Tom Andes

The morning the new neighbors arrived, parking a few car lengths behind the moving truck in their forest green Mini Cooper, Jesus, they blocked Bryson’s drive. He was sorting the mail, weeding out the bills from the supermarket circulars. A dude in shorts and red New Balance got out of the car. Bryson didn’t know about a man who wore shorts. But he could handle the guy.

            She stepped out of the car. Indian, but that wasn’t what got him. He knew what the two of them would see when they looked at him, which was what those civilians had seen in that courtroom when they’d taken his badge and his gun. A man believed in law and order, he put in three decades with the city, and people like this woman thought he was trash.

            He took his time coming down the steps. A doctor and a social worker, the realtor had said. Once upon a time, Taraval Street had been working class Irish, the kind of place you could live if you were a butcher in a market, like his grandfather had been.

            “You can’t park here.” His voice shook. Sure enough, they had an I’m With Her bumper sticker on the back of the car, and one that read Alliance Française de San Francisco: the French school in Hayes Valley. In the back seat was a crate with a lamp, a couple CDs.

            “I’m Jacob.” The guy came over first, putting out his hand: eager to smooth things over, man-to-man.

            “You’re blocking my drive, Jacob,” Bryson said, as nice as could be—a neighbor with a minor grievance, nothing more. Maybe they could work things out. Bryson cinched the knot at the waist of his bathrobe.

Jacob looked flustered. After the first time Shane had gone to jail, Bryson had come down hard on the kid, and Theresa had decided Bryson was an SOB, the woman never giving him credit for how he’d tried to talk to their boy. And he knew better. Still, he made a point not to tell Jacob his name. Keep the guy on the ropes. Keep him guessing.

Jacob was gesturing at the moving truck, Bay Area Relocation Services, and if he’d groveled, if he’d given Bryson just a little respect, as a guy who’d lived in the neighborhood all his life, Bryson might have shrugged it off. But the wife stepped in.

“What seems to be the problem?” She sounded like one of Shane’s caseworkers. Her brown eyes were cool, calm, and level, like she knew what Bryson was, and what his kid was, too—like that lady judge when she’d handed down the six months suspended sentence, which had ended Bryson’s career, when all he’d done was get in a shoving match and call a guy a couple names for taking Bryson’s order of chicken tacos.

“You’re blocking my drive,” Bryson said, gesturing at the Mini Cooper. Not like he’d been going anywhere. But something was starting to boil inside him.

She blinked. “Did you need to get out?”

He felt as though he’d been laid bare and showed for what he was: a bully, and a guy who didn’t have anywhere to be, 52 years old and standing in front of his house in his bathrobe at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

“I might.” He stammered. “Later.”

But she wasn’t listening. She’d given him her back, like he wasn’t there.

“You can move the car,” she told Jacob, and she dropped the keys in his palm and walked up the hill to direct the movers into the house, like arguing with Bryson wasn’t worth her time.

“That’s Farheen.” Jacob sounded as though he were explaining the woman’s rudeness. He rattled the keys. Clouds were over the Pacific, the morning fog burning off.

“She keep your balls in a jar, too?” Not that Bryson wanted to get in a punch-up in front of his house, but it was a safe bet guys like Jacob didn’t use their fists to solve their problems. No, they talked things out, hugged afterwards, like those losers at the AA meetings Bryson used to go to, spewing about their feelings.

Jacob’s ears turned red.

“I’ll move the car.” He nodded, like he saw what Bryson was, too.

Bryson chuckled. The car was a win, at least. But he felt sick—sad, lonely, and ashamed. “You do that.”

Inside, Bryson raised the blinds. Ocean Beach was ten blocks away, but it was funny to think of the Sunset District, where Bryson had grown up on the ass end of San Francisco, as being prime real estate, attractive to yuppies like those two. He flipped through the last of the mail, an envelope from Kaiser Permanente, his insurance company, Theresa still on his plan. Not that he could blame her, tanked up on a cocktail of prescription medication, for taking her shrink’s advice and moving out. Theirs hadn’t been much of a marriage, not at the end.

