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Back Ladies of the House Save as PDF
Chapters (59)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Praise
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. January
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. February
  13. Six
  14. Seven
  15. Eight
  16. Nine
  17. Ten
  18. Eleven
  19. Twelve
  20. March
  21. Thirteen
  22. Fourteen
  23. Fifteen
  24. Sixteen
  25. April
  26. Seventeen
  27. Eighteen
  28. Nineteen
  29. Twenty
  30. Twenty-One
  31. Twenty-Two
  32. Twenty-Three
  33. Twenty-Four
  34. Twenty-Five
  35. May
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. June
  43. Thirty-Two
  44. Thirty-Three
  45. Thirty-Four
  46. Thirty-Five
  47. Thirty-Six
  48. Thirty-Seven
  49. Thirty-Eight
  50. Thirty-Nine
  51. Forty
  52. July
  53. Forty-One
  54. Epilogue
  55. Acknowledgments
  56. Author’s Note
  57. Ladies of the House - Reader’s Guide
  58. Questions For Discussion
  59. Excerpt

Wallis toed off her shoes and flopped on the bed. “Feather pillows,” she said. “Bo, you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

“Do you need a rest?” Bo said, watching from the doorway. “We can do our house tour and walk later.”

Wallis launched herself off the bed about as quickly as she fell onto it. “Absolutely not. We just need to wash our hands and I need to change quickly.”

Wallis had noticed the pillows; I, the rolltop desk in the corner. I had tasks to accomplish before I could relax. “I need to send some emails,” I said. “The lawyers.”

We agreed to meet downstairs in half an hour, though Wallis would have liked it to be less. She changed her outfit and sat in the rocking chair by the window. Her phone, she picked up, put down, picked up again. I kept telling her, one more minute. Just one last thing. “We’re wasting our time, Daisy,” she complained as I slowly attended to my inbox. “We’re wasting our youth.”

Twenty-Two

That evening, Wallis stood over her suitcase, considering which dress to wear for the Reeds’ dinner party. She had hot rollers in her hair and a toothbrush in her mouth.

“I think you should wear the pink,” I said. Wallis had been right earlier; the pillows on the bed, feathered, deep, were so comfortable I wondered how I’d ever bring myself to leave them.

“Eh,” Wallis hedged, then took herself into the bathroom to spit and rinse. “I was thinking the green.”

I joined her in the bathroom, finding a perch on the lip of the claw-foot tub. I was in awe of the Judge, that a woman could have a remarkable career and a fabulous house filled with items of taste, chosen with care. Cricket would describe her as a maximalist. Her home was decorated in layers. Plates adorned the walls of the kitchen. There was wallpaper on nearly every ceiling. There was a magnifying glass in the downstairs powder room and needlepoint pillows with witticisms like If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong. Surfaces were covered in candles. She had a fondness for jars. Pencils in jars. Cotton balls in jars. Keep your eyes peeled for the jar in the jar, Wallis had said to me earlier, after the grand tour. The way the Judge arranged pictures and pieces of art and artifacts, mixed fabrics and styles of furniture, made me want to go home and redecorate my entire apartment so it wasn’t so ruthlessly curated. Read: empty. Cricket’s style was more traditional—dark woods, creams and taupe—but like the Judge, she’d made sure the house looked lived in, warm. Despite the less-than-perfect memories, when we sold P, we’d lost much more than a house. It felt good to be back in one. “How long do you think it takes to dust this place?” I asked.