.
“I’d love to try your juice,” I say.
Janice perks up a little, and I follow her to the kitchen. Not surprisingly, her kitchen is immaculate. The floor looks cleaner than my countertops. She has a kitchen table like I do, and it has place settings and coasters on it. Janice reaches into the refrigerator and pulls out a giant pitcher of something thick and grainy and green. She pours two brimming glasses of it and slides one across the table to me.
“Don’t forget to use a coaster,” she tells me as I bring my glass to the kitchen table.
As Janice settles down at the table across from me, I examine the liquid in my glass. Well, it’s almost a liquid. It has some properties of liquids. “What is it, exactly?”
“It’s juice,” she says, like I have asked a very stupid question.
I want to ask what she put in it that made it this vivid shade of green. I can’t think of any green fruits that I enjoy eating. Well, there’s honeydew, but I don’t know if I would want to have honeydew in drink form.
But she’s watching me, and I realize that I have got to take a sip of this alleged juice. Well, maybe it’s better than it looks—it almost has to be. I wrap my fingers around the glass, lift it to my mouth, and then bottoms up. I take a mouthful of it and
Oh my God.
This is not better than it looks. Somehow it’s worse. This might be the grossest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth. It is taking all my self- restraint not to spit it right back into the glass. It tastes like she took the grass outside in the backyard, dirt and all, and then turned it into a drink.
“Delicious, right?” Janice takes a healthy swig. “And believe it or not, it’s very nutritious too.”
I just nod because I’m still working on trying to swallow the current mouthful.
“So,” she says, “how are you liking your new house?”
“I love it,” I say honestly. “It needs a bit of work, but we’re very happy with it.”
“Most houses do when you buy them,” she says. “And I’m sure you got a very good price on it.”
I lick my lips and am immediately sorry because they taste like the green substance. “Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody else wanted it.”
Janice’s words make me forget all about the bitter taste of juice in my mouth. “What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “Only one other person put in a bid. And they withdrew
it.”
That’s not what our real estate agent told us. She made it sound like
there were other bids, but they were on the low side. Was she lying to us? Were we really the only ones interested in this cozy but gorgeous house in an excellent school district?
How could that be?
“Why wasn’t anyone bidding on it?” I ask Janice, trying not to let on how curious I am.
“I haven’t the faintest clue,” she replies. “It’s a fine house from the outside. Well built. Good roof.”
Well, that’s a relief.
“It must be something on the inside,” she adds.
Something on the inside? What’s inside my house that scared off the dozens of other couples who must have visited the house?
I can’t help but think of that horrible scraping noise that kept me awake at night. I was so happy when we got the call that the house
was ours. But there hasn’t been a day that has gone by since we moved in when I haven’t wondered if I’ve made a horrible mistake
“So,” Janice says, crisply changing the subject, “how was dinner with Suzette and Jonathan the other night?”
I jerk my head up, feeling a flash of irritation. Okay, now it makes sense why she wanted me to stay. She wants to pump me for gossip about the neighbors. That’s why I’m here—not to sample her juice concoction.
“It was good,” I say. The last thing I want is to trash-talk Suzette and let it get back to her.
“Good? That’s hard to believe.” “They seem nice.”
She purses her lips. “They’re not nice people. Trust me. I’ve lived next door to them for the last five years.”
I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling her about how Suzette said the exact same thing about her. Clearly, there’s a lot of bad blood between these two. And anyway, the truth is Suzette doesn’t seem like a terribly nice person. As much as I tried to get to know her at the dinner, I disliked her even more by the end of the evening. “Jonathan seems nice at least.”
“She’s horrible to him,” Janice says.
She didn’t seem like the most attentive wife on the planet, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say Suzette was horrible to him. “Really?”
“Any time he tries to touch her, she pulls away from him,” she says. “She puts him down whenever she can. I can only imagine what their sex life is like.”
I’m trying not to imagine that, actually.
Janice’s gaze locks with the kitchen window, which has a perfect view of the front door of 12 Locust Street. She can see anyone entering or leaving the house from her kitchen. “Suzette Lowell is the worst person I’ve ever met.”
Wow. I didn’t like Suzette either, but that’s quite an extreme statement.
“She seems ” I swish the green liquid around in my glass in lieu of drinking it. “She’s friendly at least.”
“Do you know that your husband is at her house right now?”
I did not know that. And Janice can tell from my face that I didn’t know it, which seems to give her immense pleasure.
“She opened her door to him about an hour ago,” she tells me. It makes sense she would know that, giving the stunning view she has of the front of Suzette’s house. “He is still there.”
“That’s fine.” I force a smile because I don’t want to give Janice the satisfaction of knowing that this information upsets me. “He told me he’d be working on her yard in the near future, so I guess he decided to do it today.”
“On a Sunday? That doesn’t sound like a working day.” “Enzo works all the time. He’s very busy.”
Janice takes a drink from her glass and then licks away the green mustache it leaves behind. “Okay. Well, as long as you trust him.”
“I trust him.”
She smirks at me. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”
Janice is trying to stir up trouble, but I try to ignore her. I do trust Enzo. I mean, yes, for whatever reason, it didn’t cross his mind to tell me that he was heading over to work in the backyard of our attractive neighbor. But I’m not going to let myself be bothered by that. Maybe there are things I don’t know about my husband, but I know for sure that he is a good man. He has proven that to me time and time again. And even if he weren’t, I still don’t think he would cheat on me.
He wouldn’t dare.
I am scared of you, Millie Accardi.
And he should be.
