Free The New Neighbor by Leah Stewart

of dad she’d imagined for Tommy, before she met his father, and saw his polite and distracted smile, his glasses and his suit. Tommy’s parents didn’t want him to work in the summers—they said there was plenty of time for having a job—but he did it anyway. He told her this with indignant pride. He’d been working for a guy who remodeled kitchens since the summer after his freshman year. The guy wanted Tommy to go into partnership with him after he graduated. This, not college, was Tommy’s plan.
    Tommy could tell you anything you wanted to know about his boss—how in high school he’d been a rodeo bull rider, where he’d met his wife—and he had an equivalent level of knowledge about the janitors at school, the cashiers in his parents’ stores. They’d run into the guy in charge of produce and she’d stand there smiling while Tommy talked music, sports, how the produce guy had a kid who was learning to drive, can you believe it? Tommy talked and laughed and she smiled politely. He’d have his arm around her waist. His fingers would brush her skin just below her shirt. His thigh would brush her thigh. She didn’t mind standing there while he worked his charm. He was so good at it. She can’t pinpoint the moment when her admiration became resentment, though she knows they were married by then. She thought it was sweet that he liked everybody, until it struck her that maybe he just needed everybody to like him. He always had to be the bartender’s best friend.
    The first time they had sex, she was fifteen. It was right after his father went to have a mole checked, and they told him in six months or less he’d be dead. Even if she hadn’t wanted to sleep with Tommy, which she very much did, how better to demonstrate that she was alive and would never leave him? When his father was still at home, Tommy would pick her up and they’d drive around and then they’d park somewhere and he’d take her face in his hands and search it. Then he would kiss her. That was always how it started. She never asked what he was looking for, just succumbed to relief when again and again he found it. Then once his father was in the hospital, she’d hold Tommy’s hand during the increasingly awful visits, and then they’d go back to his house, so often empty now, and climb into his bed. Tommy’s mother didn’t care if she spent the night. Her parents cared but didn’t try very hard to stop her.
    One night she woke to the sound of Tommy whimpering in his sleep. She put her hand on his head—hot, damp with sweat—and he stirred, then settled without waking. For a moment she was filled with a profound understanding of her purpose. Then came a wave of painful, incomprehensible agitation. She got out of bed and, unsure what was wrong, unsure what to do, went down to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Tommy’s mother was sitting at the table, drinking a brown alcohol. It smelled like paint thinner. “Want a drink?” his mother said, then laughed in a sad kind of way.
    “I’m getting some milk,” Jennifer said. “Is that okay?”
    “Is milk okay?” his mother said. “Milk!” She put her face in her hands and laughed again.
    Jennifer poured the milk. She wanted very badly to leave but to do so seemed cowardly. So she eased into a chair at the table. It had been a mistake to leave the safety of the bed, and she felt all the panicked regret such a mistake occasioned. If Mrs. Carrasco didn’t look up by the time Jennifer counted to one hundred, she’d allow herself to go back to bed, where Tommy would stir and pull her close against him and say in her ear how much he needed her. That was, once again, all she wanted. She got to sixty-five before his mother lowered her hands and leaned in, her expression so intent that Jennifer’s discomfort ballooned. She took a quick glance down at her sedate pajamas. There was no open button. There was nothing to see. “I shouldn’t be letting you do this,” his mother said.