The Good Neighbor: A Novel Read online

  Noah shrugged and squatted down to his brothers eye level. “Look, man… it’s like this, there are some guys who love other guys, and they live together, like Mom and Dad are married. It’s no big deal, it’s just the way they are… that’s gay, got it?”

  “But do they have kids?” Josh demanded. “Mom and Dad are married and they have us, and other kids have moms and dads.”

  Noah looked up his father for help. He received only a slight nod in return. Sighing as if he had to explain calculus to his six-year-old brother, he continued, “Josh, not all men and women who are married have kids, right?”

  Josh nodded soberly.

  “Well, you see? Gay guys who live together don’t have kids, not like that. Okay? Jeez…”

  “But…” Josh demanded.

  “That’s enough questions for now, Josh,” Austin said, stepping in to rescue Noah. “Here, take this other sleeping bag and get them both upstairs, okay?”

  Josh produced a mirror of his older brother’s expressive shrug and accepted the second sleeping bag against his chest, cradling it in his free arm.

  When he had turned and trudged up the drive to the front door, Austin turned to Noah and gave him a friendly shove. “Well, you handled that pretty well. You know he takes in everything you say. You have to help him understand things. I don’t know if I could have done a better job with that.”

  “It’s not easy when you have to leave out the sex part,” Noah replied confidently.

  “What do you know about the sex part?” Austin asked, again curious about what his oldest son had to say.

  Noah rewarded his father with a rare, if arch, smile before pushing past him to retrieve the largest box remaining in the cargo area of the van.

  “Can you handle it?” Austin asked when he staggered a bit getting it out of the hatch.

  “No problem,” Noah sighed with annoyance as he turned toward the front door.

  Austin took out the last box and, balancing it on his upraised knee, managed to get the hatch door shut. Further ahead he heard Noah close the door after him, unconcerned that Austin was burdened by what he was carrying. Austin followed and allowed himself his own annoyed sigh before he sat the box down and opened his very expensive new front door.

  5150 ST. MARK’S COURT

  NO SOONER HAD Rory and Bruno stepped in their front door than Bruno’s cell phone rang, and they separated, Bruno to his office and Rory to the kitchen to feed an obviously expectant Bridget. As he placed her bowl before her on the kitchen floor, Rory thought briefly about his new neighbors. His immediate impression registered them as little more than generic Venetian Vistites. Even their automobiles were clichés. What snagged his perception of them most was the fact that Austin had recognized him and Bruno after so many years. As he watched Bridget snarf and munch her kibble, he tried his best to place the man. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a single hook of memory to hang Austin on. But then, that was not unusual.

  Rory had difficulty marrying people to particular times or places. From the time he was born until he graduated from high school, he’d lived on marine bases from Camp Pendleton to Camp Lejuene. He could recall dun hills and blue seas of the Pacific and sand dunes and the gray-green ocean of the Carolina Atlantic. He could feel the sun on his shoulders from both. But as an only child left with his taciturn military father when his mother abandoned them when he was seven years old, he had long learned to discount people from his deepest and fondest memories of place and time.

  When Austin spoke of college, and of the band he and Bruno had been a part of, Rory recalled the quiet “studio” Fridays in the art school building that smelled of linseed oil and gesso. As for the band, he thought of the scent of stale, spilled beer and quiet spaces painted entirely in black in the set-up times before a show, before the noise and swell of music and a crowd. Always a solitary child, shuffled as he was between schools and towns that looked much the same on the strip-mailed streets that led off base, Rory had always been disconnected from the friendships so many other people seemed to thrive on.

  His mother’s abrupt departure was the first lesson in self-sufficiency. His father’s military-style nurture and discipline was the other. He knew what semper fi meant long before he learned it was an abstraction that could be complicated by genuine love and connection. He never knew that in any lasting sense until he met Bruno. In many ways, Bruno’s rough cupping of his neck was no more than a gentler extension of his father’s similarly articulated affection. After being hauled around by a full-grown marine, Rory felt Bruno’s possessive and rough-handed touch was a familiar expression of love both tender and comforting.

