A Big Storm Knocked It Over Read Online Free PDF Page A

profligate with heat, so Jane Louise had packed a winter nightgown, and since there was never much in the way of food, she had provisioned herself and Teddy a large basket, which included coffee for her and decent tea for Teddy.
    Since it was a posthoneymoon weekend, she had splurged and bought French butter, goat cheese, and a very expensive steak because Teddy had invited Peter and his wife, Beth, for dinner.
    Peter and Beth were everything Jane Louise and Teddy were not, at least in Jane Louise’s opinion. Peter had grown up in Marshallsville, gone away to college, and then gone to Africa to study sustainable agriculture. When he came home his father gave him a hundred acres, and he had started his organic farm. He had met Beth in Africa, where she was doing fieldwork, and they had married and produced three daughters in a row: Laura, Harriet (known as Birdie), and Geneva. Beth baked cakes and made jam. She was on the board of the child development center and was the head of the Parent Teacher Association. She took her girls to the farmers’ fair, where they regularly won the prize for the best pumpkin or the nicest calf.
    When Jane Louise looked at Beth and Peter, she saw stability, fidelity, people to whom lewd or unseemly or seditious thoughts were unknown. She did not imagine that Beth had had time to have much of a checkered past before she married Peter—after all, she had been only twenty-four—whereas Jane Louise had been in love quite unsuccessfully a number of times and had done any number of stupid things in the name of romance. She often wondered if Teddy would have been happier with a less blemished person, and she often asked him. His look told her that her question was totally moronic to him, and also that he was puzzled. Why would you marry someone if you didn’t mean to?
    For a relatively cheerful person, Jane Louise’s need for reassurance was quite intense. For a man who seemed on amiable terms with life itself, Teddy seemed quite unwilling to give it, as if it were something fluffy and unnecessary, like a flounce on a skirt or painted decorations on a car.
    In Jane Louise’s experience life was a series of scrambles—to make friends in a new school, to get comfortable in a new town, to scrape together the money to take a trip. She had the deep optimism of a scrapper, but she felt she needed to be told quite often that the roof was not going to cave in.
    Whereas Teddy, who seemed so able to get through the things of life without scrapping, could not be turned to for reassurance that everything was going to be all right because, in his experience, it often hadn’t been.

CHAPTER 5
    It was cold when they got there. On the hall table was a long note in Eleanor’s precise, prep-school hand to remind them to spray for whitefly in the glasshouse with the organic compound in the old mayonnaise jar and to cut back the last of the mums.
    The house was chilly and damp and exuded a smell of must, beeswax polish, and lavender wax that Jane Louise found irresistible: It almost brought her to her knees.
    It was Eleanor’s intention that when she got too old to cope with stairs, she was going to build herself a trim little one-person cabin and turn her house over to Teddy and Jane Louise. She had bought four acres on Cabbage Hill Road overlooking the swamp where, every summer, a great blue heron came to nest.
    Jane Louise could not remember living in a dwelling owned by her and her family. They were renters. When she was a baby, her parents had rented a summer house and had then stayed on, year-round, for years. When they moved to Boston, they had lived in a rented apartment, and when they made their last move to a suburb of New York, they had rented a large garden apartment. Theidea that Eleanor’s house would someday be hers filled her with a mire of emotions. She did not want to inherit this house because she longed for something that could truly be her own. On the