The living room had spaces like missing teeth where Theresa had taken the furniture she’d wanted: a pair of matching mahogany end tables her mother had given them, and her dad’s old armchair. The brown plush leather couch was worn through in places. “It looks like it belongs in the Playboy Mansion,” Theresa had always said. Bryson should be so lucky.

He was eating a bowl of Raisin Bran in the kitchen when the telephone rang—the landline, which narrowed down the possibilities to Theresa, or any one of about a dozen collections agencies his creditors had sicced on him. He grabbed the phone.

“Yeah?” He spoke through a mouthful of cereal and Clover Dairy 2%.

“You know I can’t stand when you do that.” Theresa sighed. “Why can’t you say hello like a normal person?” But he saw no reason to stand on ceremony for bill collectors. And what business was it of hers how he answered the phone since she didn’t live here anymore?

“You should see the woman that moved in next door.” A raisin was gummed to one of his molars, and he worked it loose with his tongue, hoping he didn’t pull off a crown.

“Jimmy?” She used the diminutive of his Christian name, her voice high in a way that made him think of her thirty-five years ago, Theresa standing in her shawl in Stern Grove while he drank with that crew of hooligans who were mostly dead or in prison by now. His brother Robbie had been one of them: twenty-five to life for stabbing a man to death in front of the Silver Spur and killing him. “Are you alright?”

Fifty-two years old, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a boner. Not that it would have done him much good with Theresa, the two of them having long since gotten the old Irish divorce and started sleeping in separate rooms. And their kid, the one decent thing they’d made, serving time for what the courts called a hate crime. As if it wasn’t perfectly natural for a teenager to blow off steam on a Saturday night.

But hell, Jimmy Bryson was doing fine. Had everything he needed in a safe downstairs.

“Never better,” he said. “Why?”

He dropped his empty bowl in the sink, next to last night’s bowl: Raisin Bran for breakfast, lunch, and dinner now that she was gone. He wiped milk from his chin stubble.

“I need to tell you something,” she said, and he knew from her tone what she was going to say. Funny thing was that he hadn’t realized how much he wanted her back. She almost couldn’t get it out, she was blubbering so badly. “I think we should get a divorce.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“It’s the best thing.”

Thirty-five years ago, she’d held herself above those other girls from the neighborhood. Hadn’t he only ever become a cop because she’d told him if he was going to marry her, they needed to have a respectable life? But she couldn’t stand him being a cop, either.

“This isn’t you.” He was panting.

“I don’t think I know what me is, anymore.”

Which had to be the most un-Theresa thing he’d ever heard her say. It was like talking to a TV show: Oprah Winfrey, for Christ’s sake.

The ground wanted to shift, and he braced himself against the doorframe, like it was 1989 all over again, the A’s and the Giants in the Series, the Bay Bridge collapsing like a sandwich. Or maybe it was his heart, and wouldn’t that serve her right, if he dropped dead while she was on the other end of the phone, telling him she wasn’t coming home?

The worst part was that he knew it was killing her, and her mom, too. He might’ve drifted from church the same way he’d vanished from AA meetings. But Theresa had never ventured far from the faith of their forefathers, walking to St. Gabriel every Sunday morning as dutiful as a milk cow. A divorce would kill his mother-in-law.

“This you talking,” he said, “or that shrink I’m still paying for?” He wasn’t aware of shouting, but the words seemed to echo in the empty house. Of course, this was why that doctor would tell her to leave. He couldn’t win. “You want out, you can come sign the goddamn papers to sell the house because they’re right here on the kitchen table.”

He thumped them with his fist. Still had that much leverage, and he planned to use it. Apart from a few years at the market, the woman had never worked a day.

“I should go.” She sounded brittle. Her cowering made him angrier.

“You still blame me for Shane. That’s it, isn’t it, Tee?”

It was an old argument, Theresa having coddled the kid, so she faulted Bryson for laying into Shane a couple times. As if something was wrong with not wanting their son to turn into the sociopath Uncle Robbie was.

