A Neighbourhood Meeting

A few days of cleaning, rearranging furniture and turning your parents’ house into your house and you feel like a break. Thankfully Mrs Peterson has invited you over for a meal, a few drinks and a chance to meet some of the neighbours. You put on some relatively smart clothes and head over.

Mrs Peterson greets you at the door with a big smile and beckons you in. She guides you into the lounge where her husband is sitting. Always a large man, he’s gained weight since you last saw him but looks frailer. Around his neck dangles a gas mask connected to an oxygen tank propped next to the chair. He tries to rise as he sees you enter, but his wife is quickly there to fuss him back to his seat.

“Don’t tire yourself. Don’t tire yourself out,” she mutters at him as she guides him back down. He gives an apologetic smile.

“It’s this damn cancer,” he huffs and puffs, wheezing his way through words. “I just don’t have the breath to do anything.”

The Mr Peterson of your youth had been a tall, active man, not just physically imposing but also personality wise. He’d also been a heavy smoker. Now lung cancer confined him to a chair. Even then he needs shots of oxygen to keep him going. His face shows his suffering, eyes almost pleading, a haggard expression now etched permanently into his face. You shake his hand, and where once his grip was crushing now it is limp and damp.

Mrs Peterson gets you a beer while you listen to her husband bemoan his predicament. Then she’s all questions about why you’re back. You don’t tell her that your job disappeared, you just tell her that you have a new job teaching at St Perpetua’s.

“It’s a shame you couldn’t get that job while your mother was still here,” she states in response. “It always pained her that you were so far away.”

“Not as far away as your son. Is he still in…?”

“Yes, he’s still in Japan. But he has a family out there.”

The Peterson’s son is approximately ten years your senior. You don’t remember much about him. The age gap was such you never hung around together, and after university he went to Japan, met a woman and never came back. Your mother would leak news of his activities whenever she remembered.

“Although we’re hoping. His eldest, Yua, she’s 19 now and I think she’s very interested in seeing where her father came from. We told him she could look after us, but I think her mother’s worried about her travelling so far. We’re working on it, though. It’d be great to see her. We haven’t been able to see any of the kids in years, not since the cancer crippled Henry here.”

For a while you talk about the Peterson’s son and what else he’s doing in Japan. Then some more of the neighbours arrive. You’re distracted by them, which is just as well for Mr Peterson. He needs to take more oxygen. Most of the neighbours you meet you vaguely remember from your childhood. The residents of the street rarely change.

But the last to arrive are two newcomers you’ve never seen before, two redheads.

The elder and shorter looks to be about your age, maybe slightly older, ginger haired and freckled face and ample bosom, confined in a flowing, flowery dress cut low to reveal her cleavage. The younger and taller one is more conservatively dressed, hair a more golden red and cut straight and shoulder length. She’s wearing a plain blue, long-sleeved, baggy t-shirt and a knee length skirt.

“This is Faye Ollins and Brianna,” Mrs Peterson introduces you to them, “they live next door to you, the other side to us.”