The Good Neighbor Read online

  Francie rolled her eyes. “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “Some kind of woman thing. That’s all. Nothing to be taken seriously.”

  “Well, in that case, why don’t you have a glass of wine?” he said. “I can make dinner.”

  “A glass of wine,” she said. “What will that do?”

  “What do you mean, what’ll it do? It’ll relax you. You could use it.” “I see,” said Francie. “Is that your assessment of what I need?” Colt gave her an odd look.

  “You really are in a weird mood,” he said.

  “How very perceptive of you, Coltrane,” Francie said. “That’s the most sensitive thing you’ve said all day.”

  “Touchy, too. You know, in the old days, they used to make menstruating women leave the village and go into a hut. So they could leave everyone else in peace and quiet.” He grinned. “Maybe I oughta build you a hut of your own,” he said. “In the backyard. Now that we have a backyard.”

  Francie bit her tongue then, because otherwise she was going to scream.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  A few moments later she carried two glasses of wine into the liv ing room, looking for Michael among the shadows. She squinted; he had melted away, he was nowhere to be found.

  “Mikey? Where are you?”

  “In here,” came the muffled reply, through the fireplace. Francie went around the wall, where she found her brother staring into the flames, hugging his knees.

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  “Mikey? You want a drink?”

  Michael looked up at her, pathetic. She recognized this expres sion. It was the same one he used to have after the neighborhood boys had been at him, painting him with mud, poking him with sticks.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  She sat down next to him, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Dried blood lingered on the wispy hairs of his mustache. Francie touched his face.

  “What on earth happened to you?” she asked with concern. “I . . . I bumped my nose.”

  “Aw, honey. I thought you must have done something to your self. Does it hurt?”

  “Yes, it hurts.”

  Francie touched it, lightly. “Is it broken?”

  Michael winced and pulled away. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe.”

  “Poor little honey. Here, drink this to make it better.”

  How many times had she said that very phrase to him? A hun dred, perhaps a thousand. As a girl, she was always making infu sions over an imaginary fire, brewing up innumerable potions in a cast-off aluminum pot to heal his plentiful ills. Grass and dande lions for hurt feelings, bark and roots for boredom, mud and rocks for anger and bad grades. They never worked, but she was still try ing. She handed him the wine now, cool in the glass. Michael drained half of it in one gulp as Francie sipped hers daintily. The pain in her middle had begun to fade. To her surprise, she found, suddenly, that she felt fine. It was as if she had expressed some thing poisonous, and now that it was out of her, she was cleaner, more natural. Maybe that chicken coming out was a good thing, she thought. Although it certainly hadn’t felt good at the time. Worst pain ever, in fact. Yet there was something purifying about it. She felt, quite literally, as if she’d been purged.

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  But there was no point in getting into any of this with Michael. It was not his job to listen to her. That was no one’s job; it was a position that hadn’t been filled yet.

  “You were gone a long time,” he said. “I know.”

  “I was worried.”

  “Well, that makes one of you. He was more concerned about his car.”

  Michael snorted and drained the rest of his wine. “Now that I believe,” he said.

  “Listen. Before I forget—what were you going to tell me before, when we were talking in the bathroom?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seemed kind of upset. Like something had happened in Colorado. I had the impression you were about to tell me about it.” “Oh, that. Well . . . never mind. It’s not worth getting into,”

  said Michael.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means it’s something I have to deal with myself. You can’t help me out of it.”

  “Mikey,” said Francie.

  She was about to say “I’m your big sister,” another timeworn phrase, when the lights went out and a background hum that none of them had actually noticed, which was the furnace in the basement, fell silent.

  “Shit!” Colt barked from the kitchen. “The power!”

  Michael groaned. “Now what?” he said. “This is turning into a fucking nightmare!”

  “It’s okay, it’ll come back on,” Francie said. “Don’t worry.”

  She put her wine down and felt her way to the stack of boxes in the hallway. She could hear Colt stumbling around in the kitchen, cursing, bumping into things. Francie opened box after box in the blackness and felt through the contents of each, until she came to the one she was looking for; she’d remembered that she had

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  packed a bag of tea lights, and she found them finally and brought them to the living room. She and Michael lit them methodically until the walls glowed orange. Then she went with two of them, incandescent in her hand, down the hall and into the kitchen, where Colt still floundered helplessly, cursing.

  “Jesus, you look like a ghost,” he told her, out of the gloom. “I don’t know what we’re going to eat now. And I’m starving.”

  “I bought vegetables. And potato chips. We can eat those.” “You couldn’t have thought to buy precooked chicken, of

  course.”

  “Well, Colt . . . I wasn’t planning on the power going out.” “No. You wouldn’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Only you always seem to expect things are just . . . going to work out, somehow. You have to think ahead, damn it. Bad weather, wind, heavy snow. Of course the power ’s going to go out!”

