Neighbors

Part 1

"Sweetheart, I don't know how to tell you this so I am just going to come right out and say it."

I braced myself. My husband has never been much of the serious type, preferring always to be the jokester rather than act like a civilized adult should and the tone and look he was carrying to start whatever conversation this was going to be meant whatever it is must be something terrible.

"Keith, I don't want a divorce," I gently whispered to him, lower lip quivering. He instantly pulled me into his arms and gave me a tender kiss.

"We aren't even almost in that kind of situation, Michelle."

I breathed a teary sigh of relief into his chest. If it wasn't a divorce, we could get through anything together. He said softly, "I lost my job," and I laughed. I let out a complete, whole bodied, hearty bellow right into his chest. My husband Keith, the man I married, was the hardest worker in his office and had worked for the company for over 20 years, even working his way up to being the director of analytics, and occasionally having lunch with the CFO, and several other C levels. To think he would play this-

"Michelle, this is serious," he said in the most stoic voice I had ever heard him speak. I paused and sighed, trying to let my mind process the fact that this may not be a joke.

"Okay babe, if it's true, we have our savings and that will help us afloat for a while, plus your 401k and all of the investments you have been working so hard on. We're going to be-"

He was just shaking his head slowly now with his eyes closed. "We don't have any of that anymore. It's all gone." I pulled out of his grip as a response. He'd been playing the alt coins so well from what he had told me. I sat down at the kitchen table in the chair nearest me, looked into his stressed blue eyes, gave a sad smile and told him I was listening.

Evidently, the company needed a scapegoat for something huge that was going to be announced by the media, and Keith, who hadn't been involved in any of the illegal activities, including bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, sex trafficking, solicitation or any of the other things my husband was telling me about, was let go about six months prior. He was framed by people he had considered his friends, and my husband had spiraled into quite an unpredictable path after that.

The story had been supposedly scheduled to be released a few days later, and shortly after then, my husband was supposed to have been arrested for the crimes to keep the company away from scrutiny, but the story never broke and Keith spent his days blowing off steam at the casino. Blowing off steam and blowing all of our savings.

After about a month, he started to pull himself together and began looking for a job. He went to several interviews but when people began to check his references, Clive and Clive Incorporated refused to give any character attestations, for fear the story would still somehow come out.

After month two, a journalist who had been missing for a while was found brutally murdered, and rumor had it, she had been about to break a massive story before her untimely death. Luckily for us, her death and the convenient corruption of her files resulted in my husband never being wrongfully arrested. Unfortunately for us, my husband had emptied the majority of our backup cash in case of emergencies and lost his entire 401k and pension when he was fired for such a terrible, yet fabricated reason.

By the fourth month, his investments began to turn sour. The stock market and cryptocurrency had taken a nosedive and out of desperation, Keith had made a serves of devastating trades which took us from a net worth of over four million dollars to having only our vehicles and our home, which still had about half of our mortgage still on it. For the last two months, he had been interviewing all over the place, anywhere he could and has been deemed over qualified, a liar, and to the places that should have been perfect, a mismatch due to information from references at Clive and Clive.

As Keith recounted everything for me, I went through various emotions but I sat there and listened to him, holding his hand when he eventually sat down next to me. When he stopped speaking, our eyes remained locked. I blinked and held his hands tightly before asking, "Were any of the offenses true?"

When he shook his head, I saw the truth in his eyes, and it affirmed what I had already known. He was really set up by friends and colleagues who feared their own fate of punishments for their heinous acts, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

"We have to sell the house, don't we?" Keith nodded and it was my turn to close my eyes. I breathed a deep breath, and then opened them, leaning forward to give him a kiss.

"We will get through this," I said to him sadly. We went to bed with a tub of ice cream, popcorn and our favorite movie and held tightly to one another the entire night. The next morning, we contacted a realtor, my friend Sabrina, and went about getting the home ready to sell. She didn't ask many questions after realizing we weren't going to discuss it, and she was especially happy when we told her how much we were listing for. Over the next week, we cleared and moved a lot of our clutter to either trash or storage, depending how on sentimental the clutter happened to be and within two weeks, we had the house listed. Since the housing market was in the condition it was, we were under contract within two days of being listed for 50% more than asking. After closing, we took the money from selling our dream farm house which sat surrounded by a sea of wheat and sugar fields and moved into a home in a stereotypical cookie cutter neighborhood where the houses were so close you could almost reach out your window and touch your neighbors.

Being the southern raised woman that I am, I got straight into meeting the neighbors. It had been several years since I had last lived in a neighborhood and I wanted to make sure I got it started the right way. I cooked up a few lasagnas, my special garlic bread and my great grandmother's chocolate chip cookies, packaged everything in five separate bags and started deliveries on the second day since move in.

Our neighbors to the left, Carly and Jeff, graciously accepted the home cooked meal as Carly laughed about never learning how to cook. Across the street from them, no one answered when I rang the doorbell so I moved on to the next home, the one across from us. Inside was a staggeringly old man who I didn't believe would be able to carry the bag to the kitchen without falling, so I offered to do it for him.

"Little missy, the day I stop doing things for myself is the day I give up living." With that, he thanked me, took the heavy bag and hobbled into the kitchen, leaving the front door ajar behind him. I shut it after he was out of sight and returned home to grab the next two bags. When I finished meeting my third neighbor, a pregnant woman whose husband always seemed to work late, the sun had started to set.

The home to the right of ours contained an older couple who had their two grandchildren over for the evening. After telling the little princess how pretty her tiara was and being greeted by a lightsaber as her brother ran around the corner, I left their home as well, satisfied that it seemed we had lucked out on neighbors. As I was about to go inside for the evening, the home which had originally had no one home when I'd tried before had a light pop on. I hurried inside to get the last of the packages of food and went to make my final delivery.

A very tall man opened the door before I'd even finished knocking, wearing no shirt and sweatpants that seemed to hang from his chiseled hip bones. He took one look at me and wrinkled his nose before saying curtly, "May I help you, miss?"

I took a step back, appalled by the instantly standoffish demeanor. "My husband and I are new to the neighborhood and I thought it best to introduce us with some classic Americanized Italian food and cookies."

He looked me up and down slowly, before shaking his head. " Thank you, but no thank you; my partner and I are on a very strict diet and we cannot breach it for a little bit of nicety. Have a good evening, miss." Before I knew it, the door was shut on my face. I walked back home feeling dejected, but soon enough, I was curled up next to Keith on the couch.