The Perfect Neighbors by Sarah Pekkanen Page A

someone, who told me she hasn’t voted in fifteen years and doesn’t plan to anytime soon.”
    â€œIf you ever decide it’s too much—if you ever want to quit—” Gigi began.
    â€œI don’t,” Joe said. He hesitated. “Not yet.”
    â€œOkay,” Gigi said. She sighed. “Julia will be fine with it. But do you really think Melanie’s going to accept Zach moving in?”
    â€œSure,” Joe said. “She’ll squawk a little but she’ll be fine.”
    But Joe didn’t know how bad things could get with Melanie.Melanie still adored her father. She reserved her worst rages for Gigi, for the moments when they were alone. Sometimes Joe would go into Melanie’s room to say good night and Gigi would hear the murmur of Melanie’s voice behind her closed door and she’d feel a spear of jealousy through her heart: What are you telling him that you can’t tell me?
    Joe’s fingertips resumed making slow, electric circles beneath her collarbone. Gigi tilted back her head to look at him, this man she still loved so passionately. Sometimes you crashed into people, propelled by a surge of chemistry, and sometimes you drifted into them. Her relationship with Joe had been a long, slow slide that began in friendship and turned into like, and then lust, and finally love. She adored him, but more than that, she believed in him. He supported raising the minimum wage—one of Gigi’s pet causes—and he believed in a woman’s right to choose, another one of her priorities. Maybe the voters saw a man giving a winning smile with bright new teeth, and speaking in the sound bites that were catnip to reporters, but she knew the real Joe. Her Joe. He was the man she was voting for.
    She wondered what the voters would say if they knew that Joe had smoked pot in college. That Gigi still smoked pot sometimes, leaning her head out the bathroom window while the water ran into the tub and her scented candles burned.
    She glanced at the clock over the stove. It showed they still had almost an hour before the girls would get home from school.
    â€œFollow me,” she said, beckoning with her index finger.
    She grabbed a spoon and the pint of ice cream, then beckoned for Joe to come upstairs, into the bathroom. She began running the water for the tub, then unbuckled his belt and tugged his slacks down over his slim hips. As Joe pulled his shirt over his head, Gigi lit her scented candle and reached for the Ziploc bag hidden behind an old electric toothbrush in the lowest drawer of her vanity.
    She wiggled the bag in the air. Joe needed this; he was so stressed. After a joint and a soak in the tub and some sex, she’d convince him to take a long nap.
    â€œFor old times’ sake?” she asked. “I can open a window to let the smell out. Pot and ice cream always was our favorite combination.”
    Joe smiled and slid into the tub.
    Let the campaign photographer get a glimpse of this , Gigi thought as she put the joint between her lips.
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    Newport Cove Listserv Digest
    *Accountant
    Can anyone recommend a good accountant? —Barry Newman, Forsythia Lane
    *Re: Accountant
    I highly recommend Randall Barrett as an accountant (he’s the father of Cole, who’s in my son David’s 2nd grade class). Randall has been doing our taxes for years. You couldn’t ask for a nicer guy! —Linda Hawthorne, Tulip Way
    *Re: Accountant
    TurboTax is also a helpful device, or so I’ve heard. —Tally White, Iris Lane
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    Susan’s company, Your Other Daughter, was born when a sixty­-seven-year-old woman tripped over a library cart.
    An hour later, Susan was on the phone with her old college roommate, Bobbi, whose mother had broken her right hip and wrist in the fall. A librarian had called an ambulance, and Bobbi’s mother had been taken to a hospital just