“You’re yelling at me,” Theresa said. “I don’t want to hang up on you.”

Straight from the doctor’s playbook: drop something heavy like a divorce on Bryson and get him so riled up steam was coming out his ears, and say you had to go because he was acting crazy. That woman next door would laugh if she could hear.

“I did what I had to do to keep him out of trouble.”

“You blackened his eye, Jimmy.”

Seventeen, and the kid had been caught on camera taking a Louisville Slugger to the Chinese guy behind the register at Walgreen’s. Like Shane and his friends couldn’t have overpowered the old dude and made off with the drawer, if that had been all they were after. What was a father supposed to do?

“Tee—”

            “You’re yelling.”

            “Am not.” He tried to control his voice.

She used the word escalating, which always did make him see red. She’d learned from that doctor, who was eating up no small chunk of the monthly pension the union rep had managed to secure Bryson in exchange for a guilty plea.

“I’m going now, Jimmy.”

“Don’t hang the fuck up.”

When she did, he lost it, smashing the phone against the cradle. Now that she couldn’t hear him, he called her all the names he’d wanted to call her, and that woman next door, too.

Now, he was sitting at the kitchen table, and he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. The phone was hanging by the cord. Through the windows, across the narrow alleyway that separated their homes, shapes moved behind the glass in the neighbors’ kitchen.

Downstairs, his cargo van was in the garage. No need to secure the door to the Batcave, the room at the back, but he did. Kept the key on a shelf above the drill bits. He opened the padlocked door. They talked about safe spaces, brother, and this was his. And he needed it after he got off the phone.

He collapsed into the leather chair in front of his dad’s walnut desk at the back of the room. Leaning down, he spun the dial on the safe, an antique cast iron Royal Dad had given him. He’d set the combo to Shane’s birthday: 4-4-96.

In the safe was an unregistered Colt 45 in a leather holster. Behind that were a couple of spank magazines from the golden days of pornography, when you had to steal it from the 7-Eleven: an issue of Juggs, and a black and white swinger’s magazine, the California Sex Guide, couples who lived in trailer parks in Novato advertising for threesomes—stuff like that. And behind that, a German officer’s knife with an Iron Cross Bryson’s grandfather had brought home from World War Two, where he’d served in North Africa, chasing Rommel across the desert with a bunch of French soldiers.

Bryson leaned back down to the safe and found his Viagra, which he’d ordered through the mail last week. Another concession to the inevitable, and a blow to his pride, which was why he’d gotten it from a Russian mobster on the Internet instead of going to his doctor.

He tore the package open, popped one, swallowed it dry, and fired up his Dell desktop.

II

The realtor had warned them about the guy next door, an ex-cop who’d been part of that scandal Farheen had read about in SF Gate—racist San Francisco cops: go figure—so that morning’s altercation didn’t come as a surprise. What did surprise Farheen was the way things had escalated, and what the guy had said to Jacob, which was outrageous. To think men like that still lived in the world. And immediately, she’d wondered if the place would be safe for Leila, who was in the seventh grade at Alliance Française de San Francisco, a French immersion school in Hayes Valley. She’d transferred from City Arts, Jacob and Farheen having misgivings about charter schools, but what could they do? Farheen would’ve killed to protect her daughter, done anything to give her kid a leg up.

            “Do you think he’s a Nazi?” Jacob said.

            They were in the kitchen, unpacking boxes of cookware, and for maybe the thirty-seventh time that morning, she wondered if they’d done the right thing taking money from her mom back in Dayton to put down a payment on this house. However much her mom had made selling real estate, after the divorce, she’d retreated to a gated community, and she got most of her news from Fox and Friends. The way the woman’s politics had devolved from being white in an interracial marriage to bitter conservativism was one of the great disappointments of Farheen’s life.