  “Are you seriously trying to blame me for that? It’s snowing out, the lines go down. It happens all the time.”

  “I’m not talking about the power, I’m talking about dinner.” “Colt,” said Francie, putting her hands to her forehead. “Please.

  Just shut up.”

  “Yeah,” said Michael, appearing behind her in the doorway as another glowing form, underlit by a handful of candles. “Why don’t you shut up? And quit being such a prick to us. Or I’ll tell her what really happened to my nose.”

  “What really happened to your—” “Oh, damn it,” said Colt.

  “Go on, tell her, big man!” said Michael.

  “Colt?” Francie crossed her arms. “What did you do to my brother?”

  “We were just messing around,” said Colt lamely. “It was an ac cident.”

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  “He was messing around,” said Michael. “I was trying to mind my own business. But he just couldn’t leave me alone. He always has to fuck with me somehow. Always has to be giving me shit. And he hit me!”

  “I didn’t hit you, I tapped you,” said Colt. “And it was an acci dent. If I’d really hit you, you’d still be stretched out right now.” “See? There he goes again!” said Michael. “Always making threatening statements! Always trying to prove how tough he is!” “You hit my brother?” Francie was aghast. “Coltrane Hart, what

  in the name of God is wrong with you? Why would you do such a thing?”

  “We were boxing,” Colt said lamely.

  “He was boxing, Sissie,” said Michael. “I had no interest in box ing, and I told him so about a hundred times, but he can’t let any thing alone. He always has to start shit. Always! He’s like a ten-year-old!”

  “Now, just hold on,” said Colt.

  “Colt, you asshole,” said Francie calmly. “You complete and to tal dick.”


  Colt’s eyes became slits, his eyebrows lowering like floodgates. “Francie, watch it. Just because—”

  “Here,” said Francie, “see how you like it.” She reached out in the semidarkness and tried to slap him, but missed. Colt grabbed her hand to stop her and ended up pulling her off balance, so that she stumbled and nearly fell. She gasped in surprise and wrenched free of him.

  “Hey!” shouted Michael. “What are you going to do, beat her up now too?”

  “No!” said Colt. “I wasn’t—”

  “Take your hands off me,” said Francie, though she was already loose. “I don’t want to see you again tonight, Colt. I don’t care where you go, to the basement or the attic or one of the bed rooms. But I don’t want to see you. You really make me sick some

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  times. Really sick. Now just beat it.” She was fighting to keep the tears out of her voice, but they were tears of rage, not sadness— not that he would have known the difference.

  “I’m not going anywhere. This is my house—” “Your house!” Francie yelled. “Your house?”

  “Yes! Jesus! Who do you think paid for it? You? You haven’t got a dime to your name, and you haven’t worked in years! You’re no better than him!” Colt pointed to Michael. “You’re like a couple of children! You both think everyone owes you a living!”

  “I do not think everyone owes me a living,” Michael said. “Yes, you do!”

  “Who’s a child?” Francie said. This comment had infuriated her to the point that her voice was shaking, the tears just behind. “Who are you calling a child? You’re the one who thinks the world revolves around him! You’re the one who thinks he’s the most im portant person in the universe!”

  Colt stared at her in disbelief. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “Your needs,” said Francie. “It’s always about your needs!” “No, it isn’t always about my needs.”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “All right. What are you talking about?”

  Francie felt herself vibrating with emotion now, like a violin string tuned too tightly; she felt as if at any moment she might part in the middle, and fly off in different directions.

  “You think you’re the one who gets to decide our future! You’re the one who makes all the decisions! What about me? What about what I want?”

  “Let me tell you something,” Colt said. “If I didn’t make the deci sions, then no one would. If I left everything up to you, it’d be like... we were hibernating, or something. Nothing would ever get done!”

  Francie burst out laughing; she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of tears. “Hibernating? What the hell are you talking about, hibernating?”

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  “I mean sitting around always waiting for something to hap pen. You have to be proactive in life, Francie. You have to take matters into your own hands sometimes. You have to get things done!”

  “I know how to be ‘proactive, damn it,” said Francie. “I know how to get things done. It’s just hard when I have to always fight you every step of the way! Because you think you’re more impor tant than me!”

  Michael had fallen silent now, sensing that the argument had moved into the realm of the ultrapersonal. He retreated to the doorway, where he stood half in and half out of the kitchen, lis tening.

  “I do not think I’m more important than you,” Colt said. “You have no right to say that.”

  “Oh, is that right?” Francie said. Here came the tears now; she couldn’t hold them back any longer. “What about what I want for us? For myself? What about my dreams?” She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  Colt rolled his eyes. “Not this again,” he said. “Please, not now.

  In front of your brother you want to start this?”