  In his way, Rory had adored his father, even when he had gifted him at age twelve, without explanation or fanfare, with a stepmother barely eight years older than him. In many ways, Rory came to learn that men held little loyalty or regard for loyalty. It was a fact driven home to him when he was also gifted with two stepsisters in alarming succession following his father’s marriage. Heavily pregnant and massively insecure, Rory’s stepmother had made it well known that he had become suddenly irrelevant. And so, Rory’s certainty of male betrayal and female conniving became cemented and his center of reference became himself.

  There were other betrayals and connivances to come. They were the result of his tentative connections with what other people called “friends.” As his father retreated into his new family, Rory grew to understand his own needs and desires advanced toward the boys who spoke laconically out of the corners of their mouths and swaggered with newly formed chests carried well forward. Their needs he divined quickly and met eagerly, only to find himself despised and discounted once those same boys found breasts blossoming all around them. Those boys found the feminine shape promised more in the long run when it came to emotional connections they could both tolerate and enjoy.

  Bruised, Rory found himself to be his father’s son. He took all this on the chin and sucked it up. He believed that was just the way things were. Then, when he was in college, he met a certain brawny swaggerer named Will Griffin, who’d earned the nickname Bruno for his darkness and fast fists, and he was amazed to find Bruno had been looking for Rory Fallon all of his life.

  It was no wonder Rory had no recollection of Austin from college. Naturally inclined and reared to be self-reliant, if not self-absorbed, Rory met Bruno, and they were so besotted with each other that the world around them became irrelevant. By the mid-eighties, there had been enough exposure to the reality of gay people, their plight, and particularly their plague, to warrant a tenuous acceptance in Rory and Bruno’s college world. Bruno’s truculence and Rory’s obliviousness made that world appear more accommodating than it probably was, but neither of them cared. For many years, through college and then graduate school for Bruno, they enjoyed a perfect mesh of neuroses and need. In many ways, it sustained them still, even through Bruno’s little betrayals and Rory’s subsequent strengthening of his own defenses.

  Rory knew all this without the eloquence of self-examination. When Bridget finished her dinner and looked up expectantly for a cookie, Rory dismissed any thoughts spent trying to recall Austin from a past he associated more with the scent of oil paint, linseed oil, and Bruno’s Right Guard than with a flock of collegial faces. He scooped up Bridget’s steel dish, filled it with water, and went to the cookie jar for her treat. As he tossed the dog her treat, Bruno himself came into the great room dressed for running.

  “I saw the doctor today,” Bruno said as he made his way to the bar separating the kitchen from the family room. “I need you to get this filled for me tomorrow,” he said laying a blue prescription slip on the bar.

  Rory picked it up and read it. “Vytorin? What was your HDL this time?”

  Bruno shook his head. “Got it down to 280, but that’s still way too high. You’d think with the crap you’ve been feeding me and the five miles I’ve been doing a night that I’d have gotten it down a lot more.”

  Rory reached across the bar an
d put his hand on Bruno’s thick wrist. “It’s hereditary, Will. And face it, you and I both are middle-aged now.”

  Bruno glanced at Rory’s hand on his wrist and then looked up to offer Rory a tired smile. “That’s what the doctor said. This Vytorin crap should help with the cholesterol my body produces naturally. The rest is still diet and exercise. I swear, if my old man hadn’t dropped dead with a heart attack at fifty-four, I’d say the hell with it.”

  “No fucking way,” Rory said. “I want you around to torment me for a long time.”

  Bruno snorted. “It’ll be a long time, too. Look at you. You have the metabolism of a twelve-year-old. I fucking hate you.”

  Rory laughed. “You’d really hate me if I told you how much weight I’ve lost since we’ve been on your heart diet.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Bruno grumbled. “What I want to know is what kind of cardboard and gravel shit we’re eating tonight. I’m starved.”

  “Roast pork tenderloin with roasted vegetables,” Rory announced. “No fat.”