            “Put the Fiestaware up there.” She handed Jacob a turquoise bowl. He was still fired up, his pride wounded, too. Though for the most part, he seemed free from the machismo even liberal guys seemed to have. Seven years younger than she was, and maybe that was why he wasn’t as hung up as dudes her age. Though she didn’t know what kind of progress men had made in seven years, never mind in two thousand.

            “Here?” He was on a footstool, reaching for the top shelf, but Farheen shook her head. He’d come after her, pursuing her when they met in Brooklyn, Jacob finishing his internship at Columbia, and people might’ve wagged their fingers at that kind of persistence, but if he’d asked her out a dozen times, he’d never disrespected her, and never pushed her, either.

            “Next shelf down,” she said.

            “I still can’t believe we’re doing this.” Though it wasn’t a question, it sounded like one: Are you sure we’re doing the right thing spending all this money on a house?

            “I can’t either.” Her reassuring him: Yes. They needed their mutual disbelief at their audacity.

            He wrapped his arms around her waist.

They both felt giddy about dropping a million bucks on a place to live, though as Jacob said, it wasn’t a million bucks: it was eight grand a month, ha, which would add up to an additional six hundred thousand, by the time they paid the whole thing off in thirty years, ha, ha, ha. Still, it felt like a dare, like they were gambling on the strength of their union, like the financial risk they were incurring amounted to so much emotional equity in their marriage.

            And maybe her twenty-something self, summa cum laude at Oberlin, a double major in Political Science and International Relations, too busy for boys, would’ve said the same thing her friends at the Bay Area Housing Alliance had said. But change or die, that was the whole of the law. A person had to evolve, or she’d end up like that guy next door, barking at the neighbors in a bathrobe at ten o’clock in the morning, or like the people her dad had left behind in Karachi.

            “I mean it,” Jacob said. “Do you think he’s a Nazi?”

            He’d grown up going to Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and two of his grandparents had been in the camps, so for him, it was personal.

            “Are you going to punch him in the face?” she said.

            They’d both watched that YouTube video of the famous Nazi getting clocked at a rally, and Farheen had to admit it was satisfying to watch that dude’s face when he went down, though what did it say about her and Jacob that violence made them gloat? She believed in peaceful protest, in the long and dignified history of civil disobedience, but these were crazy times.

            Jacob looked wounded, like she was mocking him, though she hadn’t meant it that way. More as a challenge. Like he was going to walk over there and clock the guy. A few years ago, they’d have said dude was harmless, and maybe they’d have humored him. After all, Obama had been in office, so their side had won. Now a guy like that reactionary next door was running the show, and words, signs, signifiers didn’t seem so benign.

            “I don’t know.” Jacob was shaking. The line of his jaw was set under his neatly trimmed beard. Took her a second to see it because he so rarely got angry, but he was enraged.

“Don’t.” She kissed him. She still believed in the efficacy of nonviolence, sure. More than that, she didn’t want her husband getting in a scrap with their new neighbor, who probably kept a gun in the house, and was itching for a chance to use it.

            That was when they heard the shouting next door: a string of expletives, the b-word, that epithet even liberal dudes she’d respected had leveled at Clinton during the campaign, not that Farheen had loved Hillary, but the way guys talked, you’d think it was 1952, and the historic nominee should have been bringing them coffee.

            Going on eleven o’clock, and the sun had come out, filling the windows on the eastern side of the house. The movers were still bringing in boxes, which she’d told them to stack in the living room. She was glad the house got decent light, her one big anxiety about the property being the fog, which didn’t burn off until late this side of Sunset Boulevard.

            “What was that?” Jacob said.

            No cops. For as long as they’d rented, living in transitional neighborhoods in Flatbush, in Green Point in Brooklyn, and in Dogpatch in San Francisco, they’d agreed not to call the police at the first sign of trouble. Drug dealers hanging out on street corners, small time crime and the hustlers attendant to poverty and deep institutionalized racism, she could handle, and even if she’d helped to gentrify those neighborhoods, she had no intention of being the kind of person who would bring down the force of the law on the heads of the people who could least afford it.

