“Juniper,” Xavier said to himself softly, trying it out. Then he thought, Idiot. You got no time for this.
“Seriously, Mom?” said Juniper.
“On your face? Absolutely. Arms and legs, too. You have to take care of your skin now, or you’ll end up spending way too much money treating sun damage later. Do you want to end up looking like Grandma Lottie? I wish I’d had a mom as smart as I am.”
“If you do say so yourself,” said Juniper, taking the sunscreen.
“By the way, do not tell Grandma I said that.”
Next came a shirtless man with a golf tan, wearing coral-colored flowered shorts below the protruding belly common to so many middle-aged men. He left the tall door open behind him. “Is this the life or what?” he said. He carried a bottle of beer in one hand and a pitcher of something pink in the other. Setting the pitcher on a teak dining table, he added, “Who’s ready for a swim?”
“I am!” said a little girl, skipping outside behind him.
The woman said, “Are you sure the water’s warm enough? They just filled it yesterday.”
The little girl, maybe seven years old, fuchsia bikini, big yellow sunglasses, put her hands on her hips and answered, “Mommy, are you a man or a mouse?”
Xavier, realizing that he was staring, finished stuffing a bag and then put down his rake and turned to go find his mother. Might as well get the introductions over with. Before he got more than a few steps, though, the man called to him.
“Hey there, son.”
Xavier turned around. The man was waving and walking toward him.
“Listen,” he said, coming into the yard, “I’m wondering if I might hire you to do some work for me when you’re done here. We just moved in and I’ve got boxes to haul out and break down, some furniture to move around—my wife, she couldn’t make up her mind with the movers, so…” He chuckled. “Fifty bucks sound fair? I don’t need you for but an hour or so—pretty good pay, right?”
“Oh, I … That is, I’m just helping out my mom.” Xavier pointed toward the house. “I’m Xavier Alston-Holt. Most people call me Zay,” he said, extending his hand.
“Ah,” the man said, and shook Xavier’s hand. “Brad Whitman, Whitman HVAC. You’ve probably seen my commercials, right?”
“Maybe?” Xavier said. “We don’t have TV.”
“I’m on the internet, and radio, too.”
“Okay, sure.”
Brad Whitman leaned in and tapped Xavier’s shoulder with his fist, saying, “Heh, I thought you were hired by the old lady who lives here.”
Xavier smiled politely. “I don’t think my mom would appreciate being called ‘the old lady.’”
“No, right? What woman would?”
“She’s only forty-eight.”
“That so? Guess my Realtor got it wrong,” Brad Whitman said. “But there are lots of old ladies in the neighborhood, isn’t that a fact?”
Xavier nodded. “And some old men. Everything, really.”
“Sure,” Brad said. “That’s what we want, right?”
Xavier nodded. “So, I was just about to get my mom. She wants to say hello.”
“Sure, good. Bring her over.” Brad pointed toward his house. “Julia just made some pink lemonade. The girls love it. I’ll offer you a beer if you’ve got ID saying you’re twenty-one.”
“Not yet, but thanks. Be right back.”
Xavier was almost to the house when Brad Whitman called, “Bring your dad, too, if he’s home. I’ve got a cold one for him, at least.”
Xavier raised his hand to acknowledge he’d heard.
Bring his father? He wished he could. He had always wished he could.
3
Before we depict the first encounter between our story’s other central players, we need to show the wider setting in which this slow tragedy unfolded. As our resident English professor would remind us, place, especially in stories of the South, is as much a character as any human, and inseparable from—in this case even necessary to—the plot.
* * *
Valerie Alston-Holt had fallen in love with our neighborhood, Oak Knoll, the first time she stood on one of its sidewalks. She was a Michigan native two years out of her Ph.D. program, twenty months into her new job at the university, one year married, and seven months pregnant. She and her husband, Tom Holt-Alston, who was a young sociology professor, had been renting a cozy apartment near campus. Now, though, it was time to buy a house—and this was the neighborhood their colleagues loved most. Tom and Val couldn’t go wrong here, everyone said so.
As with a lot of American suburban neighborhoods of a certain character, Oak Knoll had been conceived in the boom years after the Second World War. Wide streets, sidewalks, and—because this is North Carolina, which is rich in both trees and clay—brick-clad ranch homes, the basic three-bedroom, one-bath design, small but functional, set on spacious tree-filled lots.
Spring was Oak Knoll’s showy season: white and pink dogwoods in bloom along with chestnuts and pears and viburnums and camellias, cherry trees, persimmon trees, hawthorn shrubs, hollies. Also tulip magnolias, those heralds who now and then made their eager pink appearance only to be punished by a late frost. The neighborhood was known particularly for the dogwoods, delicate, slow-growing trees that need two decades to achieve the size of a six-year maple. Valerie brought Tom to walk around and see for himself how lovely it was here, how perfect for them and their child-to-be. Some of us still remember seeing the two of them that day, Valerie so pregnant, so dark-skinned, such a contrast to her tall, blond husband. We won’t pretend that no one paid attention to this contrast. Of course we did. Mostly we felt it gave them an exotic appeal, a kind of celebrity status in a neighborhood that had come to think of itself as progressive yet was not doing much to demonstrate that character. The most that could be said was that some residents were white and some were nonwhite, some were on fixed incomes and some were young professionals in low-paying fields, and we treated one another with kindness and respect. To be fair, what more was there to do?
Oak Knoll was never, at least until recently, thought to be a prestigious part of town. People with serious money lived in nearby Hillside. Hillside had the blue bloods, the politicians, the surgeons, the founders of industry and big retail chains, many of them living in enormous homes made of stone and brick, fairy-tale homes with gates and ivy and long driveways and porticoes and sculpted shrubbery and, of course, towering oaks. Valerie admired these mansions and also the slightly lesser versions of them tucked into the smaller lots there—also beautiful, the yards also verdant. Who wouldn’t? But there was no way, not in any life that might be available to her (short of winning a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot), that she could ever call Hillside home. And even if she did have millions, many of the Hillside residents would say a black woman with a white husband had less legitimacy there than the black hired help, because she obviously didn’t know her place.
As time passed and the city grew, the type of people who were then known as yuppies bought big graceless houses in new outlying subdivisions on acre-plus lots, where the properties were dubbed “estates” and many families kept a golf cart in their three- or four-car garage. The Whitmans had lived in one of those neighborhoods because, let’s face it, you get a lot more house for your money out there and your neighbors aren’t close enough to know your business. Also, Whitman HVAC was a growing company, not a mature one, and to get the kind of house he wanted for a mortgage he could afford while still driving his BMW and giving Julia a new Lexus SUV and paying for the girls’ private schooling, Brad Whitman, who secretly yearned for the prestige of Hillside, had to settle.