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Back Ladies of the House
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

I couldn’t stand in the same place all night. Rationally, I knew this.

But, honestly, I did consider it.

It was Jack who rescued me, his face even more welcome because he was alone. No mother. None of her gaggle of friends. “Where you’ve been all my life?” I asked as he bent his knees to envelop me in an affectionate squeeze.

I’d been determined to hate Jack when we first met him. That had been the summer of displacement—for my parents, Maggie, Archer, and me, who’d unceremoniously packed what remained from my childhood home, and moved to its carriage house in the rear, watching as Jack’s family claimed, rightfully, legally, what we’d once considered ours. He was a thief, an interloper, until he showed up at the carriage house one night with a few olive branches—a bottle of something sweet, a quarter and a few cups—and made us laugh for the first time in what had felt like years. It turned out to be a summer of upheaval for seventeen-year-old Jack, too, uprooted from Boston following his father’s death to an old, vast house on Bellevue Avenue, into the bedroom that used to be Maggie’s, and into its original canopied bed, carved by the masters in Florence. Together we roamed Newport, making mischief on the wharf, taking tipsy bike rides to Ochre Point, seeing midnights on Gooseberry Beach. I’d watched them fall in love, and if Jack or Maggie had minded me as a third wheel, they’d never let on.

“Look at your hair!” I exclaimed, tugging on the thick strands on either side of his part. “It got long.” Last time I’d seen him, his dark brown locks had been shaped in a close crop.

“I’m letting it grow.” Jack’s mouth, wide and flexible, was usually curved up into a grin, and this moment was no exception. His nose, slightly crooked with a bump near the bridge, appeared as though someone long ago had punched him. But it was just genetics, with some assistance from a rogue basketball. Even if he had been the type to spin apocryphal yarns about himself (he wasn’t), no one would believe the nose was the result of a long-ago fight (he was too nice). “Let me take you around?” he asked with a white-suited arm around my shoulders.

“No,” I said, not wanting my pariah stink to cling to him. “You don’t have to—”

Too late.