            But what did you do when an old white dude was causing the trouble? And the guy next door was an ex-cop. And didn’t cops look out for each other?

            “I don’t know,” she said. A narrow alleyway separated their houses. His window reflected clouds and blue sky.

            “Do you think there’s a woman over there?” Jacob said.

            In moments of crisis, he had an annoying tendency to ask questions she couldn’t answer, as though she had preternatural expertise, just by virtue of being Farheen Iqbal. Considered in a certain light, it was touching, this boundless optimism as to her capacity, though in practice, it was more than a little vexing, and sexist, like a boy assuming his mother knew all the answers.

            Which made it more annoying that she knew the answer.

            “The realtor said his wife moved back to Visalia,” she said. “Or Sacramento or someplace.”

The realtor, a guy named Paul Lam, had been a font of knowledge about the neighborhood. And about the guy next door, who’d been a pain in Lam’s ass for years, letting his house deteriorate, turning into an eyesore on a block where a little curb appeal pushed the asking price into seven figures.

            “Maybe he’s got a hooker,” Jacob said. “Or he’s beating his girlfriend up.”

Like he wanted it to be true.

            But when they got close enough to the glass to peer through the window, the guy next door was sitting at the kitchen table, holding his head in his hands, the telephone hanging by the cord from the wall, and Farheen pitied the guy. Fear and loneliness underlay reactionary politics as much as hatred, bigotry, and racism. Maybe she was too Pollyanna. But you had to approach the world with an open heart. Otherwise, the other side—not love—won.

            “I think he was yelling at somebody on the phone,” she said.

“What if Leila had been home?”

            And for the thirty-eighth or –ninth time that morning, she wondered if they’d made a mistake, though by now the deed had been recorded, that unfathomable sum debited from their joint The Golden One Credit Union checking account: 228,000 dollars, which would have bought a house free and clear in Ohio. But if Farheen had learned one thing from her dad, you couldn’t look back.

            “I don’t think we can do anything,” she said.

“Can’t we call somebody?”

And because she took it upon herself to do the heavy emotional lifting, the difficult tasks, the things he didn’t want to do, because her husband had never been good with ambiguity, and because the guy had gotten the best of Jacob that morning, anyway, she volunteered to go next door and talk to the guy if they heard him yelling again.

“Let’s go now,” Jacob said. She’d never seen him like this. He was raring for a fight.

“Give him a chance to cool down.”

“You’re not talking to that psycho by yourself,” he said, which was chivalrous, but she didn’t need the help.

“All right.” She touched his arm. She was being too hard on him. They would deal with this as they dealt with all things, presenting a unified front. “We’ll go together. But we’re going to do it later, once you have a chance to chill out.”

That afternoon, she went for a run. They’d paid off the movers, seventeen hundred more dollars they didn’t have, and Jacob had gone to his office, and to pick Leila up at school. Even after three years, the expense of living in San Francisco blew her mind. Worse than Brooklyn, but they’d never entertained the idea of staying in New York for the long-term, much less buying a house. And if they’d invested in property here, that meant they’d decided to plant their flag on this hill: to stay, their psycho neighbor be damned.

            She jogged down Taraval to the beach and followed La Playa to Golden Gate Park. She’d run the Boston and the New York City, each in less than four hours, in the top 30 for her age group, and she ran Bay to Breakers every year, though her knees had started to go, so she did it to prove she still could, and to stave off mortality. And because she wanted her daughter to know: You can do anything.

Out along the coast, with the salt air in her lungs, with Cardi B playing on her Sony headphones, her feet pounding the asphalt in their Reeboks and the dull ache she’d become used to in her hips and her knees, where she imagined each step wearing the cartilage away like water on rock—it was as close as she could come to disappearing, to leaving her body behind.

III

As soon as Theresa put the phone down, she felt a jab of what might’ve been remorse, or maybe the suspicion she’d made a mistake, though for the life of her after thirty-five years living under the storm system of Jimmy’s moods, she hadn’t. Her mother was in the kitchen with the radio playing, and as Theresa looked out the window in the spare room of the ranch house her parents had bought in Vacaville, she sank onto the edge of the twin bed she’d claimed from Shane’s room in San Francisco, dreading going to the kitchen. Ma would not be happy about this.     

