Даниэла Стил - Neighbors

“They probably think I’m some kind of witch by now,” Meredith said sometimes, laughing about it. At sixty-three, she was still beautiful, with the huge blue eyes her fans had loved and remembered, sandy blond hair, and the elegant, delicate face. She was still very attractive, energetic, and in good shape, and didn’t look her age. She spent hours gardening, which she enjoyed, and reading.

She had been in the garden all morning, trimming her roses, despite the heat. Heat waves were rare in San Francisco, and she had enjoyed it. She was wearing a big floppy straw hat when she came into the kitchen for something to drink, and smiled at Debbie, who was making Meredith’s favorite chopped salad for lunch. She had kept her figure, although in the early years of her seclusion she had been too thin, and Debbie had to coax her to eat. Everything the devoted couple did proved to Meredith again and again how much they cared about her, and how kindhearted they were. More so than her daughter, who hardly even called her, sometimes not for months at a time. Meredith felt her loss acutely.

“Wow, it’s hot out there,” she said and smiled at Debbie. It had been a long foggy summer, and the September heat was a nice change. “It’s real Indian summer,” she said, grabbing a bottle of cold water from the fridge and taking a long drink.

“Earthquake weather,” Debbie said, handing her a glass, as Meredith shook her head. She didn’t need one.

“I hope not,” Meredith said, setting the bottle down. “I’ve lived here for twenty-eight years, and there’s never been a major earthquake, thank God,” Meredith said. “We missed the one in ’89 by four years. That sounded pretty nasty.” It still shocked her to realize that Justin had been gone for half the time she’d lived in San Francisco now. He would have been twenty-eight if he’d lived, which was harder to imagine. In her mind’s eye, he would always be a boy of fourteen. She remembered him smiling, and laughing, and playing pranks on her. He’d been playful, and happy, and funny. It gave her comfort to know that she and Scott had given him a happy childhood, with no sorrows until the divorce. The memories of him were gentle now, not of the imagined horror of the day he drowned.

“This house won’t move an inch if there ever was a quake,” Jack said, as he walked into the kitchen for a glass of water himself. He and Debbie were forty-four years old now. They hadn’t weathered the years as well as she had. Meredith hardly looked older than they did, and had fewer lines in her face and around her eyes than Debbie, who always had a slightly hard expression, bleached her own hair a brassy blond, and always seemed to have an inch of dark roots before she dyed it again. Jack was growing bald and had a beer belly, which always surprised Meredith, since he wasn’t a drinker, as far as she knew, and Debbie had put on more than a few pounds. Meredith was still naturally slim, with a good figure since aside from her daily walks, she went to a yoga class in the neighborhood, where no one ever recognized her. She had become comfortable with her solitude, embraced it, and at night she read voraciously. She and Debbie would talk about the books the next day. Debbie had never been a big reader, but she knew it was a way of bonding with Meredith, so she read what she knew Meredith liked. It seemed odd, but they had become her best friends.

—

The house was over a hundred years old, and made of stone. It was the largest house in San Francisco, sitting on a sizeable plot of land, which took up half a block. Between the gate and the hedge, and the imposing structure and grounds, people who were unfamiliar with the neighborhood wondered who lived there. Jack’s comment about the house reminded her of something from the distant past.

“Speaking of earthquakes, do we still have the emergency supplies for one? We were worried about earthquakes when we moved here, and we stocked up a bunch of tents, and rope and crowbars, and some canned food, bottled water, and first aid supplies, and put them in the garden shed. Do we still keep them up to date?” She used to keep clothes for Justin out there too, when he was small, but after they’d lived there for several years, they stopped worrying about earthquakes, and had forgotten about updating the supplies. She hadn’t thought of them in years. “We had battery-operated lanterns too.” She also remembered that Scott had wanted to keep a gun with the supplies too, in case anyone tried to loot the house, but she wouldn’t let him. They’d kept an envelope of cash in the safe for emergencies. She still did, for when she occasionally needed petty cash to give Jack or Debbie.

“I keep up with the first aid supplies, and the tools,” Jack answered her. “I donated the tents to a homeless shelter years ago. We wouldn’t want people camping out on the grounds anyway. And I threw the clothes away.” She nodded, knowing they were Justin’s from when he was a child. “And we have all the food and water we need in the house, if there ever is a quake. We keep the house well stocked.” Debbie kept a large supply of meat they froze, and canned goods. “We don’t need to feed the neighborhood,” he said with a stern expression, implying he was protecting her from curious strangers. “We have everything we need for us, to keep going for a long time. The house is sitting on granite, you’d barely notice a quake here, and we have an emergency generator if we lose power,” he said confidently. Scott had it installed when they bought the house.

The rest of the houses on the block were handsome Victorians, all wooden structures. They were lovely, though less solid, and might not fare as well. Meredith had never met her neighbors, and didn’t want to. Scott had been more neighborly and concerned about the neighborhood in an earthquake when they moved in, but her life had changed radically since then. She had no idea who lived on her block in the string of pretty Victorian houses, and she suspected Jack and Debbie didn’t either. They were even more reclusive than she was, and always seemed suspicious of their neighbors and passersby who tried to peek through the gate. They shielded and protected her.

She sat down to lunch with them at the kitchen table, as she did every day. Meredith ate her meals with them now, and had for many years. It didn’t seem right to cause Debbie extra work, serving her in the dining room for just one person, and it seemed unfriendly, given how kind they’d been to her, at the hardest time in her life, through the divorce and her son’s death. They made up for the fact that she never saw her daughter. At first, she had taken her meals on a tray in her study, but for years now, she had eaten lunch and dinner with Jack and Debbie, even though their backgrounds and histories were different from hers. They had grown up simply in poor families, never went past high school. Debbie had graduated, Jack dropped out in tenth grade, and were almost twenty years younger than she. But they had become her only friends. Sometimes Debbie watched one of their favorite TV series with her in the den. It was more fun than watching alone, and they could talk about it afterward. Jack didn’t like the shows they watched. He pooh-poohed them, and would go to their apartment to watch sports, which Debbie hated. She and Meredith liked the same TV shows, and read the same books, because Debbie made the effort to do so. She was more intellectually ambitious than Jack. In some ways, she was like a daughter to Meredith, or a sister or a friend. Jack was more taciturn, a man of few words, and less chatty than Debbie, who engaged Meredith in conversation, and so was better company. He was bright, but not talkative.

Meredith went back out to the garden after lunch, to finish her gardening. She didn’t mind the heat. She liked it. Debbie came out to check on her progress around four o’clock, and brought her a glass of ice-cold lemonade. Meredith accepted it gratefully and smiled at her. She took a long drink and drank half the contents of the glass before she stopped.