The Perfect Wife

“Oh, we just lived up in DTLA,” Jessie said and seeing the confused look on Kimberly’s face, added, “Downtown Los Angeles. We had a condo in the South Park district.”

“Oh wow, city folk,” Kimberly said, giggling a little at her own joke. “What brought you to Orange County and our little community?”

“Kyle works for a wealth management firm,” Jessie explained. “They opened a satellite office down here earlier in the year and it recently expanded. It’s a big thing for them because PFG is a pretty conservative operation. Anyway, they asked him if he’d help run it. We figured it was a good time to make a change since we’re thinking about starting a family.”

“Oh, with the size of this house, I assumed you already had kids,” Kimberly said.

“Nope—just being optimistic,” Jessie answered, trying to hide the sudden embarrassment she was surprised she felt. “Do you have any children?”

“Two. Our daughter is four and our son is two. I’m actually going over to daycare to pick them up in a few.”

Kyle arrived and wrapped one arm around Jessie’s waist as he extended the other to shake Kimberly’s.

“Hello,” he said warmly.

“Hi, welcome,” she replied. “My goodness, between the two of you, your future children are going to be giants. I feel like a munchkin next to you both.”

There was a brief awkward silence as both Jessie and Kyle wondered how to respond.

“Thank you?” he finally said.

“I’m sorry. That was rude of me. I’m Kimberly, your neighbor from that house,” she said, pointing across the street.

“Nice to meet you, Kimberly. I’m Kyle Voss, Jessie’s husband.”

“Voss? I thought it was Hunt.”

“He’s Voss,” Jessie explained. “I’m Hunt, at least for now. I’ve been procrastinating on doing the paperwork to change it.”

“I see,” Kimberly said. “How long have you been married?”

“Almost two years,” Jessie said sheepishly. “I have real problems with procrastination. That might explain why I’m still in school.”

“Oh,” Kimberly said, clearly relieved to move away from the delicate last name topic. “What are you studying?”

“Forensic psychology.”

“Wow—that sounds exciting. How long before you’re officially a psychologist?”

“Well, I got a little delayed,” Jessie said, sharing the obligatory story from every cocktail party they’d attended for the last two years. “I started out in child psychology when we were undergrads at USC—that’s where we met. I was even doing an internship for my master’s when I realized I couldn’t handle it. Dealing with children’s emotional problems was too much for me. So I switched.”

She pointedly neglected to include some of the other details of why she’d dropped out of the internship. Hardly anyone knew about them and she certainly wasn’t going to share them with a neighbor she’d just met.

“So you find dealing with the psychology of criminals less disturbing than children?” Kimberly asked, dumbfounded.

“Weird, huh?” Jessie conceded.

“You’d be amazed,” Kyle piped in. “She has this knack for getting in the heads of bad guys. She’s going to be a great profiler eventually. Any potential Hannibal Lecters out there better look out.”

“Really,” Kimberly said, sounding properly impressed. “Have you had to deal with serial killers and stuff?”

“Not yet,” Jessie admitted. “Most of my training has been academic. And with the move, I had to change schools. So I’m going to do my practicum at UC-Irvine starting this semester. This is my last one so I’ll graduate in December.”

“Practicum?” Kimberly asked.

“It’s a little like an internship, only less involved. I’ll be assigned to a prison or a psychiatric hospital, where I’ll observe and interact with inmates and patients. It’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

“The chance to stare the evildoers in the eye and see into their souls,” Kyle added.

“That might be overstating it just a bit,” Jessie said, giving him a playful punch in the shoulder. “But eventually, yes.”

“That is very exciting,” Kimberly said, sounding genuinely intrigued. “I’m sure you’ll have some great stories to tell. Speaking of, you said you two met at school?”

“Freshman year dorm,” Kyle said.

“Oh,” Kimberly pressed. “Bonded while doing laundry, that sort of thing?”

Kyle glanced over at Jessie and before he even said a word, she knew he was going to dive into their go-to cocktail party story.

“Here’s the abridged version,” he began. “We were friends but started dating midway through the first semester after she got stood up by some jerk. He got kicked out of school, not for bailing on the date I assume. Still, she dodged a bullet in my opinion. We broke up junior year, got back together as seniors. We dated for a year after that before moving in together. We did that for a year before getting engaged. Then we tied the knot ten months after that. It’ll be two years of wedded bliss in October.”

“So you’re college sweethearts. That’s so romantic.”

“Yeah, it sounds that way,” Kyle said. “But it took a while to win her over. And the whole time I was beating the competition off with a stick. As you can imagine, pretty much every guy who saw her was immediately smitten with Ms. Jessica Hunt. And that’s just looking at her. Once you get to know her, you’re even more besotted.”

“Kyle,” Jessie said, her face turning red. “You’re embarrassing me. Save some of it for October.”

“You know,” Kimberly said with a smile, “I just remembered I need to get my kids now. And I suddenly feel like I’m interrupting a happy couple’s plan to christen their new house. So I’m going to go. But I promise to introduce you around. We have a really friendly neighborhood. Everyone knows each other. We have weekly street barbecues. Kids have sleepovers all the time. Everybody belongs to the local yacht club, even if they don’t have a boat. Once you’re settled in, you’re going to find this is a great place to live.”

“Thanks, Kimberly,” Kyle said, walking her to the door. “We look forward to meeting everyone. And thanks so much for the brownies.”

After she left, he closed the door and made a big display of locking it.

“She seemed nice,” he said. “Hopefully everyone’s like that.”

“Yeah, I liked her,” Jessie agreed. “She was a little nosy, but I guess that’s just how people are down here. I suppose I should get used to not having any anonymity anymore.”

“It is going to be an adjustment,” Kyle agreed. “But I think that long term, we’ll prefer knowing our neighbors’ names and being able to leave our doors unlocked.”

“I noticed you locked it just now though,” Jessie pointed out.

“That’s because I was thinking about what Kimberly said about christening the new house,” he said as he approached her, pulling off his second shirt in ten minutes. “And I don’t like any interruptions when I’m christening.”

*

Jessie lay in bed later that night, looking up at the ceiling, a smile on her face.

“At this pace, we’ll have those extra bedrooms filled up in no time,” Kyle said, seemingly reading her thoughts.