Now Xavier said to her, “The time has come.”
“What time is that? Are you going somewhere?” She laid the flowers and clippers in her basket and then stood upright. “I thought you were going to clear out those dead leaves for me.”
“I am. We have new neighbors.”
“Oh, that. I know. It was inevitable. Like death,” Valerie added with a rueful smile.
Xavier said, “I met one of them just now. She says it’s her and one sister and their parents.”
“Only four people in that huge house?”
Xavier shrugged. “Guess so.”
“How old?”
“The girl? My age, I think, give or take. And a little sister, she said. I didn’t ask about her.”
His mother nodded. “Okay. Thanks for the intel.”
“Do you want me to find you if the parents come outside?”
“No. Yes. Of course. I am going to be a good neighbor.”
“You always are.”
“Thanks, Zay.”
“Just telling it like it is.”
“That’s what we have to do, as much as we can.”
Xavier returned to the backyard and got to work raking the leaves from an area where his mother intended to put a koi pond. With him going off to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for school in the fall, she’d said she needed new beings to keep her occupied so that she didn’t call him every day to make sure he could survive on the opposite side of the country without her. He knew she was joking; she wouldn’t call daily regardless. She’d want to, but she wouldn’t. He understood. They’d been a pretty exclusive duo for a long time.
He’d said, “Make the pond, and maybe date someone local.”
“Oh, look who’s talking about dating.”
He gave her that crooked smile of his that had made him so popular with all the older ladies here in Oak Knoll, as well as with, we were sure, the girls at his school. He said, “I’m too busy to have a girlfriend.”
“Too picky, it seems to me.”
“I know you are, but what am I?” he said.
The fact is, Xavier was both picky and busy—but mostly picky. He hadn’t met anyone who made him feel like he ought to change any of his priorities. He had plenty of female friends and, among them, girls who would have dated him if he’d pursued their interest. He hadn’t pursued it, though, because he knew himself well enough to understand he was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. Always had been. He’d hooked up with a couple of girls in the past year mainly due to lust and opportunity, but a relationship was not workable for him right now. His music was his love.
Now he glanced at the poolside girl, the new neighbor, the girl he’d sort of met. What’s her name? he thought. Why do you care? he also thought. Just do your work.
Xavier had been six years old when he first strummed a guitar, at a birthday party for the daughter of one of his mom’s colleagues. Several of the adults had brought instruments—guitars, mandolins, bongos, a harmonica—and after the cake and presents, everyone gathered on the uneven brick patio in plastic lawn chairs to play and sing. First it was Raffi songs, for the kids, then a lot of Neil Young and the Beatles and some James Taylor. Xavier thought the music was fine, but it was one particular guitar that snagged his curiosity. He liked the look of it, and its clear, bright tone. He’d asked its owner, a history professor named Sean, if he could try it. Sean sat him down and put the guitar on Xavier’s lap. The instrument was huge in comparison to the boy’s skinny little self. Xavier held the neck and reached over the top and strummed, and that was it, he was gone. A week later he took his first lesson. By ten, he was fixed on classical music exclusively; of all the genres, classical was the one that made him feel beauty, and he needed that feeling to help him get through all the emotional noise in his world. Then early this year, now eighteen years old, he’d auditioned for a coveted spot at SFCM and got it.
Xavier raked the leaves into a pile and began stuffing them into the biodegradable bags Valerie bought from a shop where every item cost four times as much as its cheaper but usually toxic (in one way or another) alternative. Most of their cleaning, bathing, storage, and clothing products came from there. Between this expense and the gardening and Xavier’s music lessons, it was little wonder there wasn’t much money for updating the house, had Valerie been inclined to bother. We made fun of her sometimes—the way we did with our friend who’d gone so far with the Paleo Diet that he wouldn’t even eat food made with grains unless that grain had been milled by hand with a stone. Valerie took our ribbing in the spirit with which it was given: affection, since we couldn’t help but love a woman as caring as she was, and respect the way she stuck to her guns.
The new neighbor was still on the chaise by the glittering blue in-ground pool, still reading. Xavier liked the sight (of the girl, mainly, though the pool looked really nice). Though he hadn’t yet had a chance to study her features, his initial impression was favorable. White girl. Really long brown hair. Pretty face. Plaid shirt tied at the waist, sleeves rolled up. Cutoff denim shorts. No shoes. Dark toenail polish—green, maybe? He kept an eye on her as he worked, and had the odd but pleasing sense that she stayed deliberately aware of him as she read.
“Sunscreen, Juniper,” a woman’s voice said. Xavier looked up from his work to see a woman coming outside through tall French doors to the covered porch, a bottle of sunscreen in hand.
Juniper.
The woman’s hair was blond and long, but not as long as Juniper’s. She wore it in a high ponytail above gold hoop earrings, which did not, in Xavier’s opinion, go with the tight fitness tank top and shorts and tennis shoes, all of it in trendy patterns and colors that, if he had known about fitness fashion, he’d have recognized came from Ultracor’s spring collection. She looked like a catalogue ad.
Watching the woman, Xavier thought well-kept, the term he’d heard some of the women use when his mother had her friends over for book club. While they always did eventually get around to discussing the book, whatever it might be, first they had the “graze and gossip” part of the evening. Lately that term, well-kept, was in the gossip part of the evening a lot, in correspondence with the increasing number of high-end houses being built nearby. The women tried to make it simply an observation, but Xavier could tell that it was a judgment, too. These women were all professionals: some were teachers or professors, like his mother; some were in public health or social work or ran a small business. None of them were kept.
Xavier liked to hang out with them, not to gossip (their business was their business) but to avail himself of the appetizers and salads they brought. They brought wine, too. Plenty of wine. He was eighteen now, old enough to die for his country and therefore old enough to have a glass of wine with his hummus and olives, his chèvre-stuffed figs, his lentil-arugula salad, et cetera, that’s what they all liked to say. Xavier wasn’t much for wine, but he would never say no to the so-called crack dip, a hot cream cheese, Ro-Tel, spicy crumbled sausage extravaganza, as far as he was concerned. He planned to buy a Crock-Pot for his dorm room so that he could make the dip himself and basically live on the stuff.
“Juniper,” the well-kept woman said again, this time with annoyance.