the suburban scorecard stacked up its rear window. According to the stickers, the driver or various members of her family had attended Andover, Stanford, Cornell, and Yale Medical School. When the woman came to a complete halt in front of the coffee shop and began chatting with a friend on the sidewalk, Doug leaned on his horn, wishing sorely it were the trigger of a cannon. The two women glared back at him in disdain.
For you I served, he thought. For you we killed. For this.
As he often did to calm his nerves at such moments, he dialed Mikey.
“So what’s with the neighbor?” he asked him.
“I love you, Doug, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The place next door. Up on the hill. Turns out some old hag lives in there. She didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat.”
“You mean Miss Charlotte Graves? Yeah. I’ve been meaning to call you about her. She’s a problem.”
“The way she’s keeping that place, she must be violating some kind of ordinance, right? Some Keep Finden Beautiful shit? You should be able to find something to get her on.”
“Trouble is—”
“She’s just the type, isn’t she? Trees, she said. And then walked off. Like I’m the first person ever to cut down woods to build a house in this town? Like her fucking ancestors didn’t clear cut it three hundred years ago. I’ll tell you something, Mikey, some days I wish I was a Russian gangster with twenty cousins and a stretch Hummer. Just to piss people like her off.”
“I think you got that covered, my friend. But listen. When I say she’s a problem I’m not kidding. She’s filed a lawsuit against the town—saying she owns your land.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“My guy on the board of selectmen told me. She wrote the complaint herself. He says it reads like something out of the Old Testament. But she’s pro se, so some judge’ll have to give her a hearing and try to piece her shit together on the taxpayer’s dime. And I’ll have to show up to make sure he tosses it out. It’s a nuisance suit—she’s crazy.”
“Get rid of it, Mikey. You hear me? I don’t need that shit. Not now.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
Up ahead, a third woman, in a Burberry jacket and duck boots, this one steering a stroller, joined the nattering pair obstructing the roadway.
“I got a situation here,” Doug said, tossing his phone aside and stepping from the car.
“Where do you think you are?” the pearled young matron demanded, as he approached the Volvo. “Los Angeles? Are you planning to fly into some kind of rage?” She turned back to the driver. “All right, then, Ginny. We’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Okay! Bye!” the woman behind the wheel called out in her bright, chipper voice. And with that, she stepped on her accelerator, leaving Doug standing by himself in the middle of the street as the cars behind him began to honk.
THAT MORNING he’d slept through his alarm, which he never did, caught up in dreams again, the remnants of which stuck with him as he cleared the town traffic and made it onto the Pike, still moving at a frustrating pace along the crowded inbound lanes. He’d dreamt of his cousin Michael and it had reminded him of when Michael had told him the story of Doug’s father. His mother had met him when she had gone to help serve his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. This would have been 1964 and she would have been seventeen. When the dinner was through and the dishes washed, the son had driven her home, all the way from the North Shore, an hour at least. This part Michael could say for sure because he’d heard it from his own father’s mouth. That, and the fact they’d been on dates. Two or three and it had ended by Christmas; or maybe it was five or six and had run on into January; he was in college in Western Mass or he’d just graduated or was working for his father before going. His father was rich, that much was clear, because Doug’s uncle John had got a break as a young electrician with a contract to service all the companies the man owned. It was Uncle John who’d recommended his little sister for that day, thinking she might get a regular job out of it. Michael had been told never to speak of it, especially not to Doug.