The Perfect Neighborhood

Liz Alterman

Description

For fans of Big Little Lies and Desperate Housewives. Appeal to readers who enjoy thrillers, domestic suspense and a tantalizing behind-the-scenes peek into the lives of their neighbours.

Sujets

• Domestic
• Page Turner
• David Nicholls
• Adele Parks
• Lisa Jewell
• The Good Life (1975 TV series)
• Ordinary People
• Suburb
• Dark
• Desperate Housewives

Informations

• Publié par: Legend Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781915054555
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Legend Press Ltd, 51 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6HJ
[e-mail] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents Liz Alterman 2022
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
First published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox Company LLC. | www.crookedlanebooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-91505-4-548
Ebook ISBN 978-1-91505-4-555
Set in Times. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Cover design by Clare Stacey | www.headdesign.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Liz Alterman is the author of a young adult novel, He ll Be Waiting , and a memoir, Sad Sacked . Her work has appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , McSweeney s Internet Tendency , Parents , and other outlets. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and three sons where she spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms. When she isn t writing, she s reading.
Visit Liz www.lizalterman.com
Follow Liz www.twitter.com/LizAlterman www.instagram.com/lizalterman
For Rich, who took care of everything while I went to Oak Hill.
Thank you for the time and space and, most of all, your faith in me.
Even the devil s eyes can t be as sharp as the neighbors .
- Heinrich Boll
CHAPTER 1
Thursday, June 13 Rachel
For the past two months, we spoke of little other than the Langleys.
Did you hear? She s gone!
No! It can t be true.
If they can t make it work, none of us stands a chance!
Allison and Christopher Langley? Oh, it s over. Totally. Someone saw him jogging with the dog. Just the two of them. That s a first.
How long do you figure he ll be alone?
Less than a minute. Look at him! I bet he won t even have to set up an online dating profile.
How fast do you think he ll decide to move back to the city? That house has to have, what, four bedrooms at least? And so close to the elementary school! Let me know the second he decides to sell! I know a couple who d kill for that location.
On and on it went for weeks as May slipped into June. Nearly everyone within a three-block radius of the Langleys well-maintained Colonial whispered about them over hedges, in the parks and playgrounds, while walking their dogs and toddlers around the pond in the heart of our otherwise sleepy town.
Some refused to believe it.
The Langleys? No way!
I m sure she s just off filming another commercial. Probably somewhere fabulous. I wonder what she s pushing this time? Toothpaste? Rental cars? What a life!
That might have seemed plausible if Mary Alice Foster s son, Phil, hadn t seen Allison hurry into an Uber at four in the morning without a suitcase.
Can we trust Phil? No disrespect, I m just saying, he hasn t seemed quite right since he got back.
Yeah, no offense, but Phil s not exactly credible. And why is he watching their house? That s creepy.
Others insisted they d seen it coming.
I saw Allison looking teary at the drugstore a few weeks back, but I chalked it up to allergies. Trees budding and all. Show me a person whose eyes aren t watering, right? Anyway, I said hello, and she sort of waved back. It wasn t like we had a conversation. We didn t really know each other. Did anyone really know the Langleys?
I bet she met someone else, maybe a hedge fund guy with a fat bank account.
Chris s got money, doesn t he? Royalties from that song? Wasn t it in the background of those beer commercials? Plus, she s probably made a bundle from those acting gigs.
I m talking about private jet, fuck-you money. She s what? Thirty-two? Thirty-four? Her window to bag a billionaire s closing, and she knows it. Probably got tired of life in the burbs. Can you blame her?
Finally, we were able to purge every ill-formed, mean-spirited thought we d ever harbored about them. Neighborhood-scale vomiting. Sickening. And delicious. I was part of it too. The gossip. It was wrong yet impossible to resist. Some of us were almost rooting against them from the start. You couldn t help it. So much to envy. Even their names - Allison and Christopher Langley - sounded clean, rich, regal.
With her thick dark hair, perfect smile, and bone structure that implied she d still be gorgeous at eighty, everyone in the neighborhood treated her like royalty. Our very own Kate Middleton.
