Suburban Dicks (Suburban Dicks, #1)

by Fabian Nicieza

Jeff and Andrea had opposite parental approaches, and in many ways their approaches bucked gender stereotypes. Jeff was all in on the twenty-four-hour news cycle fearmongering. He seemed to believe that several million children were kidnapped each year in West Windsor alone. He was vocal about keeping the kids close at all times, even—especially?—if that didn’t mean close to him. Andrea, on the other hand, lived in the real world. She was Queens-bred and held a philosophy that shit happened and sometimes shit happened to you, but mostly it happened to the other guy. She refused to helicopter parent and hoped that approach would lead to self-reliant adults instead of missing or deceased children. She figured the odds were in her favor.

“Our homes are broken into because they know we have gold,”

Andrea liked Sathwika’s wit and saw a keen light in her eyes. She wondered, possibly for the first time since having returned to West Windsor years ago, how similar and how different their lives were. Most of her Indian peers had been born here. They were first generation, but their parents had seen their lives bifurcated in terms of language, religion, and culture. Yes, they tended to stick together, but were they really any more clustered than Jews? Or the Latinx community who gathered for weekend soccer games on the Duck Pond Road fields? Or the Chinese doing their tai chi every morning at Morris Davison Park?

“Stern and Lee, the Suburban Dicks,” he said out loud, rolling it slowly around his tongue like a shot of bourbon. It would hit every single sweet spot a story like this could hope for. A small American town rife with racial and cultural prejudice, now dealing with a murder. Would most people get the dated reference to “dicks” being private investigators? Didn’t matter. It sounded really good. “Kenny Lee, the Suburban Dick,” he said. That sounded even better.

“Traffic stops, police citations over noise, complaints about cooking smells, complaints about what they wear, how they talk, how they pray, how they are smarter than my little Johnny, how they’re not smarter than my little Ji-an,” she rattled off. “Should I continue?”

ANDREA Stern stood in the Sasmals’ backyard, avoiding responsibility for her children as they ran amok across the property. She could feel the disapproval emanating from Tharani and Sharda. She felt some disappointment at her failure to control her kids, and some fear they would ignore her if she tried, but mostly she just felt a lot of indifference. Doing nothing was the path of least resistance—a path she had abhorred until she had kids.

THE drive north on the New Jersey Turnpike had proven relatively painless because Andrea had let them watch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse on the iPad.

Ramon strode toward her. He smiled and removed his sunglasses. He remained gorgeous. He still had that same confident gait. He looked like he hadn’t gained a pound in ten years, while she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein’s head had been placed on top of a poorly dressed beach ball. Out of spite, she wished children on him.

Andrea considered her options. She could come clean, but as clever as Ruth was, she wasn’t sure her daughter could handle the complete truth. By the time she was Ruth’s age, Andrea had already learned how to pick locks, worked as a roper for three different con men in the neighborhood, worked the competition by planting evidence the cops could use, worked the cops to eliminate her competition, run fifteen different restaurant scams to score free food, and lost a brother to violence. Last year, for the fourth-grade science fair, Ruth had made a volcano.

“Where are the kids?” he asked. “At Brianne’s,” she said. “They’re fine. I talked to them.” “What did they see?” “Their mother being removed from the pool in handcuffs,” she answered bluntly. “It upset them a lot. It upset me, too. I’ll talk it through with them. They’ll be fine.” “Will they?” he asked, his anger rising. “Just like that? They’ll be fine?” “I saw my brother stabbed in front of my eyes,” Andrea said. “Look how well I turned out.” “I fell off my bike when I was six and I got really bad scrapes on both my knees,” said Kenny. “Shut up!” Jeff and Andrea shouted at the same time.

“Okay, good,” Andrea said. “If the group you saw plans to meet anyone else, it’ll likely be after work hours.” “Oh, they’re definitely going to meet someone,” said Brianne. “What do you mean?” “I recorded their conversation the entire way down the hall,” she said. “You did what?” “I recorded it on my phone,” said Bri. “Easy peasy.” “You are a deceitful bitch and I love you,” said Andrea. “Can you send it to me?”

“I have to be honest, I’m reconsidering the preconceived notions I had about Asian extended families and having your mother-in-law living with you,” said Andrea. “Having an emergency babysitter for the kids can be great,” Sathwika replied. “But trust me, if you knew my in-laws, you’d reconsider it every single day.”

It was good. Netflix good.

not for this pesky investigation and the improbability of either one of them ever impregnating a woman, odds were that ten years from now, Kenny’s kid and Benjy’s kid would hate each other in school, too. But they’d probably hate the Indian kids more. And all of them would team up against the Latinos. And all the while they’d be saying how wrong it was to think that way and pretend they weren’t thinking that way themselves.

Time changed our prejudices, but it didn’t change the fact that we were prejudiced. At least Kenneth Lee knew that the one thing he could say for himself was that he was self-aware. He had grown up apart from both the Asian community and the American community. To the mostly immigrant Asians, his family was American. To the average white-bread American, he was Asian. Kenny had always been comfortable in the knowledge that his true identification was as an Asshole American.

“Accept that there are fifty years of institutional racial bias staining all aspects of this case. But be very aware and make it plainly clear that it was a young African American man killed in nineteen sixty-five and a young Indian man killed now. You have a Chinese mayor who has completely supported this investigation. You have a Hispanic FBI agent leading the investigation in Newark and you have a stubborn New York Jew talking to you about it now. Though the acts were inherently racial, bringing it to light has transcended race. Keep the community calm and let the process play out.”

Andrea pulled into the Plainsboro Police Department parking lot and realized she would likely miss Jeff’s arrival at the train station. She’d deal with that bullshit on a need-to-deal-with-that-bullshit basis.