Then he invented some gadget or part of an HVAC system (we’re not clear on what exactly it was), patented it, and sold it to a big manufacturer, netting something like two million dollars. This meant he could afford to move Julia and the girls to a house in Hillside. To one of the lesser houses, true; four thousand square feet instead of six or eight. But Brad was fine with that plan; his property taxes would be lower than with the true mansions and he’d still have that enviable Hillside address.
Moving there would have been the Whitmans’ plan, except that their best friends, the Jamisons (Jimmy was in pharmaceuticals and doing well these days), had discovered Oak Knoll, with its aging houses and, in many cases, aging residents. Aging residents who were one by one selling off and moving into assisted living. Or they were dying off and their kids had no interest in returning to live in the cramped one-bathroom houses they’d grown up in, houses that now smelled of mothballs and Preparation H and had nicotine stains on the ceilings and walls. And so the kids were clearing out the tchotchkes and selling the places as is.
Unlike in Hillside, where the houses were at least as old or older (if better smelling—sometimes—and better kept), in Oak Knoll you didn’t have to pay through the nose to get the house and then pay again to modernize everything. Oak Knoll homes were cheap enough that you could raze them and build a brand-new showplace, put in the best materials, best technology, great insulation and low-e glass, have lower utilities and maintenance and tax bills and a larger return on investment if you sold—Oak Knoll was where it was happening, Jimmy Jamison told Brad. He’d already picked his builder, and Brad was not going to believe the media system he’d designed. Jimmy took Brad to see one of the builder’s just-done houses (Mark and Lisa Wertheimer’s, now). The men stood in the kitchen with its ten-foot ceilings, its marble countertops, its Sub-Zero refrigerator and Wolf range, and Brad said, “Damn. I reckon I ought to build one of these for Julia and me.”
* * *
From the far more basic Alston-Holt kitchen, where Valerie was arranging her peonies in vases, she watched Xavier speak with the new neighbor. Visually, the man fulfilled every expectation she’d had for who was going to live in that house: white, late forties, trendy on-brand swim trunks to go with the swimming pool and the enormous stainless-steel gas grill on the flagstone patio nearby. He wore flip-flops and a backward-facing ball cap. A man-child with money.
There were a lot of them around these days. She’d had dates with a couple such men, fix-ups by a friend in the engineering college who had regular dealings with men in local industry. More like pre-dates: meet someplace during happy hour, see if there’s any chemistry, try to gauge whether or not the guy’s interest in dating a black woman arose from an honorable place in his soul. Valerie Alston-Holt was not some exotic oversexed chick waiting to satisfy some white man’s slave-sex fantasy—and yes, there really were men who entertained themselves with that idea and thought she’d be entertained by it, too.
Valerie didn’t mention any of that to Xavier. Even when she dated a man for real, she kept it very low-key. To wit: her current gentleman, a man she’d connected with at a conference in Virginia almost three years ago but whom Xavier had met only twice. His name was Chris Johnson—the most nondescript of names, we thought. He had great credentials, though, being tenured faculty at the University of Virginia in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Also, he sang baritone in a prizewinning quartet. Their “dating” so far amounted to regular FaceTime conversations and the occasional weekend getaway, now that Xavier could stay home on his own.
Valerie didn’t invite Chris down here, save for the two times we mentioned, and didn’t talk about him much. As all single parents know, dating while raising a child or children is no simple endeavor. Valerie didn’t want to make Xavier anxious about a thing that might happen, might not. Once that boy got fixed on something, he had a hard time letting go. She’d seen that about him early: a favorite blankie, a favorite food, a toy, a book, an author—one summer he’d read nothing but the Brian Jacques Redwall novels, all twenty-two of them. He had two close friends, who’d been his friends since preschool. And of course there was his music and his guitars.
Here’s another example of the boy’s intensity: The possibility that Xavier’s first-choice college might not take him had kept him awake nights, though he was as skilled and talented as anyone he’d competed with over the years. To the delight of those of us who lived nearest and could hear him play when the weather was mild and the windows open, Xavier increased his practice schedule to an hour before school every day and two hours at night after he got home from his job stocking groceries. Then he did his homework. For two days before and a day after his SFCM audition in January, he could barely eat, which is saying something. And although he did get himself back into a more normal routine after they returned from San Francisco, he stayed keyed up until his acceptance letter came in mid-March. This was just the sort of young man he was. Valerie had done her best to teach him to make that intensity work for him. Good grades, good work ethic, good recommendations from his teachers and his boss—and it had paid off.
But it might have as easily worked against him, and still might; how many nights in the past few years had Valerie waited up for her son, praying that he and his friends not be stopped by the police? Praying that he never got put in a position where he felt wronged and defensive and turned that intensity of his on the cops? He was tall. He was black. Valerie had told him so many times, “If they get scared of you, they’ll shoot,” hating that she needed to say it at all, hating that the progress toward that post-racial future she and her husband and others like them had fervently fostered was now being reversed. Why couldn’t we see one another as simply human and pull together, for goodness’ sake? The planet was dying while people fought over things like who was most American—or who was American at all.
Now she watched Xavier leave the man-child-with-money and come inside the house. “They’re all out there,” he said, joining her in the kitchen.
“I saw. Let me just finish this and wash up.”
Xavier leaned against the counter, took an apple from a bowl and polished it against his T-shirt. Then he put it back and did the same with another, saying, “He thought I was your hired help.”
“Are we surprised?”
“He also thought you were an old lady. Well, not you specifically. He thought an old lady lived here. Said his Realtor told him that.”
“Well, that is a fair mistake.” She dried her hands on a dish towel. “Did you get his name?”
“Brad something. HVAC. That’s his line of work. He said he has TV commercials, like I should know him.”
“Oh, right, right. I remember Ellen said a local celebrity was buying here. She just couldn’t remember which one or which house. Clearly there’s a good buck in HVAC.”
Valerie considered and then rejected changing out of her sweaty T-shirt and fraying cargo shorts. Let them take her—or not—as she was. She put on sunglasses and a hat, and then she and Xavier walked over to the Whitmans’ together, moving from their wooded paradise to the Whitmans’ sculpted strips of mulch and sod that surrounded the patio and pool.