And him? His rock-star status, though faded, had even the most aloof mothers in Oak Hill swooning as they dropped off their budding musicians for the piano, guitar, and voice lessons he gave in the afternoons. Nannies, too, left minivans idling at the curb to walk their charges to the door for a chance to see him up close, maybe even talk to him, drink in a few sips of his voice, which carried the faintest hint of a Southern drawl, a souvenir from the years he lived in New Orleans.
Last summer, when Frank Chadwick convinced Chris to join the town softball team, women who d never watched their husbands play suddenly appeared on the sidelines. They pretended to cheer while admiring Christopher s butt, round as two firm cantaloupes, beneath the thin polyester of those uniform pants.
Is he wearing a cup, or is that, er, natural? one woman whispered to another.
All the running they did left the Langleys enviably fit. How many mornings had I looked out the bathroom window and nearly been blinded by their radiance as they jogged past the house? Good health oozed from their pores, the opposite of the image reflected back at me in the mirror. Graying hair sprouted at my roots and temples. My face, most days, appeared pale and puffy as an angel food cake. My tongue felt sandpapery as a cat s and tasted faintly of the wine I d downed quickly the night before to take the edge off the day and force my evenings to blur into something more bearable.
In early spring, through the window screen, I could hear their laughter, the way they held a conversation and bantered easily, never out of breath, and I despised them. Golden and good-natured, even Murphy, their dog, was beautiful. If he stopped to chew grass, one of them would command, Keep it moving, Murph! and the dog obeyed.
How could you not loathe this couple? We were merciless in our constant need to dissect them. Like hawks circling, we waited to spot their weaknesses.
They had no children. Some chalked it up to that selfish millennial stereotype. Others felt sorry for them. Such a shame! Their kids would be stunning! But a group of us, the ones who d fallen into codependent friendships, ones forged for survival at Mommy and Me classes or preschool drop-offs and pick-ups, envied the Langleys. United in our easy-to-maintain haircuts, comfortable shoes, and yoga pants, we resented them as we imagined the perfect pair doing all the things we no longer could: staying awake past ten on a Friday night, sleeping in on Saturdays, savoring Sunday brunches.
Deflated balls and mold-speckled riding toys weren t ruining their lawn. Their driveway wasn t littered with crushed-up pieces of forgotten sidewalk chalk or pulverized Goldfish crackers covered in ants. Phantom whiffs of vomit didn t waft up from their couch cushions.
Sometimes, after too many glasses of wine, we d speculate, They probably still have sex in the shower. Remember that? Remember shower sex?
Ever see them stretching in the park? They re so fucking limber!
On and on we d go until, even to our drunken ears, we heard how jealous and ridiculous we sounded.
At the annual block party or the neighborhood holiday cocktail gathering, the Langleys had their own gravitational pull. Necks swiveled. Heads spun in their direction. And the way they looked at each other? We were the spellbound audience catching the joyous final scene of a Hallmark movie.
Don t forget, she s an actress, the more bitter among us reminded the group.
But most of us believed it wasn t an act. They seemed so insular, as if all they needed was each other. It had to be real.
So, naturally, the shock of Allison s abrupt exit left us reeling, clamoring for answers. What went wrong? Had she met someone else? Maybe he wanted to get the band back together and tour again? Did they disagree about starting a family?
No one knows what goes on in someone else s home. I know this better than anyone. And, of course, it was none of our business. But after living so long in our quiet town, people craved news beyond soaring property values and preferred preschool teachers.
How could Allison s decision to suddenly run off in the early hours of a late-April morning not become breaking news that worked its way into nearly every conversation? What else did we have to talk about? The Petersons new shed? Who might get a Labradoodle?
The Langleys would ve continued to be our primary topic until Allison returned, Christopher moved away, or another couple s shocking divorce came to light, forcing our jaundiced eyes to shift in a new direction.
The thing that brought the gossip to a shameful halt wasn t a reconciliation, a departure, or another couple s demise. It was the disappearance of Billy Barnes.
Billy, who would turn six in July, vanished as he was walking home from kindergarten on a perfectly ordinary afternoon. Not a trace of him was left behind. Not the house key that dangled from his Yankees keychain. No