  “I’d murder for some pork chops, rice, and gravy, and some of my mama’s banana pudding. You know?”

  “I know, baby,” Rory said genuinely. “But go run now. When you get back that cardboard box and gravel crap will taste good.”

  “Whatever,” Bruno said and walked toward the front door.

  Rory sighed and placed Bridget’s bowl on the floor. Noisily, she began lapping up the water, and Rory smiled. As far as he was concerned, the only faces worth remembering were those of his big dog on the floor and his big dog now trotting down the street before breaking into long strides that would eventually return him home. As far as he was concerned, the Harden family was pleasantly irrelevant as long as they stayed on their side of the property line and enjoyed their big da Vinci model home without making pests of themselves.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Later that night…

  5150 ST. MARK’S COURT

  BRUNO SHUT OFF the water in the shower and toweled himself energetically. Dry, he dropped the damp towel on the floor and stepped over to the vanity and rubbed his jaw. The mirror suggested he needn’t shave until morning. His fingers concurred that he was only three hours past his five o’clock shadow. Though not necessarily a vain man, he did regularly assess himself nude in the bath’s generous mirror. All considerations of his cholesterol aside, extra weight, even on his six-foot-four-inch frame, sent the wrong signal. It suggested a certain slackness, a lack of precision and care that invited speculation that he might, perhaps, be less careful in his actions elsewhere. Bruno made his living in a tough world, and he wasn’t as far up in that world as he intended to be. With rigorous care, he closely monitored himself and his work so that neither would get in the way of the future he saw for himself.

  In an eighteen-month lapse of time between leaving Rory and getting him back, he’d married briefly. She was mostly forgotten and, to some extent in hindsight, no more than an accessory at a time when a wife was more necessary to his career than one was now. She’d loved his body. Looking at his assets now, he tried to see himself through her eyes as he catalogued his looks from the thick neck, to the broad shoulders and firm chest, the long waist and longer legs, the bulky genitals still flushed and full from the heat of the shower. Bruno knew he had an enviable body fringed with what his ex-wife had irritatingly called John-John Kennedy chest chair.

  Bruno snorted recalling that. He preferred to think that stupid s.o.b. had his chest hair, or would have still if he could tell up from down. Bruno could tell up from down. He never, he thought as he surveyed himself in the mirror, would have been arrogant enough to think he was so blessed that nothing could ever pull him in a downward spiral. Bruno cupped his balls in his hand and squeezed them gently. He knew, except for easily dismissing a certain few of a real man’s natural prerogatives, the biggest balls in the world couldn’t help you if you took it all for granted and thought it couldn’t all be taken away from you. Bruno let go of himself and squared his shoulders. He had no intention of letting himself think he couldn’t fall at work if he let go for one minute.

  “Hey beast,” Rory said from behind him.

  “Hey yourself. What are you doing?” He replied to Rory’s reflection in the mirror.

  “I’ve just got in from taking Bridget for her bedtime walk.” Rory folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the bathroom’s door jamb. “When you get done admiring yourself, you want to sit outside with me for awhile? The moon’s full and it’s really nice out.”

  “Why don’t you bring what’s left of that bottle of Shiraz outside and wait for me? I could stand some downtime. I’m beat,” Bruno said as he opened a vanity drawer in search of his antiperspirant.

  Rory dropped his arms and walked into the bathroom. Stopping behind Bruno, he put his arms around his waist and leaned his forehead in the declivity that ran down his spine. Bruno popped the cap off his antiperspirant and, raising one arm, then the other, slathered the gel under each arm. Finished, he took one of Rory’s hands and pulled him from behind to face him. Lifting Rory’s chin with a firm grasp on his jaw, he said, “Miss me today?”

  Rory allowed himself to be searched by Bruno’s dark eyes. “Everyday. You work like a dog, Bruno.”

  Bruno bent to kiss him and then pulled Rory to his chest. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

  Rory rubbed the side of his face in the high arcing branch of hair where it curved away under Bruno’s right shoulder. “Yeah, I know.” He pushed gently away, kissed the hollow of Bruno’s throat and said, “But at least I get some time with you before we both fall asleep.”

