Read Online Neighborhood Watch by Cammie McGovern - Free Book Online

Who wouldn’t? Now I wonder who else he was manipulating, giving up portions of his writing day to.
    “Did it ever sound like flirting?” the same lawyer asked Viola.
    “In my mind, any conversation that goes on longer than it technically needs to while working is a flirtation. So, yes.” Viola sounded so unlike herself saying this, I wondered if she’d written it down somewhere and memorized her line.
    “Did it seem sexual to you?”
    “Oh, no.” Her eye flicked over for a second to mine. “I never saw that.”
    In the end, my coworkers did me far more harm than good, though I don’t blame them. They were librarians, keen observers with sharp memories. During the trial, I’ll admit, I liked hearing their stories—the validation, after everything, that my friendship with Geoffrey hadn’t all been in my head.
    It surprised me that no one ever mentioned how we started eating lunch in the garden behind the library. We never planned our meetings, we just wandered outside and found each other. We’d eat and talk as if we were in the middle of a longer story we could never finish. “So where were we?” Geoffrey might say when I sat down. “Oh, right. Tenth-grade English. Your first lesbian teacher.”
    He told his own stories, full of teen-boy pranks where he was the ringleader and Paul was a background player. Neither of them had been good athletes, which meant they never joined Little League or Pee Wee football. The afternoons of their youth were free for trolling through the woods at the end of their street. “We built teepees and stored food and berries to live off of if we ever had to.”
    I loved hearing his stories. The ones Paul told were mostly from high school, after Geoffrey had already become a star writer for the newspaper with a column titled “In Steadman’s Stead.” “All the school jokes came from his columns,” Paul told me. “The principal quoted them, the teachers, everyone.” Alone with me, Geoffrey told stories that predated the discovery of his writing talent. Maybe for obvious reasons. His career was stalled; he faced an uncertain future. But sometimes I wondered if there might be more to it, if for some reason every reminder of his writing life was painful to him.
    I remember the lunch hour when I told Geoffrey the truth about my father’s illness, how he’d had bleak patches on and off throughout my childhood, and then, at the age of forty-four, drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night and told them he hadn’t slept in fourteen days. He stayed there a month and came home a changed man: heavier, paler, with hands that trembled too much to open the vials of pills he’d returned with. We didn’t know what to say to the stranger he’d become. For months, his only conversation was about nurses and fellow patients from the hospital. “Eventually we got used to it,” I told Geoffrey, looking not at him but at a spray of orange daylilies. “He never went back to work after that. Never drove. Never left the house really, except to go out in the yard a bit. He loved to garden. That’s what he did when he met my mother.”
    I’d rarely spoken about my father the way I did with Geoffrey that day, revealing facts that are unimaginable for people who haven’t lived with mental illness. He never worked again. Never left the house. “Sometimes I think he was criminally overmedicated in that hospital and never had the courage to wean himself.” Geoffrey nodded. Part of me felt insecure at having spoken so candidly, part of me wondered, If I offer more details, will he use them? “He stopped drinking alcohol because of the meds and instead put cough syrup into his tea. At night if his hands were shaking too much, I did it for him.”
    “Hmm,” he said, closing his eyes and nodding.
    I hoped he was thinking: Good detail. Usable . “You have an incredible memory,” he once said, which kept me talking. The irony is that I did have an unusual memory. I could recall the