I’d had two nine-year-old boys of my own once, so I knew very well that was not the case.

This wasn’t even the nine year old’s most grievous offense, just the most recent one I’d seen firsthand.

The seven-year-old could be found on any given afternoon pounding his five-year-old brother senseless.  Everyone, and I mean everyone, that saw this, tried to interfere and stop it, but the parents were adamant that the youngest brother needed said poundings, to ‘toughen him up.’

And the five year old, who I pitied the most out of all three feral boys, was best known for digging beach ball sized craters in other people’s nicely tended yards, or in general just destroying property, as all three kids were left unsupervised most hours of the day.

They were all bullies or headed that way, but you didn’t blame kids that young for things like that.

Everyone blamed the parents.  Because the parents were dickheads.

Messy dickheads.  The kind of messy that literally fell onto everyone around them.

Literally because of the unruly dog they let loose to roam for hours, day and night, pooping in everyone’s yard and going after any dogs that crossed his path.

My dog, ’Tato, left a mess in my backyard, but I knew said mess was my responsibility to clean up.

Their dog, in typical dickhead fashion, left its mess everywhere except their backyard, i.e. every front yard on the block.

When it was mentioned to them by Virginia Gant, a sweet old lady of sixty-four that lived three houses down from me, that this was perhaps a rude thing to do, their response was to send their three boys door to door, with custom made business cards, offering to clean up the dog poop around the neighborhood . . . for a fee.

They’d turned being irresponsible parents and pet owners into a business.  I almost admired their nerve for that one.  And of course, the story made for a good laugh.

The dad (when he was around) was the type you had to keep out of arm’s reach as he tended to find any excuse to get touchy feely with women who were not his wife.

And the mom, who was always perplexed when anyone confronted her for her many, many messes, had backed her car into the side of the back bumper of mine just a few months back.

My car was in drive, hers in reverse as she’d been zipping like a speed demon out of her driveway, music blasting, right as I’d been pulling away.

I’d honked three times, loudly, but she’d slammed into me nonetheless, and later claimed I’d never honked.

And then she’d claimed we were equally at fault, that we’d backed into each other, even though I hadn’t even been backing up.

And then she’d claimed that, no, wait, she took it all back, because she was pretty sure suddenly that it had been me that backed into her.

The entire incident had been wildly frustrating for someone like me, who tended to stick to the truth, because her story had changed about three times before we’d settled the issue, but eventually the insurance company had ruled her at fault, and I’d just been avoiding her crazy ass since then.

The best way to describe the Dickhead Dillons would be to say they got off on conflict.  They enjoyed negative attention, of any kind, as far as I could tell.

They were the worst neighbors ever, but that being said they only rarely had the opportunity to bother me personally.

For the most part, they were more amusing than anything else, hell, they gave the rest of the neighbors something funny to talk about on a regular basis, but add to that the fact that I knew Deborah had sided with my ex in the divorce, and would tell him what she’d seen before the day was out, and, well, all amusement quickly turned into annoyance.

“Why don’t you like that woman?” Heath asked me when we’d passed out of her earshot.

Of course he would notice something like that.  I hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even made an unpleasant face, but I was sure my hand had tightened on his.

Where to start with that question?  I stuck to the pertinent issue at hand.  “She’s friends with my ex-husband.  She’ll be calling him to tell him all about seeing us holding hands by the end of the day, I guarantee it.”

“Will that bother him?  Is he still jealous over you?”

I looked for the right words, knowing it would be easy to put my foot in my mouth on this subject.  “Not likely.  It’s more that he’ll enjoy . . . rubbing your age in my face.  He’ll use it to say nasty things to me, I expect.”

“Want me to rearrange his face for you?”

I smiled, assuming he was joking.  I studied him for a moment, and the smile died.  “No, no, of course not.  My ex is a nuisance, nothing else.  He doesn’t even bother me anymore.  There’s certainly no need for violence.”

That seemed to settle the subject, or at least he let me drop it after that.

“Would you ever let me photograph you?” I asked him idly sometime later as I studied his stern face in the sunlight.  It made me long for my camera.

I shot a look at him as I waited for his answer.

His expression told me clearly that this would never happen.  “Not likely,” he said, and we both knew it was an understatement.

We were still walking hand in hand, had been for quite some time, sort of like a normal couple.  It was nice.

“I’d keep the pictures for myself.”

“No can do.  Sorry.”

He actually did sound sorry, so I dropped it.

“You know, if we wanted to be normal, we’d do something crazy tonight like leave my house and go out on a date.”