Not a mistake, but a boundary. Dr. Volker—Beverly—was right about that. One Theresa should’ve set long ago.

You don’t get to yell at me, Jimmy. Not anymore.

            She clenched her fist, tapping her thigh. She felt a thrill of victory.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy.” When she stopped crying, she said it over and over, whispering it at the rotary phone her parents still had, the same one she’d giggled into with her girlfriends back in 1982, when Theresa was sixteen, a virgin in her Mercy High uniform. Still couldn’t believe she’d had the nerve to tell him she wanted a divorce, yet though she felt vindicated, and the adrenaline she got when they argued, when he yelled, it left her tired. And she still had to sign those papers. This wouldn’t really be over, not until she’d done that.

            Theresa opened the door. Couldn’t sit any longer on her son’s twin bed, not with Shane sleeping on a cot in Solano. Jimmy hadn’t gone to see the kid. Not that Shane would’ve conceded to putting his dad on the visitors’ list. But for once in his life, Jimmy could’ve tried, couldn’t he? Every time Theresa visited, Shane’s eyes grew more hooded and furtive, though he’d never let her see him cry, and he’d never tell her what they were doing to him in that place, either. But she’d seen Oz and those other TV shows about prison, so she could guess what went on.

            In the kitchen, Theresa grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge. The boombox was playing Henry Mancini, “Moon River,” her mother belonging to another world, one in which a woman did not ask her husband for a divorce.

“You talking to someone in there?” her mother said.

            It felt unnatural at fifty-two to be arguing with your husband in a room in your parents’ house. The youngest of five—by a crazy stroke of fate, all girls—she might’ve been eighteen, sneaking out to take in a double feature at the Balboa with Jimmy. Hard as it had been to have Shane after three miscarriages, that had only been an excuse. They’d stopped after one because even back then, the ugliness of his job had rubbed off on Jimmy.

            “Ma,” Theresa said. “I might need to stay a while longer.”

            Nearly a year since she and Jimmy had separated, and that was the closest she’d come to copping to the fact she was asking for a divorce, but her mother seemed to take it in stride. The smell of the onions and butter in a saucepan on the range made Theresa wish for that old life: the house on Vicente Street with its three floors, and she and her sister Lucy playing Fortune Teller with a folded piece of paper from a school binder to see who each of them was going to marry. Had she ever written Jimmy’s name in one of those origami flowers? No, she’d pined after the McGuire brothers who lived on Judah, guys she still saw around the neighborhood, most of them fathers and grandfathers now.

            “I know it’s none of my business,” her mother said, fetching a bunch of celery from the crisper drawer, “but your father and I went through some rough patches, too.”

            Rough patches?

            Easy for her to say. If anything, Theresa’s dad been an upstanding citizen, a cut above the other dads in their neighborhood. Forty plus years at the Public Works Department, what the cynical among their circle had called the Irish Welfare, and now, he was playing golf with a buddy at the Wildhorse, the public links in Davis, enjoying the retirement he’d earned.

            “You’re right, Ma. None of your business.”

            Had to dare herself to say it, but she was on a roll. She finished the soda, the caffeine making her anxious, jumpy. Not that Jimmy had ever hit her. He’d always seemed to know what would’ve driven her away, and he had a positive genius for stopping just short of that point.

Into the saucepan went the celery. Theresa’s mother took a potato from the basket hanging by the window. “You always did do whatever you liked.”

            Which seemed unfair, given that Theresa had spent her life doing whatever her mother and Jimmy had wanted her to do. Had to fight them tooth and nail to take the only job she’d ever had, checking groceries at Andronico’s while Shane was in high school. Her mother and Jimmy both thought she was too delicate to work like a normal person. They were always in cahoots.

            “Yeah, Ma.” Easier to agree. Beverly said sometimes that was all right, too. “I guess so.”

