3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows Read Online Free PDF Page A

windowsills, glinting colors both rare and ordinary. She liked this room. She liked the degree of worn-ness that wasn’t really permitted at home.
    In the past they’d mostly used this house for -weekends and short vacations, and in the old days Jo had often brought Ama and Polly along. Jo knew her family -was different from most of the other beach families in that way. Most moms brought their kids out for the whole summer -while the dads commuted on -weekends. But after Finn, Jo started going to sleep-away camp for summers, and her parents never came here -when it -was just the two of them. The Napolis had one of the biggest houses on the beach and used it least, and Jo guessed that did not endear them to the community.
    “Who are -we keeping this place for?” she had once overheard her dad ask her mom.
    “For the kids,” her mom had said. “For Jo,” she corrected herself.
    This summer Jo -would have happily gone back to her sleep-away soccer camp in Pennsylvania. She had loved it, but this summer she -was too old to be a camper and too young to be a counselor. Both she and her mom -were set off balance at the idea of her being home for the summer again. That -was how the idea of spending the summer at the beach house had come up. There -were several kids Jo knew here, including her friend Bryn from school. Bryn -was part of the group Jo had begun to hang out -with in seventh grade. Bryn -wasn’t the greatest listener, but she -was loyal, and just being her friend put you at the center of the action. Bryn had told Jo there -were a lot of kids from their high school -who came for the summer and got jobs on the boardwalk. And Bryn -was the one -who’d told her about the bus girl job at the Surfside. She said it -was one of the few jobs you could get -when you -were fourteen.
    In the beginning Jo thought it was her idea to spend the summer at the beach, but later she wondered if her parents had thought of it already.
    Jo finished putting her things away in her drawers. Before now, her dresser had seemed like a sizable prop—like the dressers in hotels where you never actually put your stuff. This was her bedroom, but she’d never been here long enough to pack very much or really bother to settle in. This time she would. This time she would get bored in this room; she would have beach friends over, she would talk on the phone, she would sit on the floor, she would scuff up the walls, Scotch-tape random quotations and pictures on them. She would fill up the garbage can and leave dirty socks around. She would keep her door closed to shield her mom from the mess.
    It was getting to be dinnertime, and Jo didn’t want to stay and eat dinner -with just her mom. If her dad had been there, she wouldn’t have wanted to eat dinner -with just him and her mom either, because the two of them -would fight or be silent. She didn’t want to eat dinner -with any combination of them, and she didn’t want to eat dinner by herself. She pictured herself in a room full of strangers.
    “I’m going to check on my application at the Surfside,” she called to her mother as she walked toward the front door.
    “I thought you were supposed to wait for them to contact you,” her mother said from the kitchen, -where she was Windexing the glass fronts of the cabinets. Practically the entire house was made of glass, and her mother hated smudges and fingerprints.
    “Well, now they won’t have to,” Jo said.
    “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” her mom shouted after her. “Polly called.”
    “She did? Did she leave a message?”
    “Just that she called.”
    “All right,” Jo said over her shoulder, and shut the door behind her. Jo hadn’t checked her cell phone, but Polly had probably called that, too.
    Jo walked onto the beach from Oak Avenue. She took off her shoes and walked along the water until she got to the northern part of the boardwalk -where the restaurant sat. It -was a big seasonal crab house, popular -with vacationers and