The Neighbors Are Watching by Debra Ginsberg Page A

special of her own. Something that might even become a signature dish in years to come. It was important that she make something memorable. She wanted to be complimented. She wanted people to go home after the party and say, “Wasn’t Dorothy’s—fill in the blank—amazing?” Whatever Dorothy made should be good enough for her neighbors to ask her for the recipe. And then, of course, Dorothy would laugh and tell them that there was no recipe, that this—fill in the blank—was something she just threw together.
    Yes, that was it. That was it exactly.
    Dorothy shoved the chicken back in the fridge and opened the deepdrawer beneath the silverware where she kept the stash of cookbooks she used most frequently. There was a larger, more expensive cache of cookbooks in the garage, buried under boxes of Christmas ornaments and Kevin’s old baby clothes, but she consulted those only when there was something really big coming up: holiday cakes, for example, or multicourse French dinners for parties. People
expected
you to use cookbooks for those kinds of things. But for the smaller occasions, when it was important that the dishes she cooked
appeared
to be made from her own imagination, Dorothy went to the secret drawer. It probably wasn’t necessary to actually hide these cookbooks, but hiding things had long been second nature to Dorothy, as much a part of her as the diamond-shaped mole in the crook of her left arm.
    There were neatly folded wads of one-, five-, and ten-dollar bills all over the house, for example. Dorothy knew every individual location, if not the exact amounts. There was one in a rolled pair of socks wedged between two never-used blankets, one in a storage box containing Kevin’s old school projects, one behind some plastic San Diego Chargers tumblers on a kitchen shelf, one stuffed inside the hollow metal toilet paper roller. And that wasn’t even all of them.
    Dorothy also hid documents. She had a secret safety deposit box, the paperwork for which she hid in the box itself, and the key for which she hid in another safety deposit box at a different bank. Because you couldn’t be too careful and you just never knew. Which was why Dorothy had also hidden a pack of cigarettes in the kitchen, in an old round tin that had once held caramel-covered popcorn. Dorothy could see it in her mind’s eye, the faded red and white image of Santa Claus still visible on its surface. Dorothy didn’t smoke (well,
hadn’t
smoked for a while anyway), but, again, you never knew when you might really, really need a cigarette and wouldn’t have time to go to a store to get one. Of course she would
never
smoke unless she was sure that nobody was watching.
    Just as she was finishing that thought—at the moment, in fact, whenthe concept of being watched entered into her brain—Dorothy felt the chill of a stare at her back and whirled around, her hands clenching at her sides.
    That pregnant girl—Diana—was standing in the kitchen doorway, quiet as you please.
    “Hi, Mrs. Werner.”
    Dorothy inhaled slowly. There was nothing to feel guilty about.
    “Hello, Diana. Have you come to see Kevin? He’s upstairs.”
    Dorothy didn’t know why she felt the need to tell Diana that Kevin was home—or upstairs for that matter. Diana knew where Kevin was all the time; that was why she was here in the first place. Nor had Diana ever once entered the house through the front door, greeted Dorothy before she saw Kevin, or announced her presence in any other way before she sneaked into Kevin’s room and the two of them did whatever it was they did for hours on end. But Dorothy felt compelled to adhere to the social ritual just as she had in the past every time one of Kevin’s friends had come over to play.
    “I was wondering if I could get a glass of water,” Diana said. “Would that be okay?”
    “Sure,” Dorothy said. “Of course.”
    But neither one of them moved. Diana stood tilted backward slightly to balance her uneven