Wasn’t until after lunch, those potpies cooling on the rack by the window, Theresa and her mother spooning up Campbell’s cream of tomato soup at the Formica table they’d owned since Theresa could remember, that she grasped the hold Jimmy still had on her. She couldn’t stay under her mother’s roof, not the way the woman kept undermining her, so Theresa was going to have to go back and see Jimmy one last time, to sign those stupid papers, before she would be free. Once they sold the house, and she collected the half that was hers, she could get a one-bedroom, maybe someplace sunny like Sonoma County.

“I’m going for a drive.” Theresa gathered up her keys, her wallet, and her purse.

“Are you going to be home in time for dinner?”

It was a quarter after one. An hour and a half from her folks’ place to the house on Taraval, but the way cars backed up on the 80, she’d be lucky if she made it by three. Still didn’t know whether she was going to chicken out. But she wanted done with this.

“Don’t wait for me.” Theresa grabbed her jacket from the rack by the door. She’d surrendered her house key to Jimmy, who’d demanded it when she said she was moving, but she wasn’t worried. He’d be home. Wasn’t like he had anywhere to go.

Theresa closed the door. Only as she turned the keys in the ignition did it occur to her to wonder whether Jimmy was okay, and what he might be doing in that house, alone with his resentments.

IV

The package said to call your doctor if you got a hard-on that lasted more than four hours. Bryson was coming up on five, but he wasn’t ready to swallow his pride and call his GP, much less an ambulance. Still on a friendly basis with half the first responders in the city, and he could imagine the stories they’d tell about old Jimmy Bryson. He’d just as soon they found him dead on the living room floor.

            He wanted a sandwich, something to eat besides Raisin Bran, but when he opened the fridge, the pastrami he’d bought last week had gone bad, slimy in the package, and the fat-free Yoplait he’d laid in after his last checkup was three weeks past the sell-by date. He ate it, anyway. Spooned it out of the four-ounce container and wouldn’t that be a laugh if the stuff they’d told him to eat because of his blood pressure turned out to kill him, like those yuppies he’d read about in the Examiner who’d gotten food poisoning from their kale and quinoa salads.

            He felt dizzy, his skin clammy, and his thoughts were racing. His left arm tingled.

The fog had burned off. Sixty-eight degrees, by the thermostat, and from where he stood, Bryson could see clear across the alleyway between their houses into their kitchen. She was standing with her back to the window, and she looked so much like her mother, at least from behind, it took him a second to register that she must be the kid, the one who went to school with the cheese-eaters in Hayes Valley. Straight black hair fell down her back, and she was wearing a floral-print top. As bitter as Bryson had become, as much as he might have been the no account SOB his soon-to-be ex-wife always said he was, maybe fatherhood had changed him because the first thing he felt was affection. The kid would probably grow up to be a high-handed you-know-what like her mom, but she was beautiful as all children were, as Shane had been, too.

            By then, he’d begun to wilt, and the first of the shooting pains hit his chest. But he wasn’t having a heart attack: no, he was going into shock, and as he stared at the window, he prayed the child would not turn around and see him. Not even because he was afraid the sight of a grown man in his condition would mess the kid up for life, Bryson standing there in his tighty-whities with a raging hardon straining the fabric, but because he was chickenshit, scared to get sent up with the freaks he’d put away over the years. Never mind what his buddies on the force would say. He’d be front-page news, with a dopey mug shot that made him look like a child molester, and you knew what they did to kiddie-rapers in Quentin, especially ex-cops. And wouldn’t the District Attorney and the rest of the liberal scum at City Hall gloat about that?

            He dropped the Yoplait, the empty container and the spoon clattering on the linoleum. Closed the curtains just in time to see Jacob walk in their kitchen, a look of shock and of slow, horrible understanding playing across his face as he saw Bryson shirtless through the window.

