Read Online A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne - Free Book Online

tears, which is why I sang it.
    â€œHi,” I said, blinking back at him.
    We regarded each other for several moments. “What you building there?” he said finally, lilac leaves brushing his head as he cracked his knuckles.
    â€œIt’s a science project.”
    â€œAha,” he said, beginning to edge away.
    â€œFor school.” I felt emboldened by his lack of interest. “Last year we studied amoebas.”
    â€œAmeobas,” he repeated.
    â€œYou can only see them through microscopes. Even then you have to look carefully. We also looked at a cow’s eyeball under a magnifying glass.”
    â€œYes,” he said, as if he’d already known this. “Well, goodbye there,” he added.
    And he walked slowly across his backyard, past his copper beech tree and his aluminum chair, up his two back steps and into his house. This was perhaps the first private conversation I had ever had with a man who was not my father or one of my uncles. It left me with a peculiar feeling fluttering between excitement and disappointment, and something else that evennow I’m not sure how to name. It wasn’t really much of an encounter, and yet it has remained troublesome enough to make me wonder if that small violation, that quiet little intrusion, was what first set me against Mr. Green.
    June arrived. School ended. Hurricane Agnes slammed into town, tore off tree branches and knocked down power lines and left lake-sized puddles in the street. A few days later the twins snuck in to see an R-rated thriller at the MacArthur Theater and were graphic for days afterward. They began interrogating each other with flashlights, one barking questions while shining the flashlight into the other’s eyes.
When did you last have sex with a chicken? Have you ever eaten a pig’s testicle? Was the pig still alive?
    By then my mother had taken my father’s college beer stein from its place on the living-room mantel and recast it as a toilet-brush holder in the downstairs bathroom.
    Because she refused to allow him to come to the house, my father often met us on Saturday afternoons in parking lots, sometimes at a bowling alley or skating rink, sometimes the mall. Steven always made a point of shaking his hand, telling him everything that had happened all week in a rush of over-confident chatter. Julie stood a little apart, smiling a cryptic smile she had practiced in the bathroom mirror. I waited until he had finished with the two of them so that I could be liftedinto the air and embraced all alone, and wedge my face into his crisp white shirt, and wrap my arms tight around his neck.
    One warm Saturday, not long after the hurricane, my father met us in the mall parking lot and presented each of us with a water-resistant wristwatch with a striped cloth wristband. He said he was going on a little business trip, maybe for a couple weeks. To Delaware, he said. A real estate convention. Then maybe a short vacation. Three weeks at the most. He presented my watch to me and said the time would go by “in no time.”
    â€œThat’s a pun, honey,” he added. Then he hummed a few bars from “As Time Goes By.” “Marshamallow,” he said, squatting on the pavement in front of me. “Let’s not cry, sweetheart.”
    â€œOh God,” muttered Julie. “Spare us, Junior Sarah Bernhardt.”
    She had dressed to annoy my father, squeezing herself into an old black satin sheath dress of our mother’s, which had moth holes in the bodice. She had lined her eyes with black eye pencil and given herself a beauty mark the size of a thumbtack above her upper lip.
    â€œI thought we were going bowling,” she added, one hand on her hip.
    My father cleared his throat and tried to pry my arms from around his neck. “Not today.”
    â€œWhat
are
we doing today?” said Steven.
    â€œToday we’re just going to talk.”
    I stepped back. The twins groaned and