The Neighbors Are Watching Read Free Page A

roll over, his body falling heavy into hers. It was an agreement they had: He offered and she accepted.
    Sometimes, after they’d made love, Allison was sure that their little spats were a form of foreplay. But before, in those few minutes when the space between their bodies was cold and impenetrable, she always felt a sharp bite of fear that he wouldn’t reach out—that they’d stay like that forever.
    Of course, this time was different. Even he, as thick-skinned as he often was, wouldn’t make such a move now, not under these circumstances. The stupid little things they’d found to argue about before had now been made permanently irrelevant. Their entire marriage had twisted into a question mark and nothing would ever be the same or all right again. She thought of that big-bellied girl downstairs and felt acid burning her throat. She didn’t know what was worse—the betrayal, the lies, or the secrets. Just the same, she couldn’t take the chance that he’d move over, that he’d try to fix it somehow with his body. She’d lie here like this until dawn if she had to.
    She couldn’t see the clock but knew it was about three in the morning—the blackest, bleakest part of night. On still summer nights like this, when most of the neighbors turned off their air conditioners and opened their windows, you could hear anything you wanted and much of what you didn’t—cats yowling, the clink of late-night party wineglasses, and sometimes the menacing rustle of coyotes coming down from the dry hills surrounding the neighborhood. The relentless press of housing development through every empty space over the last ten years had brought those wild dogs ever nearer; a reminder, along with the influx of black crows, of how far civilization was encroaching on the wild.
    Now, Allison heard the slow crunch of gravel followed by the sound of a car door opening. No doubt it was coming from one of the many rotating vehicles in Jessalyn’s driveway. There’d been a steady stream of late-night visitors to that house since Jessalyn had moved in six months ago, whichrevealed something about the nature of the callers—all men as far as Allison had been able to tell. Very few of them stayed longer than an hour or two, which revealed something else. The car started promptly, and Allison heard it pulling away.
    Allison had spoken to Jessalyn maybe three or four times at most when they were both picking up their mail or pulling into their driveways at the same time. Somehow, even though Allison had tried to keep those encounters as short as possible (something about Jessalyn just repelled Allison), she had still managed to learn that Jessalyn had been on a reality contest show and that she’d lost (“Those shows are all fixed,” Jessalyn had told her at the time). She also knew that Jessalyn was “starting over,” although she couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, was “back in school to get my degree,” although Allison had no idea in what, and that she worked in a Del Mar day spa, although she hadn’t explained what she did there. Jessalyn’s eyes were overly made-up and always glassy—maybe that was what Allison didn’t like about her—probably from drugs, which she probably got from Kevin Werner.
    Allison could actually hear him now, several houses down, listening to some awful death metal band, the sharp tinny shrieks reaching her ears on wafts of air. She could see him in her mind’s eye, pockmarked, surly, and black-clad. The kid was a walking billboard for disaffected youth and just one more reason to hate teenagers. Allison didn’t know how anyone managed to teach at the high school level. Her own third graders were bad enough—they already had entitled attitudes and challenged anyone who had the temerity to knock their all-important
self-esteem
. But … no, you couldn’t blame the kids yet. At that age, it was still the parents. The parents were responsible for all of it. She couldn’t understand how