V

Farheen came down the hill past McCoppin Square and the Parkside library branch. Beyoncé’s “Hold Up,” her favorite track from Lemonade, pounded in her headphones. Been cooling down since 19th Avenue. Maybe they’d made the right choice buying this house, after all. She could live with that debt to her mother, the financial debt—the emotional one, too. Been living with the latter all her life. And though her knees were starting to go, though sprinting downhill was the worst thing you could do when the cartilage was wearing away, when she crossed Sunset Boulevard and saw Jacob walk out the door with their daughter, her husband’s hand covering the child’s eyes as though he were leading the kid to her own execution, Farheen ran down the hill.

            “What is it?” She was standing at the bottom of the stairs that led up to their new front door: their million-dollar home, pink stucco rimed with salt, mosaic tiles on the porch, where the realtor had left a couple ice plants in terracotta pots.

            But Jacob kept repeating himself, telling her Leila hadn’t seen anything.

            “What are you talking about?”

Though she knew: the motherfucker next door.

            Jacob said it again: “She didn’t see anything.” He wore the blue oxford and the khakis he’d worn to his office, and he ushered their daughter down the steps, covering the girl’s eyes. “We’re going for a drive,” he told Leila, rolling his eyes in the direction of the house next door. Wait for me, he mouthed at Farheen. “Okay?”

            She nodded. But she’d already decided to confront the guy before this went any further.

            “What didn’t I see?” Leila asked, and if it were possible to feel two opposite things at once, Farheen did. Didn’t understand what her daughter hadn’t seen, but Farheen could have dropped to her knees, pressed her daughter’s face to her shoulder, and cried with relief, even as she wanted to pound on their neighbor’s door and smash his face, just like that masked Antifa protester had smashed that Nazi’s on YouTube.

VI

Theresa hated driving, traffic backed up at the tollbooths by the Bay Bridge, the urgency of the other drivers zipping past, upset at her for holding them up. Those people on the motorcycles splitting lanes filled her with terror, lest she swerve into one of them. Everyone was so angry.

            Still, as much as she hated being behind the wheel, it felt good being back in the neighborhood, this place where until last year, she’d imagined herself living until she died. She cruised down Sunset Boulevard, making a left toward the beach, the sunlight blinding as it hit the water. She lowered her visor, saying a silent prayer a kid like the one Shane had beaten up didn’t step in front of her car. And yes, she understood what her son had done was wrong. But he was her son, and her job as his mother was to love him, despite everything.

            Short of breath, Theresa passed at a crawl—rubbernecking, Ma would’ve called it—parked in front of Pirro’s Pizza and gripped the wheel as she fought tears.

            “Oh, Jimmy,” she whispered, “what am I supposed to do?”

            But short of driving back to Vacaville, there was nothing else for it. She grabbed her purse and crossed the street.

VII

All roads seemed to lead here, to Sergeant Jimmy Bryson sitting behind the wheel of his 1989 Dodge RAM cargo van with the engine running, with the garage door closed, having a heart attack—he got that now—with a loaded Colt 45 in his hand. Certain laws governed the universe, and one of them held that you did not mess with children. He’d done the unthinkable. Or nearly done it, a distinction that would be lost on Jacob and Farheen, as it would be on most city judges, not to mention his buddies on the force.

            Of course, hindsight made it easy to look back and see all the things that made this next shitty choice inevitable. Yet he couldn’t eat his gun. Tasted steel, the Mobil 1 motor oil he used to lubricate the bore, chipping a tooth trying to get his mouth around the barrel. He’d left the engine running: carbon monoxide poisoning a safety measure in case he didn’t have the stones to pull the trigger.

            The doorbell echoed at the top of the stairs. It’d been so long since someone had come to visit, he’d nearly forgotten that sound. And because he was still too much of a coward to kill himself, he shut the engine off. Someone was pounding on the door, the side of a fist or maybe a shoe striking the wood.

            He got out of the van. He’d put on his bathrobe, and he dropped the Colt in the pocket. That would show her who was boss. He climbed the stairs. He knew damn well who was waiting on the other side of that door, and he was going to tell her what time it was.