The Neighbors Are Watching Read Free Page B

Dick and Dorothy Werner maintained their holier-than-thou attitude considering they’d raised that kid, Kevin. Just naming a kid Kevin was asking for trouble. Allison knew from experience that the Kevins in her class were always going to be troublemakers.
    Of course, Allison thought, she and Joe had just made it easier for dear Dot to maintain that superior stance forever. Dorothy had been there, kneeling in her star jasmine with her stupid yellow clippers in hand and watching when the girl had shown up. God only knew the conclusions Dorothy had drawn behind that ugly purple visor she always wore. Allison figured Dorothy was already whipping up a cake from a mix that she’d bring over for “you and Joe,” but really to find out why there was a pregnant teenager living in their house, information which she could then take back to Dick, who, as the arbiter of decency and American-ness on the block, would probably blow some sort of fuse inside his head. It was already killing him that there were lesbians living on the street and that he was separated from them by only two walls and a eucalyptus tree. Not that she’d heard this directly from Dick. But Dorothy, who had turned passive-aggressiveness into a high art, had dropped enough clues as to his point of view. “Dick’s so funny,” she’d said once. “He couldn’t find our power saw last night so he was going to go next door and ask one of the girls (Dorothy never referred to Sam and Gloria by name—they were always “the girls”) if he could borrow theirs. How silly is that? I mean, just because they, you know … well, anyway, it doesn’t mean they have
tools
. Men are so … Right?” And what was really the funniest thing, if you thought about it, was that Dorothy only shared this information with Allison because Dorothy thought of her as a like-minded
friend
.
    But Dick and Dorothy weren’t Allison’s problem. No, her problem was downstairs, nestled under the bright yellow afghan her grandmother had knitted for her before she’d passed away, in the hope that there’d soon be a great-grandchild to celebrate. Allison was glad the woman hadn’t lived to see who was sleeping under it now.
    It wasn’t the girl’s fault. Of course it wasn’t. Allison knew this intellectually even though there was nothing—
nothing
—appealing about Diana. From the sneering expression on her young face, to her swollen belly, which was proudly exposed and, yes, pierced, Diana was all hostility and bad attitude. The tattooed ankles rounded out the picture nicely.Diana had a snake on one and an apple on the other and Allison didn’t apprecíate the biblical references
at all
. And, although the girl’s mother was surely to blame for the poor parenting skills that had led to a pregnant, tattooed teenage daughter, Allison couldn’t lay fault for her sleepless night there either. No, it was Joe—all Joe. Allison clenched her thighs under the blanket creating a tiny tremor in the fabric. She was desperate for a drink, even though she’d hit the wine pretty hard before going to bed. She just wanted oblivion.
    The worst part was that Allison didn’t even know how she was supposed to feel. She and Joe had been married
eight years
and in all that time, not even a hint that he had a child somewhere. How could it have been so hidden—so out of her reach? How was it possible that through all the casual intimacies of their life together—shared meals and movies, paying bills, football on Sundays, washing dishes, brushing their teeth, their discussions about their future—there was no whisper, no accidentally dropped words about this girl? It would almost be easier to have woken up and found that
everything
about her life was a lie—that she was part of some grand government experiment, that her memory had been erased, that she was living with space aliens—instead of just this one awful truth. It wouldn’t get any better either. Because the girl was here and she was