  Bruno slapped Rory’s ass and steered him toward the bathroom door. “Get the wine. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Rory left as Bruno reached for the clean pair of boxers that lay waiting for him on the vanity. He bent to step into them, noting his dick had firmed and lengthened in the course of close contact with his partner. It tented his boxers as he pulled them up and snapped the elastic around his waist. “Maybe,” he thought, and almost called Rory back. Instead, he thought of his meeting at eight o’clock the following morning and sighed. Lovemaking would have to wait for Saturday morning and, if he played his cards right, all Sunday afternoon. He smoothed the dark, close-cropped hair on his head and leered purposefully in the mirror. The effect was halfhearted and tired.

  Still a little buzzed from the couple of bong hits he’d had before dinner, he just wanted one more glass of wine and some cuddling on the pool deck under the full moon. The pot was the one indulgence he allowed himself, his one link to a time when he’d been a wild man and not a buttoned-down corporate animal. Even Rory had ceased to be an indulgence. With the corporate world suddenly tolerant, Rory was treated as an interesting eccentricity Bruno donned like a loud tie. Still, his eight o’clock was going to be grueling, and he needed to be honed and not dulled by the lingering languor a hot night riding Rory would bring. Regretfully, he shifted his dick in his shorts and turned his thoughts toward the wine waiting for him. That would have to be enough tonight.

  Bruno strode from the bathroom, through the master bedroom, and out the French doors by the pool to find Rory waiting for him on the wicker sofa and Bridget sprawled out on the pavers. With no small amount of elegance for such a big man, he sat down, slipped his arm around Rory’s shoulders, and stretched his legs with a sigh. He rubbed the dog’s side with his toes, enjoying the softness of her fur. Bridget reached over her shoulder and licked his toes.

  “So, what do you think of having neighbors after all this time?” Rory asked as he handed him his wine glass.

  Bruno looked up through the pool’s screened roof and noted the lights on upstairs in the house next door. Shadows moved on the room’s ceiling. From where he sat, that was all he could make out. He took a sip of his wine and allowed his hand to find its way inside the stretched-out collar of Rory’s T-shirt. He brushed his fingertips lightly against Rory’s smooth bare chest. “I think the
y’ll be in for an eyeful the next time I decide to fuck you in the pool.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rory responded and leaned his head against the encircling curve of Bruno’s arm. “That’s what I was thinking.” Awkwardly, he took a sip of his own wine, and then said, “They seem like okay people.”

  “I hope they are. These damn houses are so close together, we’re in for a nightmare if they turn out to be assholes,” Bruno said.

  “Or worse, if they are totally chatty and feel the need to carry on a conversation every time we both find ourselves out by our pools,” Rory responded quietly.

  “Well, put up a privacy fence if it looks like they are. Just call and get it done if they make you unhappy. Pay for it out of the house account.”

  Rory sighed gratefully in reply. “Are you cold just sitting out here in your drawers like this?”

  Bruno shook his head no. “You’re warm. I feel good, sitting just like this.”

  “I hate it, feeling like they can just look down at us sitting out here.”

  “Why?” Bruno asked. “Fuck ’em.” With that, he planted a wine- tinged kiss on the side of Rory’s head.

  “Can you believe that littlest one calling me a goddamn hippie in that Cartman voice?” Rory snickered. “He sounded just like him.”

  Bruno laughed loudly. Then a bit lower he said, “Did you see the look on his mama’s face? I thought I’d piss my pants trying not to laugh.”

  Rory stretched out his legs and held them six inches off the pavers for a count of ten. “God, I’m glad I don’t have kids.”

  Bruno drained his wine glass and tickled as close to Rory’s side as he could reach. “Aw c’mon. I wouldn’t mind having a red-headed pretty boy like you running around the house spouting off like a kid on South Park.”

  Rory squirmed under his tickling fingers. “If he was yours, he wouldn’t have my coloring. He’d be dark and tough as hell. My god, a fucking thug child.”