He kept his lawn maintained. He did not make noise. He was pleasant when we passed each other and he had, once, when a tree branch came down in my yard during a storm, sent his groundskeeper over without being asked to clear it.
His son Kyle came home from college in June.
Kyle was twenty-two.
I understood, within two weeks of his arrival, that Dennis Hauser had made a specific error in the raising of this child, the error that people with considerable means sometimes make, which is confusing the provision of things for the teaching of accountability.
Kyle had everything and understood that he had everything and had organized his personality around this understanding.
He was loud in the way of young men who have never been required to be quiet.
He was careless in the way of people who have never had to repair what they broke.
He had a motorcycle.
The motorcycle was a large and expensive machine that he rode with the skill of someone who had owned it for less time than he pretended and with the consideration of someone who had decided that consideration was for people who did not have the kind of father he had.The neighborhood endured him.
Not because we liked what he was doing but because the social calculus of a neighborhood is complicated and because Dennis Hauser was the kind of neighbor who, if you pushed back against his son, would respond in ways that made pushing back feel more costly than absorbing the irritation.