  “Why not?” Her voice became shrill. “He might as well know.” She turned to Michael, whose eyes had grown wide, like a child witnessing a fight between two giants. “You know what, Mikey? Colt won’t let me have any children. Because he doesn’t want them. He would find it inconvenient. Because his work is the most important thing in his life.”

  Colt threw his hands up. “‘I won’t let you,’ ” he echoed. “You hear how you’re talking? As if everything was really up to me. That’s the real problem. You’re angry at yourself, Francie. You’re pissed off at yourself for being too passive. The reason you don’t feel like you have an equal say in things is because you never open your mouth until it’s too late! And then you take it out on me!”

  “Well, I’m opening it now!” Francie said. “It’s not fair, Coltrane!

  I am a woman! I want certain things! I need certain things!”

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  “And you’re just going to sit around waiting until I give them to you,” said Colt. He picked up a fork and ripped open the plastic wrap that covered the chicken. “Instead of going to get them for yourself. That’s the problem. Passive instead of proactive. Always the victim, never the victor.”

  “How am I supposed to go and get a baby for myself?” Francie shrieked. “How? It takes two, Colt! It takes you and me!”

  “Exactly. It takes two. And we both have to want it.” “And you don’t! So where does that leave me?”

  Colt shrugged. It was more than Francie could take, this seem ing indifference. She swung at him again, connecting with his shoulder this time, spraining two of her knuckles on his scapula. More tears sprang to her eyes and she yelped in pain. Colt put the fork down and stood staring at the raw chicken, hands gripping the countertop, trying to control himself.

  “I never hit you,” he whispered. “In almost ten years, I have never once even thought about hitting you.” He slammed his fist into the counter, so that the empty cupboards rattled.

  “And you play games with my head sometimes!” Francie went on, as if she hadn’t heard. “What about that time in the motel? After we found this house? Remember?”

  “Remember what?” Colt hissed. “You didn’t use a condom!”

  “Oh, man,” said Michael. “Maybe I should—”

  “No, Mikey, you stay,” said Francie. “I want him to explain what he did.” She turned to Colt again. “Remember, you bastard? You fucked me! Without a condom! Remember that? Why did you do that? Just so you could get my hopes up? Or did you for get, just that once? You never forget, Colt! It’s like a religion with you! How was I supposed to interpret that? What was I supposed to think?”

  “Jesus, Francie,” said Coltrane, despairing now. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

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  “I want to know why! I want to know right now why you did that!”

  “All right,” said Colt. “You want to know why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore whether I use a condom or not, that’s why.”

  “And why not? Why doesn’t it matter?” “Because,” Colt said, “I had a vasectomy.”

  There was a long silence, during which Michael silently melted away into the darkness of the hallway. Francie stared at Colt. She couldn’t believe her ears. The pain in her middle swelled again like an ocean wave. She grabbed at her gut, suddenly nauseous.

  “You had a what?” she said finally. “When?”

  Colt sighed, sagging against the counter. “When I went to San Francisco, last summer.”

  “I thought . . . I thought that was a business trip.” “Yeah, it was, partly. And partly for the other reason.”

  “So you, what, you just... decided on the spur of the moment?

  On a whim?”

  “No. I planned it.”

  “You planned it. Without consulting me. Without telling me.”

  Colt braced himself, as if against a strong wind. “I didn’t see why I should have to. It was my decision. It’s my body. You women are always going on about how your bodies belong to you, how no one else has the right to decide what happens to you. Abortions and birth control and all
that shit. Well, why should it be any different for us men? It’s our bodies, too. We can decide what happens to us. I don’t have to ask your permission. Besides, I knew what you would say. I knew what it would lead to. This.”

  “Colt,” said Francie. “How could you do this to me?”

  Colt looked at her now. “Because,” he said firmly. “I don’t want children. Ever. And I wanted to be sure there would be no mis takes. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get . . .”

  His words trailed off. Francie waited.

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  “Get what?” she prodded him. “You wanted to make sure you wouldn’t get what?”

  Colt cleared his throat. “Trapped,” he said.

  Francie felt now as if she, too, were melting away, as if there were nothing left. She leaned against the counter for support.

  “Trapped,” she repeated. “That’s right,” Colt said. “Yes.”

  “Having children with me would be a trap.” “For me, at this time in my life, yes.”

  “And you knew what this would lead to if you told me,” Francie said. “And so you wanted to put it off.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You knew that I would leave you,” Francie said. “That’s why you didn’t tell me.”

  Colt still didn’t answer. He looked down at the floor. “Well,” said Francie, “who’s the passive one now, then?”

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  The Visitor

  The long pause that followed this question was interrupted by a sudden banging from the front of the house. Neither of them

  moved. They could hear Michael’s breath, drawn sharply in sur prise.

  “You guys?” he said querulously, from where he had been lis tening around the corner. He sounded as if he’d been crying, like a child caught in a parental crossfire. “I think someone’s at the door!”